I’d like to focus a little on this point a little if I may without straying too far away from Infinite Flight. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with either FSX or XP11 on desktop, but they both have an incredible amount of freeware and payware aircraft/ add-ons. Some of the free add-ons are Incredibly good, but a lot of them are incredibly bad, particularly the aircraft. I can’t name a single freeware aircraft for either that is up to the standard of Infinite Flights recently reworked/ developed aircraft (CRJ, A350, 777 etc). I’ve downloaded lots of freeware, I’ve slso spent a ridiculous amount of money on payware, and 9 times out of 10, the quality is top notch and community projects just cannot compete.
With these simulators, there is no validation process. You submit the files, boom, anyone could download them. With infinite flight, every single aircraft goes through a thorough stage of checks and testing, which can take months at a time. As much as I expect we have some Incredibly talented members in this forum that could do 3D modelling and code aircraft physics, it’s not as simple in practice as it is on paper.
But say the aircraft was out together (this will take months by the way, you don’t build and code an aircraft in days), the developers will then have to take time away from whatever they are currently working on to make sure the aircraft works and can be put into the simulator without causing any issues. It then gets passed on to us beta testers for, potentially, months worth of testing and bug reporting to make sure it’s suitable and functional before it even has a chance of being released into the simulator. If the aircraft is deemed broken, it would then get removed from the simulator and end up being a waste of both the Devs and testers resources.
This is just for one aircraft by the way, it could take 1-6 months for a single aircraft, not including anything that the developers may already be working on that needs testing and work.
I really really love the idea, please don’t think I’m straight up criticising it. I would love for the community to have some involvement, but I don’t think that aircraft building should be that involvement. Too many things to go wrong and waste time. It’s not a simple task, let me promise you.
Something like Marc’s livery templates I think would be more suitable and much easier to implement