As a landscape developer, I 100% agree.
However, I feel like us landscape developers are ignored by the Condor devs. It seems like 90% of the devs' effort is spent towards releasing new planes (I mean, this makes sense, as this is where the revenue is) - and 10% is towards new features and bug fixing - to keep the users happy.
Here are some things which would greatly improve the quality of life for us landscape developers (here in the US we need all of the quality of life buffs we can get - we are struggling right now with horrible politics and a crazy pandemic):
- Landscape Editor Zoom, Pan, and Select - this is honestly not that difficult (and yes, I have developed several Win32 graphical editing tools in my past). There is even a world-wide industry standard to go by. Scroll wheel zooms, and for pan, either right click and hold or you could adopt the Photoshop standard of space-bar and left click. Seriously... having a different "state" or tool to select just to zoom and pan is painful - especially when you want to zoom and pan with another tool selected, like the tree or elevation tool.
- Better elevation map tools - I may be in the minority here, but many runways in real life are not completely flat. In fact, the runway at my local club has an elevation change of 20 meters. Seriously. It is intimidating to new pilots, and having a way to simulate this in Condor would be absolutely mind-blowingly helpful.
- Trees - You know, here in the US we may have a president with really short fingers, but at least our trees are really tall - like REALLY tall. The average height of the canopy cover in my local area is 100' (30 meters). I feel like the default trees in Condor are about 1/2 this size. This makes a big difference when teaching students how to land without an altimeter. We are taught to judge our altitude by tree height - and well, the Condor tree height seems be based on a much shorter average tree height. A simple slider to adjust the bXXXX and sXXXX tree scale would be awesome!
- Make Landscape Editor a 64bit application that does all processing on a separate thread. Application programming 101 says to never do extended processing on the UI thread - yet - try to to do anything in the Landscaper Editor and you will just have to wait - most likely with all our input frozen. This is fixable and should really be addressed. Hopefully this would also fix the issue of Landscape Editor not working with really large scenery files (I believe AA2 had to develop their own method for merging separate sceneries together because of the limitations of Landscape Editor?).
- Finally, a request that is purely cosmetic - but could be absolutely mind blowing... Add another tree type. I really want to release a "Fall" patch for my scenery that includes 3 differently colored trees. I live in an area known for having a stunning fall foliage explosion - and how cool would it be to be able to simply modify the landscape drevesa.dds file to give the trees 3 different colors.