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

I can share a few quick comments.

The original intent of FlightGear was to create a structure and environment
that could facilitate a wide swath of contributions and also facilitate
competition of ideas, code, content, etc.  When disagreements arose over
one way or another way, we did everything we could to support both ways and
let the user or developer decide.  We never wanted to tell a contributor
that their work was unwelcome, we tried to find a place where they could
integrate their work and continue developing and improving it.  We've done
this with rendering systems, weather modeling, flight dynamics engines, and
I'm sure a few other things.  I think we were pretty successfully in
crafting an architecture to support this, and from everything I have seen,
the current project evolution still supports this original concept pretty
well,  Many have made important points in this thread, and the various
perspectives are all valuable to consider, but maybe it's good to remind
everyone what the original design intent was.

Looking back, I wish we would have invested more effort into
end-user-facing content creation tools ... but those are hard to build and
we had our hands full just getting the basic things working.  I don't think
I personally could have taken that on along with everything else I was
developing.

It is also important to remember that this is a community volunteer
organization.  It's not all that different from my local radio control
model airplane club in so many important ways.  The folks that step up and
do the work are the ones that primarily make decisions and set the
direction of the club.  If I complain to the guy who volunteers to mow the
grass that I didn't like something about the way he did it, that is a tough
sell.  That person is volunteering hours of his time every week so that I
have a place I can just drive up and fly my model airplanes, and I should
find ways to first be greatful before tactfully dropping in my thoughts on
how he could do better.

Another thing that is a factor from my perspective is that not every
contribution is equal.  I've said this before, but I've received
contributions where the person said quite literally, "I didn't understand
what a bunch of this code did, so I just deleted it."  That's an extreme
example, but not everyone is in the same place in their journey and their
abilities, and not everyone has a big picture understanding of the project
like James and Stuart and Gijs and other core developers have.

I think FlightGear has grown beyond my initial imagination (or I didn't
understand the organizational needs and challenges we would face as we
grew.)  Designing organizations is not a thing I am good at or have skills
at, it was off my radar screen at the start.  We have figured out many
organizational things as we went along, but we do see some of the affects
of my lack of vision on the poeple organziation and management side now.
That's on me in large part, but I don't think I could have done much better
or different at the time.  We are talking 30 years ago now when the project
was first being conceived!

Jumping from overly generic to overly specific ... I wonder if some sort of
aircraft review system (like an amazon review) would be useful?  People
could give aircraft up to 5 stars and attach a comment or review.  I would
want these comments to be currated to avoid spam or inappropriate things
(not to filter negative comments.)  But developing such a system and
integrating it in a way that people would see it and contribute to it and
benefit from it would be a significant effort.  The current self rating
system is far from perfect, but no system will be all that great.  Don't
forget, each person that comes to this project has different interests and
different priorities.  What is fully developed with a 5-star rating for one
person might be severely lacking for someone else.  What is fully developed
for someone running flightgear on a laptop might be different from what is
fully developed for someone building a physical cockpit in their living
room or garage.

This message is oo long so I'm going to call it here.  Summary, is we want
to value everyone's contributions.  We also want to value everyone's
thoughts, but remember when you are sharing your thoughts to a volunteer
that has put in 100's or 1000's of hours into the project of their own
valuable time .... they may not be able to address your thoughts or they
may already have more pressing priorities they are focused on.  In a
volunteer community project or club or any volunteer group, it's those that
step forward and do the work that lead the project and set the direction
and tone.  (And that is not so much me these days ... life is a whole thing
and adulting is hard ...)

Best regards,

Curt.

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 10:13 AM David Hudach <[email protected]> wrote:

> >  "Ideas and suggestions are only valuable insofar that they result in
> change"
>
> Fair point. But it's the perceived resistance to a suggestion. Here is
> what it seems like: suggestions, points of discussion, ideas seem to be
> taken as criticisms, that there is a defensive attitude. Responses follow
> lines of "it's" not broken, we already have that, you've not "done"
> anything so we can't take it seriously, and so on.
>
> Further, who is to say that an idea or suggestion will or will not result
> in change unless it's taken seriously? But to me this thread has had little
> to do with any of that.
>
> I'm sorry, I just don't buy into the idea that effort shouldn't or can't
> acknowledged unless you've "touched" the source code tree or whatever. Some
> statements are so powerful that they just seem to speak to the general
> philosophy and perception of the developers, "who cares", "roll up your
> sleeves" (which to mean simply means "roll up MY sleeves"),
>
> and >  "If you care about a topic, demonstrating a commitment to doing
> stuff *as well* as talking about stuff, is what matters"
>
> That's not because of some guiding thing in nature, it just seems to be
> the SOP of the project.
>
> Hell, if I said there is a GREAT holographic implementation available that
> could solve many of the realism issues and I provided a link, I'm guessing
> it would be ignored out of hand because I didn't write a proof of concept.
> God forbid an idea from someone be worthwhile unless that someone rolled up
> his sleeves and made 18 code commits first.
>
> Like I said, I will continue to use FG because it is far superior than
> others I've tried. But I will learn how to build it on my device and make
> code changes and improvements for myself if needed because the air gets
> rather thin at this altitude.
>
> Personally, I feel bad for Curtis who, as I understand it, started this
> project in the mid 90's. I don't know, maybe this is where he wants it to
> be. Regardless, I feel bad. This idea that someone needs to make commits
> before they can be taken seriously smacks of a ClubSource rather than an
> OpenSource project.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 10:28 AM Stuart Buchanan <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> I've been reading this thread with interest, but haven't had the time to
>> comment before as the thread moves on faster than I've been able to respond!
>>
>> Some thoughts, which I've split into two as the discussion has moved on.
>>
>> # FGAddon / Aircraft Ratings
>>
>> For those not aware, the policy for FGAddon is here:
>> https://www.flightgear.org/about/policy/ .  It is an svn repo for
>> aircraft development, as well as the source of the default "hangar" of
>> aircraft in the launcher.  So I don't think it's right to suggest that we
>> should remove aircraft from fgaddon based on development status.
>>
>> At present we generate the hangar from all of the aircraft in fgaddon.
>> We could skip aircraft that are in very early stages of development, but I
>> think we should only do that with the aircraft developer's permission.
>>
>> If someone has an issue with the ratings for a specific aircraft, then I
>> think the first approach should be to communicate with the author to ask
>> them to be adjusted.  When the aircraft ratings were originally introduced
>> (after lots of discussion and consensus on this list), we did try to make
>> them as clear as possible.  So if an aircraft is not meeting specific
>> ratings it should be possible to make an evidence-based argument.  Clearly
>> that is going to require tact and diplomacy, particularly if working across
>> a language barrier.  It's not clear from this discussion whether any of the
>> folks who are unhappy about specific ratings have actually done so?
>>
>> Personally, I've not been convinced by the arguments put forward that the
>> rating system is broken.  Or that it is materially impacting new users.
>> I've read a lot of opinions that it does, but beyond Richard's analysis of
>> MP aircraft usage, not much evidence.  In particular I've not seen any
>> evidence that FlightGear is getting less popular, which has been mentioned
>> a number of times.
>>
>> # Contributing / Value of critique / Community
>>
>> James is absolutely right that what actually matters for the development
>> of FlightGear is actual changes to FlightGear.  While we focus on code,
>> merge requests / PR, aircraft, scenery etc, contribution does go beyond
>> that, and definitely includes documentation, high quality bug reports,
>> website, infrastructure.  These are all tangible contributions.
>>
>> Ideas and suggestions are only valuable insofar that they result in
>> change. If you want to make that change happen then you either need to be
>> prepared to do it yourself _or_ convince other volunteers to make
>> the change.
>>
>> That latter path is more difficult, particularly for any code change
>> (e.g. C++) because we all have very long todo lists, and you need to
>> convince us to not work on something else instead.  So the bar is pretty
>> high, and I personally would need compelling evidence or a truly exciting
>> idea.
>>
>> There is definitely some truth that if you have contributed to
>> FlightGear  (by the definition above) then your views are going to carry
>> more weight simply because it demonstrates that you understand the
>> FlightGear project as a contributor, and that you know what you are asking
>> others.  I'm more likely to use my volunteering time to work on something
>> for you if I feel that you are also contributing.
>>
>> Finally, interpersonal skills are important, and being nice and polite
>> definitely helps.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> -Stuart
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-- 
Curtis Olson

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