Re: The endless influx of low-quality, low-realism, quantity-over-quality aircraft into FGAddon

What, specifically is wrong with the Ercoupe? I love that little plane, I tried both versions, both are good. I also love Emmanuel's planes. Someone here needs to be the voice of gamers, I guess I'm it. In commercial sims (the ones sold as games anyway, not the 20M$ "real" sims used for actual pilot flight training), the "accurate" "training" level aircraft that sim companies produce are buoyed by including LOTS of mid-realism aircraft that are pleasant and easy to fly, which gamers prefer (probably, my source is: I made it up). My immediate reaction when I see JSBSIM in the name of any aircraft is: "You're going to be in the middle of a pleasant flight around a cute little island, then your engine is going to quit because you didn't check for water in the fuel in the gamer airport of your gamer airplane". Like I get it that you have to do that in real aircraft, but I just wanted to go fly around some islands and relax not start a whole NTSB investigation.

I would love to see some telemetry make it into the launcher so that we know which planes people are flying and how long. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts Emmanuel's planes show up in 8 of the top 10 slots. They are fun to fly. I'm not sure why people say the FDM isn't good on them, I've loaded several of his aircraft (just random ones) into my FDM editor and they look great. For a few of the aircraft I was surprised he actually stacked multipart fuselages to ensure that the FDM shape follows the aircraft model fuselage accurately. Whatever is "wrong" with them must be in the approach / cruise or mass numbers because the geometry is invariably really good at least on the ones I've randomly opened. That means that whoever is complaining about these airplanes is a text-file edit away from fixing them. They don't even need to open blender! Just fix it and let someone with FGAddon access know!

My own problem is that submitting a patch for a plane that we fix is a non-obvious process. I've fixed the flight model myself on some aircraft that were really squirrely, but all the changes are living on my disk, because I have no idea who to even speak to to get my changes into FGAddon, there should be a file called "did-you-improve-this-aircraft.txt" in the aircraft folder detailing in specific steps how to submit your changes for immediate review. FGAddon should work like Steam patches. The moment an aircraft is updated, that patch should automatically roll out to all connected clients (forgive me if that's what already happpens). Same with updates to Terrasync scenery, it should be live-patchable. Users should be able to work on a single terrasync .BTG tile / airport upload their changes, have THE COMMITEE approve them and have their changes go out immediately. I think visibility of who to contact when you've made an improvement as a user should be much more obvious. FG has SO much potential. Anyone can contribute, all we need to do is make it obvious to people how to contribute (and then make sure they get the dopamine hit when THE COMMITEE speedily approves / gives them constructive feedback on their contributions; i.e.: Actionable steps to get their changes into FGAddon, not vague statements about low quality).

Flightgear has the power to leverage the creativity of millions of gamers, all it has to do is tell them how.

F.

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