Briany

I don't know if this has anything to do with updates to the game, but for the last week or so, airport markers don't show up until I'm right on top of the airport. Like, I was trying to land at a little dirt strip and the marker didn't even show until I was literally flying right over the runway. I don't remember having this behaviour in the game a couple of weeks ago. Is anyone else having this problem?

Does anyone know if the SDK allows people to create missions and/or flights where things are scripted to happen along the way? I remember this was a big thing with FSX - you could download all kinds of journeys like that. I remember one mission where you're flying out over a misty sea when a GIANT iceberg appears out of the gloom, and there's a sort of archway or opening in it that you could fly inside, revealing a secret base complete with landing strip.

Because the default scenery in the game is so fantastic, what I'm doing at the moment is flying VFR using landmarks in the Cessna 152, and reading about the places I encounter along the way. Currently about halfway through a flight following historic Route 66 across the US, stopped off in Amarillo. Been good fun so far. Does anyone else do this in game? Can we get a thread going of different interesting paths to follow? I was thinking of going up the Yangtse or along the Trans-Siberian railway next, or maybe a shorter tour of the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland.

The next work for the freeware community after a huge glut of content has been created will be to arrange it into central databases with a filesystem-like hierarchy for different places and objects. After that, making large files which installs a lot of different objects or scenery at once. After that, tweaking for minimum performance impact. So long as the community can coalesce around one or two central places to share and organise all this stuff, I think there's a very bright future for free addons to the game.

All the freeware that's coming out is going to put the likes of Orbx out of business. No way their developers can compete with an army of hobbyists with time on their hands. How do Microsoft and Asobo look upon freeware versions of airports and planes that are in the deluxe and premium deluxe versions? I thought the asking price of those two versions looked pretty steep in respect of the return you get. But it seems to me that MS and Asobo wouldn't like if you could just make freeware versions of the extra content as many users would not bother with paying extra and just wait until the freeware is released.

I don't mind it, but I find that the taxi marker doesn't always turn off. Sometimes when at a non-towered airport, I turn it on, but the ribbon and marker should disappear once I'm holding short of the runway, or on it. It gets to the point where I'm in the air, and it's still there.

On the upside, I landed at Myers Park Memorial Municipal Airport near Carthage, Missouri the other day. I was a little perturbed to see that the runway was half tarmac and half grass and was intersected midway by a civilian road. Turns out this airport has been closed since 1997. So, yeah, there are some airports/airstrips currently omitted from the game, but they have also included ones long abandoned. 😉