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

> On 23 May 2026, at 00:51, Richard Harrison <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> The default filtering in the launcher already reduces the list of aircraft from ~750 to 62; and some of those should be variants.
> 
> There are some UI issues with how that filter works:
> 
>   1. The filter controls sit at the top of the aircraft browser and scroll out of view once you are into the list.
>   2. Switching from a currently-installed aircraft into the browse view positions the list at that aircraft, which can leave the filter controls a long way off-screen above.
>   3. Search ignores the filter entirely. It would help if results indicated something like "not showing N filtered aircraft" so the user knows the filter is still hiding results.

Each of these was actually a conscious choice :) The first two are to avoid wasting visual screen space, and the later is you can find aircraft *regardless of their rating*, by design. Otherwise the discoverability of lower-quality aircraft would effectively be zero, and previously we have felt that was a worse problem.

> It would also help if the average star rating were shown alongside the favourite-star indicator - probably as "3.4 out of 5" with the stars drawn beside it. Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Ahahaha :)

> 
> Point (3) is probably the reason users still encounter low-rated aircraft that the filter would otherwise hide from them.

Again, the intention of the UI is to allow the user to choose based on the rating, *not* to hide low-quality aircraft entirely, the same way Google or Amazon don’t hide low-rated items, if they do match your search. It might be bad restaurant, but if you want pizza, and it’s the only pizza place within 10 miles, *you* need to decide. Same logic applies to our A380 - it’s buggy and unmaintained, but if the user is determined to fly an A380, are we supposed to prevent them?

> 
> Alan asked whether we have any statistics on aircraft usage.

Those numbers also align with the data I get from Sentry.

> 
> Anything we can do to improve the experience will be a good thing, whether this be UI improvements, fixing aircraft or updating ratings.
> 


As Rhys said, MRs that update rating are welcome, we just see almost none being submitted.

One more thing about hangars: aside from differently licensed hangars, it would be easy to allow a custom hangar to be defined based on Fgaddon, but which subsets the aircraft (this is already possible) and/or overrides the aircraft ratings. This would then become ‘James’ Top FGAddon picks Hangar’, and maybe contains only the aircraft *I* deem to be suitable. 

(This works because hangar building is decoupled from where the files live, anyone can make a hangar using the public scripts, based on what’s in FGaddon, and do whatever filtering or overlay they wish)

Kind regards,
James

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