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

I'd like to echo the remarks by Frank re the filter control.
Its bugged me for years but I said nothng cos I assumed (wrongly) others
would see it and fix it.  And anyway I know very little of C++ and Nasal
As a tester on another project  autonomi.com, I am acutely aware of
developer time and the need to prioritise on the central problems, also
interventions by well-meaning folks who are not in a position to see the
Big Picture. Which leads to a waste of precious volunteer dev and test
time.....

How about a popup on the likes of the A380 and similar along the lines of
"This aircraft is buggy and unmaintained so please dont expect perfection
This does not mean you cannot have fun with it and we encourage you to try
it out anyway. Then if you think you can help here's how... <link to dev
resources>
Even a simple list of what did not work for you can be useful.  Best
Regards the FG team"

Regards
Willie Fleming

On Mon, 25 May 2026, 10:57 gallonf&z, <[email protected]> wrote:

> To James
> Thanks for the clarification.
> The filter controls pop up after initial startup, but not automatically
> thereafter, where the only displayed choice is for List or Grid.   And it's
> not real clear how to re-display them.  When in a push, I sometimes click
> search with an empty field to troll through the whole list; but it would it
> would be nice if was more obvious how to re-display the
> filter controls.
> Kind Regards. Frank
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 4:13 AM James Turner <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> > 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Flightgear-devel mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Flightgear-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
>

_______________________________________________
Flightgear-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel