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

Frank,

The "wooden" box reference was in no way meant to be a criticism or
disparaging remark. If it came across that way, my sincere apologies.
Actually, your point was well made that the sim back then was the best
available at the time to train you. And the goal was to create an
expectation in you what the real world would be like. They strived for the
best realism they could at the time. To their credit and yours, you learned
something. What they built taught you something, it created in you
an expectation. I think that should still be the case now ... and following
the developer forum I believe it is the case in terms of developing the
underlying application. I just think I'm a bit surprised by the willingness
to let our guard down and relax the standards on the final result - the
aircraft.

I was merely saying that if realism and continuing improvement didn't
matter, development would have stopped at some point when the FG "owner"
said, "well - we're done here, let's shut off the lights and call it a
day." But the evolution does matter and development does continue. I'm
suggesting keeping an open awareness of who might use FG and what that
means in the long term.

Dave

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 8:27 AM gallonf&z <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Dave
> I think you misunderstand my position.
> No one wants to return to a wooden box.
> The MD-11 is an outstanding simulation; but restricting simulations to it
> and a few others of equal quality, would seem to me to be counter
> productive.
> Nevertheless, having broken aircraft that don't get fixed is a real
> problem.
> I still think that  the authors or maintainers should be notified; and if
> there's no response, and the planes don't get fixed in reasonable time,
> they should be sent somewhere out of the way of a new user. My last
> suggestion was to relegate them to the FGAddon basement by stripping them
> of their ratings.
> {I agree with having the ratings displayed.} An aircraft with 0 ratings
> would not be characterized as "bad"; it would just be non-rated.
>
> Kind Regards, Frank
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 6:47 AM David Hudach <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> > "the same way Google or Amazon don’t hide low-rated items"
>>
>> Yes, this is because they don't make the products, their job is to show a
>> list of available items based on the search. They don't have a dog in the
>> fight, they are neutral (possibly paid to rank some higher). Back to your
>> pizza analogy and one that aligns more with the current discussion of FG.
>> You own the pizza shop and one of your cooks wants to sell and uncooked
>> pizza or one that does not meet the standards of the restaurant. Do you
>> offer it on the menu? What is the impact to a new customer? It may be hard
>> to predict. But what is the safest "bet" for the restaurant owner who cares
>> about future and existing customers and his brand, his product, his pizza
>> shop.
>>
>> I know, it's a bit of a goofy analogy but I think it brings into focus
>> what we are really talking about here.
>>
>> And I will say that much of this discussion relates to an experienced FG
>> user. I don't think that is the origin of this post. It has to do with the
>> image of FG with a new user and the impact it has on new users when an
>> aircraft is broken. As an experienced user it's easy to say, "write the
>> author" or refine your search criteria and so forth. But to a new user when
>> something is broken, that user will more than likely associate it with the
>> app itself. And that's what ends up hurting the name, the brand.
>>
>> And back to this:
>>
>> >  So what, it is the experienced simmer that we will loose because they
>> >  fly an aircraft and it doesn't perform as they expect, or it is
>> missing
>> >  lots of the panel gauges or switches and knobs. Well if the only way
>> >  they will stick around is if all aircraft offered in addons is perfect
>> >  because they are not interested in getting their hands dirty to
>> improve
>> >  a less than perfect aircraft, who cares, I want to the attract the
>> >  simmer that wants to improve stuff, not the ones that demand
>> perfection
>> >  or they are out of here. The entire argument doesn't make sense to me
>> >  and I don't believe it is even a thing.
>>
>> I repeat, we are not talking about perfection, we are talking about
>> improving realism and not permitting broken aircraft into the app. Lest we
>> forget the original subject: The endless influx of low-quality,
>> low-realism, quantity-over-quality aircraft into FGAddon
>>
>> >  If that is so hard or complicated that it
>> >  alone will cause a new user to bail, I submit, who cares! Where is the
>> >  loss? Again, we are not selling something. We are not loosing revenue.
>> >  Apparently we are not even loosing someone that is willing to get
>> hands
>> >  on and make something better. We are not loosing anything of value to
>> >  the project.
>>
>> And there it is: "who cares"
>>
>> If there is no concern for loss of revenue then maybe it matters that FG
>> takes monetary donations to improve the product. A new user may want to
>> contribute with money rather than getting their hands dirty to improve
>> things. I suppose the thinking here is that only developers use FG. Oh,
>> maybe a new user will want to contribute if things are broken. Maybe. But
>> what is the safest "bet" here to increase FG usage and likeability? I say
>> it's that FG offer the best to hook the user.
>>
>> I think the problem here is that many are expressing a view of how THEY
>> see and use FG without even imagining (or sometimes caring) how a new user
>> sees things.
>>
>> I'll go back to this: I believe each and everyone contributing to FG is
>> striving to improve it. That's painfully obvious to me from following the
>> progress in the posts. That's a credit to all and a reflection that the
>> goal is to make FG the best. So why does it seem like some just want to
>> give up on what is the public facing aspect of FG - the aircrafts
>> themselves.
>>
>> Again, the goal isn't perfection, it's striving to improve everything
>> overall. If not, then FG would be content offering gallon's wooden box with
>> a few instruments and an old TV from the late 1950's.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 5:13 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
>>>
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