The Scenery Pipeline and Implementation may be an Achilles' Heel

[ahuimanu]

Hello LM developers,

Now that legacy clouds can be used with EA, I find that the sim is quite pleasing. While the legacy aircraft development for Prepar3d makes it still my preferred platform for flight and procedure training, I am concerned that the world/scenery is lagging. Would you consider a scenery repository, and perhaps offering a more extended library of airport environment objects, to increase visual fidelity in the airport environment? For Laminar Research, they use a "scenery gateway" approach that allows community contributions, I think a similar approach would assist all customers of Prepar3d.

The lifeblood of the platform is its extensibility via the included Software Development Kit; more effort into making this toolset accessible would benefit Prepar3d as a platform. For instance, perhaps supporting Blender as a 3D art pipeline would help. Also, perhaps a graphical editor for creating scenery would help? I realize that SimDirector is available, but load times for the sim make that difficult. Moreover, whereas the add-on approach with XML files is great, the lack of tools available to manage a larger add-on library leads to prohibitively-long load times.

I would like to continue with Prepar3d for the long run, but I hope that other aspects that make the sim usable, beyond improvements in the visual rendering system, may be considered in the future.

Thank you.

[Max Perry]

Hi! Totally appreciate the post and we definitely will be looking into improving the SDK in the future. Load times in SimDirector, BGL loading should be improved in 5.3!