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MSFS customers like to find interesting scenery points, as evidenced by the effort and care Asobo puts into their POI and Bush Trips. I think they've added 83 POI in the latest world update.
My products have documented over 1,500 Points of Interest in the magnificent default scenery, including a percentage of the hand made objects, and Asobo has no interest in allowing customers to access them in the marketplace?
The marketplace induction team sent me here to get an answer.
Stating that "Asobo has no interest in <whatever>..." is pure speculation.
What is true though is that we do not have unlimited resources - those available are used on topics that are discussed and prioritized between us and Microsoft, every decision being largely influenced by the community.
The only thing I can say is that, although it may change in the future, supporting flight plans in the MarketPlace is not one of our priorities right now.
Best regards,
Eric / Asobo
Maybe you can create a toolbar panel where users can select a tour. When selected it will load the flightplan in the user's plane and show a description of the tour in the panel.
Hi Eric,
Thank you very much for taking the time to address this question.
Eric / Asobo > "What is true though is that we do not have unlimited resources - those available are used on topics that are discussed and prioritized between us and Microsoft, every decision being largely influenced by the community."
Thanks, yes I do appreciate something of the complexity of the project and the vast effort required to create and maintain it. I've been publishing in print, on television and on the web about sims since 1998 and MSFS 2020 is the realisation of all my sim dreams! I only wish to make it accessible to more pilots.
Regarding resources (for testing), the pln format has been extensively tested and documented by myself in more than 700 videos which are on YouTube. Customers have flown thousands of the flights, and in all that not one .pln flight has failed.
The pln file is loaded into the sim via the LOAD FROM THIS PC dialogue. So all I am asking the MSFS marketplace has to do is put the files anywhere on the customer's device.
Eric / Asobo > "The only thing I can say is that, although it may change in the future, supporting flight plans in the MarketPlace is not one of our priorities right now."
Obviously I hope that does change. I see it as a win/win situation.
"all I am asking the MSFS marketplace has to do is put the files anywhere on the customer's device"
This is probably where the issue comes from: you seem to assume that what you describe is a simple thing to do - but it's not.
If the Marketplace interface requires a new category for this kind of add-on (and I believe it should), it would at the very least involve the SDK team (for the Project Editor), the Marketplace team (for ingestion) and the UI team (for the in-game Marketplace pages).
We also need to consider the console version of the platform: if your .pln files are distributed through packages, how can simmers select them? There's no File Explorer on consoles and the current interface to save/load flight plans would quickly become difficult to use with lots of flight plan packages installed.
It means we probably need some kind of interface to browse installed flight plans and filter them, which in turns leads to more work for the UI team.
Hope this will help explaining why your suggestion is not that straightforward to implement.
Best regards,
Eric / Asobo
Hi Eric,
I believe most here, like me, are certainly appreciating all your efforts and your time, there is no question about this. After all, we're all more or less developers here, and we certainly understand the complexities you're dealing with, and we should understand each other intentions are only for the better.
I also read that you're decision making process is largely influenced by the community, and to this extent, I think this would certainly be important the 3rd party developer community is feeling the same consideration, both when discussing possible enhancements or new SDK supported features, and when dealing with the Market place application process. I believe many are trying to reach out to you (Microsoft/Asobo) in order to build a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship in fact.
Considering you're also limited on resources, the 3rd party developer community is a talented pool with decades of experience in the field, and maybe forging more of these relationships with more of us might be a key.
Regarding there being no file selector on consoles, I did notice at least on the PC version there is now the option to load flight plans from the XBox cloud storage. Does the XBox have that option too? My thought was for the Marketplace to put the plans in the user's XBox Cloud storage and then each user could access them there, on XBox or PC.
(I say all this knowing nothing of XBox architecture.)
Regarding category, my opinion FWIW is that Mission would cover it.
Thanks again.
Jorg Neumann has clarified for us the question of whether MSFS development is tied to XBox:
"There is nothing we do that doesn't come to all platforms.
Literally nothing."
In this June 22nd, 2022 interview with HeliSimmer (at this timestamp)
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