Stuff I'm Looking At

I'm always a little bit nervous about posting grand new initiatives ... if we don't actually do the initiative, invariably someone comes out of the walls later to say that we "promised" a feature that we didn't do. But road maps are important. So, bearing in mind that this is not an official announcement, and that nothing has been decided yet, here are some areas of active investigation:

• An airport art asset library. Sergio already started this process by making some aircraft OBJs and other elements (like custom pavement types) available in the libraries that ship with X-Plane. We are looking at extending this over time to include more useful elements for building airports.
• Sharing airport building placements the way we do airport layouts. Right now, airport layouts are shared in a communal database under the GPL license. An airport building database would work the same way - it would be a collection of placements of airport buildings, GPLed and redistributed with X-Plane. The idea would be to make it easy for people to add simple buildings to their local airport and share the results with everyone.
• Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) for roads. We've been looking at OSM for a while, but it's too soon to announce a plan.
• Sharing obstacle data with FlightGear. We already share airport layout data with flight-gear; this would be a similar initiative. We looked at OSM for this, but FlightGear's data needs are a lot closer to ours. This is still in discussion; the FG guys are a sharp bunch, so I think we'll able to work something out.

One of the common threads for all of these ideas is that X-Plane community members have dug into them before we have. This is not surprising, and I think it is a good thing!

Another common thread is that these are all open data sharing initiatives. Collaborative data sharing has come a long way since we redesigned the scenery system, starting in version 8.0. My hope is that over the next several months we can make some of these ideas a reality.

But first I have to fix my 930 beta features. :-)