I asked to be part of WorldHub in the hopes to fix some small airports in my area in the US. I am a practicing architect, so updating site plans from various sources is something I have very real experience with. I started with the non-towered airport I fly out of because I’m most familiar with it. In MSFS there are all sorts of problems as it is depicted currently. I found that I could partially fix some like taxiway edge lights running across aprons.
But there are a bunch of major things that can’t be fixed - buildings, the fuel area, the beacon that doesn’t exist (must be submitted as a request) and on and on. I didn’t expect to have the full suite of tools you’d find in a civil or architectural CAD system for sitework and similar, but the WorldHub approach is difficult to use with any precision. I’m just roughly clicking away forming crude polygons over fuzzy aerial photos to approximate taxiways and parking pads. This isn’t ideal, but it’s also possibly acceptable if there weren’t other more serious problems/limitations.
Mostly, it’s the extreme limitations such as not being able to correct major problems with the buildings shown at airports. I understand why they wouldn’t allow for importing custom 3d assets, but just letting us pick from a selection of pre-made options, ideally with the ability to customize dimensions (even just scale X/Y/Z) to resemble the actual buildings would be a huge improvement.
I’d prefer that removing the non-existent beacon was part of submitting the update not a separate process. It has been weeks since I tried (and ended up not submitting the updates) so I don’t recall exactly, but the airport has a fairly common fuel setup for US small airports, but as I recall, I couldn’t come anywhere near approximating it in WorldHub (maybe you can’t change the fuel set up? I’d have to re-load it and dig back in.)
If this is an alpha, fine, Asobo et al can see how the very limited initial run has gone and should roll out improvements/expansions. But they need to empower us to make more extensive corrections for this system to be useful or meaningful.
One idea: Explain explicitly that I only get access to the current minimal options as a first round. I submit the changes, and then if they approve those changes, they give me access to more extensive options like correcting the buildings. If I knew that I could prove my way to really being able to fix the overall problems with these small airports, I’d be willing to pursue that route. But with the dead end that I could fix some ground lighting, some parking asphalt edges and maybe a few other things, but the end result will still be a goofy mess, I’m not motivated to do much.
In contrast, while I know that they can’t let users have total control for a bunch of reasons (such as users uploading IP encumbered assets, pranks/griefing, etc.) in order for me to engage and provide for free what I would charge a client thousands of dollars to do IRL, they need to give us the tools to actually create a satisfying, admittedly imperfect. end result for the effort we put in.
