Hello,
I am trying to get clarification as to what to do regarding the ramps at KWLW. I just made my third submission and can’t seem to make the powers that be happy. Can I get advice on what to do?
Rationale:
Given the directive that we must cover buildings and we have to match the aerial colors, the issue is that A) the colors on the aerial are AWFUL. What should be gray concrete or gravel is yellowish. B) If I use aprons for the adjacent businesses, the lack of buildings and fences make it look like the ramp is twice the size it actually is because they’re all somewhat congruent, connected by roads. This could easily be misinterpreted by pilots as ramp space.
Thus, the choices are :
A) make ALL the ramps yellow to match the aerial (I say no)
B) make the airside concrete ramp a reasonable shade of gray and make the adjacent gravel lots the yellow of the aerial so as to differentiate (mods have said no)
C) Make the ramp a reasonable shade of gray and delete the aprons over the adjacent businesses (this is a reasonable compromise that makes it better, which is the point, no?)
Here are some pictures to illustrate the issue:
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Original, untouched aerial
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Original AI creation. Note extra large interpretation of ramps (gray, btw)
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My previous submission with colors differentiated to denote airside/landside:
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My latest submission eschewing the need to cover the adjacent agribusiness at all and just focusing on the airport ramp (with one small lot in the foreground covered).
This kind of thing gets messy, especially in semi-arid climates where the grass is more scrub and weeds mixed with hard pan, brown for 8 months of the year, where it’s difficult to differentiate between dusty concrete and the above (especially pavement shoulders and transition areas). But it also brings to light the question of the original aerial - what to do if it’s grossly miscolored. Consider season, sun angle, lighting, and lack of contrast when colors are washed together.
Thoughts?
This
This seems broken beyond repair, at least with the tools available to us.
The fact that the Blackshark AI (or whatever) failed to recognize any of the dozen or so buildings populating the area leaves no option except turning everything into a big puddle of concrete.
Obviously, both your solutions are definite improvements over the status quo.
I think the mods should recognize that you’ve made the best of a bad situation.
tbh, just from a user perspective, I would prefer if the buildings in the aerial were revealed. Doesn’t look nice when you’re on the ground, but at least from a certain altitude the airport would look like a real place.
edit: Oh, I see. The buildings are there, and we can un-hide them, but we can’t see them until the submission has been published and pushed as an update? That’s… suboptimal.
As for the buildings, on the main polygon, you can deactivate “exclude detected buildings” and activate “exclude OSM”
You won’t see any changes on your side but we will when we process the airport
Thank you much for the feedback. Again, I’m very cognizant this is an alpha, so not everything is perfect and these discussions should be had in order to improve the process. But issues like these are increasingly frustrating.
It seems like we’re fighting both the original AI interpretation as well as the quality of the photos, which are subject to a lot of variability. Last night I began work on another fairly popular small airport in the same region, in which the in-sim aerial is so heavily washed out (little to no contrast) to the point it’s nearly impossible to discern pavement edges, much less centerlines. Everything is a hazy yellow, similar to what we found at KWLW.
I think in those cases, we have to use several visual resources to make the best of the positioning, but there should be latitude in using coloration to differentiate surfaces based on, again, the multiple resources we have, but more importantly, common sense. We shouldn’t need to make concrete the same yellow as the typical NorCal summer grass, for example. But that’s what the aerial portrays. It’s like camouflage! Then there’s the common-sense question of separating the landside/adjacent property from that of the airside, so it doesn’t look like one giant ramp.
In the same vein, I’m running into a LOT of issues with parallax when there is any sort of slope to the airport. To the point if the dev camera is not directly overhead and pointed straight down, lining up the nodes with the centerlines as presented on the aerial is nearly impossible. A foot or more either direction and it changes relative position. And don’t get me started on trying to navigate the camera properly when it’s pointed straight down, haha.
Yes, it’s very helpful to know we can change that so they’re generated on the next sweep. Again, I think the lack of airport-specific buildings and fences are a big part of the issue in our ability to discern what’s truly useable as an airport in the sim.
HI
Please don’t give up 
As an alpha we are also learning from your submissions and how best to review them logically.
Regarding the building exclusion options, we have a bug that means that if the “Exclude detected” option is checked by default and you uncheck it, you won’t see the buildings appear, even though they should.
I’ve spoken to the moderation team, so don’t hesitate to submit a new version of the airport for acceptance.
Cheers
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Thanks for the encouragement. I’ve been a huge proponent of fixing airports since the first iteration of the sim, so the process is very important to me and I’m still here. 
On the last decline, the mod did give me some notes, which on the whole is important -
defining what is being declined or what they’re noticing needs improvement is an absolutely necessary part of the process. Otherwise, we’re just chasing our own tail.
However, it comes back to a baseline, philosophical conundrum - what and what shouldn’t be covered and how far that philosophy extends from the airside surfaces of the airport.
The notes from the last rejection identified areas on the south side of the airport that need aprons, and are technically on airport property but are not airside facilities. As well as a stack of hay bales that needs to be covered.
With that, here are a few observations of mine that explains my rationale for not covering them:
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I didn’t uncover them or change them in any way. I am under the impression that areas we don’t address are not required to be addressed. I didn’t make it worse, but I also did not meet that standard of improving according to that mod.
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You’ll find many airports, at least in US (which I am most familiar with) have joint-use agreements with local farmers. This means the fields adjacent to the runways (either on or off airport property) are available to farm, thus always changing and are often full of hay bales or other farming accoutrements. Even the tracks made by implements change, and certain ground features are covered and uncovered depending on season. In that vein, I’d hate to have to continuously change the aprons that cover parts of the fields, which really have nothing to do with the airport itself, every time the imagery changes. My vote is to let the fields be fields. The only exception is maybe if there are vehicles pictured within a certain linear distance of the actual airport pavement?
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Back to the philosophical question of “what is an airport?” I’m really not interested in editing anything that is not on the airside portion of an airport, with maybe the exception of terminal buildings and their parking lots. Or maybe if something poses a hazard to navigation and/or its majorly incorrect. I get those instances. But in the case of WLW and several other airports, the original AI extends the “covering” (by means of aprons) well beyond the airside, which as I illustrated above, causes parking confusion. Truth be told, I’d prefer to simply delete all of those outside of the airside and not worry about them again. Plus, isn’t the point of this to cover aberrations and artifacts on the airside pavement? The things not on the airside are part of the visual, good or bad, and I feel they should be shown. Again, how far should this extend?
I’m going to try and answer all these questions, but I apologize in advance for the fact that it may be a bit rambling.
Before continuing, your feedback is a big plus for the team because, as I said, it allows us to adjust our evaluation processes. And to better understand how everyone approaches airport editing.
1 - Indeed, normally this should be our rule, we only moderate what is modified (added/removed) and which is an improvement to the scene in question.
2 - I agree with you that if elements are not part of the airport, they should not be included in submissions and should not be taken into account in our evaluation. As you say, perhaps we should consider two things: “is it part of the airport?” and “is it too close to the airport/runway?”
3 - Unfortunately, I don’t have any concrete answers to give at the moment. There are a lot of rather special cases, and we’ll always have cases like this. In any case, we’ll take good note of your feedback and use it to better approach other submissions.
I hope I’ve been able to provide a minimum of answers, and thank you for your contribution to Flight Simulator.
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I really appreciate your response. Those are fair observations necessary in improving the process.
It comes down to the fact that a lot of airports are just kind of messy, not easy to discern (and maybe their aerials aren’t very supportive of that), and the original AI didn’t interpret it the way a person might. So we have to discuss and discover how to rectify that. Which is why we’re here!
But honestly, we do have to interpret a bit, use judgement, and I’m glad it’s not so black and white as what I was starting to feel.
And thanks again for the tip on re-allowing AI buildings. If I may make one suggestion that can additionally help separate airside and landside (other than buildings): it’s fences. I’m not worried about editing what’s beyond the fence in most circumstances, and it’s a great tool to show pilots that no matter what else is depicted out there, AI-generated or not, your journey stops here.
Oh, @ASBNicolas one more question: when we have questions, disputes, and/or discussions about interpretation, what’s the best way to do that? I sometimes follow up with comments in the airport submission page in the World Hub itself, but I don’t know if mods get pinged to those and read them or if I get pinged if/when they respond, etc.
That’s why I brought it here to the forum. Otherwise, it’s just make the change and submit the airport with a comment, get declined with a comment, then never really come to follow-on consensus. Just kind of goes round and round and feels like sometimes we don’t get anywhere productive (especially when it’s a matter of interpretation), meanwhile we’re doing a ton of speculative editing (re-)work in between submissions.
You can come here, I try to be there regularly.
For the moment, we don’t have any notification option on the world hub so it’s not the better way for discuss
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