Double-sided taxiway signs available in the regular SDK and in the World Hub version

[N316TS]

A lot of airports around the world have taxiway signs with faces on both sides.

Here’s an example at BWI airport in the US:

Example at KBWI

Here’s a taxiway sign, which would be d<El[T]dE> in the SDK language of taxiway signs (source video):

Here’s the back side, which would be l [T] in the taxiway sign language (source video):

Unfortunately, if you want to make your project very realistic, right down to the exact signs used at the airport, there is no easy way to model them in the sim. I’ve seen some professional developers take two taxiway signs and push them together, back-to-back. This actually works to an extent, and that’s how I do it, too. However, besides the fact that it takes extra work to do this (and it really does, if you read on), there are other issues:

Problem #1:

Unfortunately, it can also lead to Z-fighting, like this:

(Ignore the circles around the taxiway signs. I use those to keep track of my taxiway signs as I work.)

This is an extreme example, but you can get many other cases where it’s subtle and/or only a problem from a certain distance. And in order to ensure that this isn’t a problem, you need to compile your scenery and verify every taxiway sign in your airport. I’ve seen taxiway signs that look fine in dev mode but then Z-fight after I’ve compiled them. And there can be hundreds of signs at your airport, requiring multiple rounds of fixing and compiling and viewing and restarting the sim. (That’s why I said these can be a lot of work.)

But there are other problems…
 

Problem #2:

Sometimes, if you push them too close together, they look fine in dev mode, but when you view it in the sim, mounted from the Community folder, you get the back side of a taxiway sign sticking out the front side, like this:

 

As before, to prevent this from happening, you need to check your signs in the sim, fix them, compile, restart the sim, test, and repeat.

Problem #3:

There are now not one, but there are now two different products that “enhance” your taxiway signs:

If the 3D models for these are slightly off from the default versions, then who knows if they would even fit together seamlessly or result in Z-fighting, themselves.

 

Problem #4:

The models for taxiway signs in MSFS 2024 may not be the same as the ones in 2020. So even if your addon or World Hub entry might look okay in 2020, they may not in 2024.

Having the option to have double-sided taxiway signs would be really helpful. The system that automatically generates airports doesn’t have to use them. If they were just a tool in our toolbox, that would be really helpful.

[CharlieFoxtrot00]

The SDK devstream today said that placing two signs back-to-back will continue to be the correct way to do this for now.

[N316TS]

Sigh. Thank you for the heads up.

To the SDK team, particularly Eric, thank you for the candor in your answer.

Although this idea only has 4 votes as of this writing (anyone else out there?) this was brought up in the “main” forums only a few months after launch and had 35 votes over on those forums until a moderator over there (and ironically, one of my good friends, ha) closed it:

Ability to Create Two-Sided Taxiway Signs

I really appreciate an honest answer like, “We don’t support it and there was no plan to do it until we saw this question.” I just want to give a heads up that the feature request has been around for a while.

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As an aside to my own idea topic, there are a lot of SDK wishes in the main forums’ Wishlist subcategory. Moderators over there are closing SDK topics over there because they have been told to direct people to come over to these forums and log their feature requests here, but users seldom heed that advice. Consequently, there are likely several SDK wishes in those forums that probably have no counterpart ideas here. I logged this idea only two weeks ago when I discovered that no one else had done one, but the original wish comes from January 2021. Some of those wishes are junk, but there may be a few gems among them, and I would encourage the SDK team to at least read through the list once, when they come up for air after MSFS 2024 launches.

[CasualClick]

Disclaimer - I am one of Jayne’s Mods - this is a Personal Comment and Observation

Yep. Core sim non-developer users won’t or don’t come here primarily because they believe this is a mostly “For Programming/Coding” forum (which isn’t wrong), they’re not comfortable being able to actualize or express their ideas in a highly technical sense, or it’s simply inconvenient.

As a result, we collectively as a community, have an enormous schism whereby good ideas or identification of actionable, potentially low effort/low cost defects don’t make it into Kitty Hawk backlog and are subsequently lost.

My suggestion is that CMs from both forums consider creating a common pool between the Discussion Forum 's Wishlist and the Ideas forum here, and triage/groom say 2x a month. A metric of success could be to identify and implement x items or at least get those items very high in the Backlog for Kitty Hawk and or Sunrise.

The Wishlist items would NOT be the ones that happened to make it onto the Roadmap by sheer votes. There are many good ideas like two-sided signs, that have few votes. A pass by the core Dev Team could bring some of those ideas to the top since you’re the most knowledgeable about what is possible in terms of coding and implementation. The Discussion Forum CMs can point to emerging user sentiment to also zero in on those less visible but compelling wishes.