Re: It's time for a new default airport

Hi

But also, WS3.0 looks *great* with real shadows / HDR / PBR lighting, and with some more shader work, will do all kinds of things that are impossible with Orthophotos (eg proper surface water / wetted surfaces after rain).

Is there an existing airfield on Next, doesn’t need to be a massive airfield, that showcases the improved HDR/PBR rendering pipeline of the tarmac, runways, buildings, and then one or two aircraft and ground vehicles?

The reason I’m asking is that there is a potential ATC tower simulator project and I’m looking into whether FlightGear Next would be good enough for the visuals from the tower.

Doing a search on YouTube for “FlightGear HDR PBR” produces a couple of hits, but they’re typically 3 or more years old.

Cheers

From: James Turner <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2026 10:17 AM
To: FlightGear developers discussions <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] It's time for a new default airport




On 16 Jun 2026, at 05:31, Israel Emmanuel <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

I think it's also a good thing to have orthophotos that can come with TerraSync at that airport.

I disagree with this fairly strongly, Orthophotos are *not* part of our core experience, and having them at our default location would give the wrong impression. It’s fine that we have them as an extension for people who want them, but I think that’s as far as we should go.

But also, WS3.0 looks *great* with real shadows / HDR / PBR lighting, and with some more shader work, will do all kinds of things that are impossible with Orthophotos (eg proper surface water / wetted surfaces after rain). I think Stuart, Fernando etc deserve a release where we really lean into that.

(And this is ignoring this license / distribution issues around Orthophotos: someone needs to do the infrastructure R&D about what we can affordably do there, eg will it blow the current hosting / CDN costs, what hosting space is needed …  )

Kind regards,
James

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