Making custom windsocks is possible, but not easy. Some developers have done it (e.g. NZA Simulations), but instead of every developer having to reinvent the wheel, it would be helpful to have a few extra common variants available to everybody, like solid white and solid orange:
I’ve seen one payware developer (not going to mention who, but it was not NZA) do this type of animation badly.
With the World Hub in alpha, now is also a great time to add this capability, so that World Hub developers familiar with their respective airports can add a little more realism into their fields.
The SDK has a Windsock example. It’s trivial to make texture variations by renaming some folder, XML and CFG elements, and providing a new Windsock_Fabric_Albedo.png texture for each variation. Compile as a library of simobjects, or include in the airport package.
Thank you! That’s really cool that that option is available.
I’m actually looking at it from the World Hub perspective, where our only option is the standard version. If there were native support for different windsock types, we could make the world more realistic.
I didn’t realize the World Hub did not allow custom objects or SimObjects.
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Yeah, I’m assuming that the reasoning is probably because the generic airports are stored locally, and allowing custom things to be added would blow up the base install size over time. In the future when they move toward a more cloud-based architecture in MSFS 2024, the same world that we’re editing now will support both MSFS 2024 and the soon-to-be-legacy MSFS 2020. So I can’t imagine support for custom objects is coming to the World Hub any time soon.
In this idea, I’m just hoping for a “Type” (or whatever they want to call it…maybe “Color” or “Design”?) parameter for windsocks for some of the more common varieties. I assume that such a change would not add any significant amount of space to the compiled BGLs for the world.