More appropriate skin tones for ground crew

[exotic gale]

It's entirely normal for the ground crew to have mixed skin tones in Europe and the US, but when flying into the Caribbean it looks really weird seeing a bunch of white guys and gals handling my plane at places like Montego or Bonaire. 😄

I've not done any flying in Asian countries with GSX yet, but I assume the same thing is an issue there too.

[brave lava]

You are suggesting something that is there already, and it's one of the biggest improvements compared to the old crew, which was exactly 3 models with 1 uniform, compared to 16 models in 227 airline uniforms.

The 16 models (soon to be updated to 24), are divided in several ethnicity groups, of 4 characters each, featuring a different mix of characters.

The airline code of the airplane is linked to an internal database which specifies which group of characters should be used for that airline so, not only every airline has a different mix of characters, but they are of different ethnicities.

We even clearly showed that in the promotional video, which intentionally pauses for a couple of seconds on the 227th airline, an airline from Zambia, obviously featuring an all-black crew.

So, if you followed the explanation so far, you would have realized that, the key for this to work, is:

• the airline must be recognized from the aircraft.cfg, meaning it must contain the correct icao_airline code. Not all liveries, especially unofficial ones, use it, and I found a case in which even an official airline in the Fenix manager had a wrong code (Canada Jet Lines mis-typed as CLJ instead CJL), which I reported to the author, since it's on flightsim.to as wel.

• the airline MUST be one of the 227 included with GSX.

If that fails, the crew will revert to the generic crew. You can recognize a generic crew, because they wear a dark blue jacket/skirt/hat with a white shirt and a red/white scarf and they have NO custom airline PIN on the jacket. The generic crew is of mixed ethnicity.

.
So, the real question is:

Have you noticed a particular airline not being recognized ? If yes, please indicate which one and will look into that.

Note that, we decided not to add defuncts airlines to the list, because we need to be a bit careful with how many new objects variations we add, which all contribute to slowing down the startup.

[lusty pike]

He asked about the ground crew and those shouldn‘t be linked to the airline code but ok…

[brave lava]

Sorry, I assumed the question was about the crew, not the ground crew.

We might do something similar for them, associating the operator nationality to the characters ethnicity but, the issue is, we don't have as many different ground crew characters for each service, the most we have are 9 Marshallers, 6 different pushback/drivers, 2 caterers, 1 deicer and 1 baggage loader, so to offer some variations, we should have far more characters, and those take a lot of time to do and maybe, some users would prefer we'd rather add new functions like Push-in or new services.

[lusty pike]

Thank you for the answer. I‘d rather have less twins and triplets and an option to get all of the passengers seated instantly. Have a great day.

[brave lava]

Having about 65 different characters is not "just" a matter of taking time to do those. It's also a way to save performances, because each twin would save MSFS from loading a new set of textures, since if you have two objects with the same textures, those won't be loaded twice, since the texture is already in VRAM, so there's little performance hit, compared if we had 180-200 different characters all visible at the same time.

[lusty pike]

Ok, makes sense. So we can bury the dream that AI soon will create the favorite soccer team skins to fill the plane 😁

[exotic gale]

Yes, it's about the ground crew. I've completed two JBU flights with the new update and it works great with the FAs.