Hi Asobo, I was flying around Colorado near Telluride and noticed lots of shimmery lines on the mountains. Upon closer look these are watermasks over minor streams. It looks really bad. Because of hi res satellite photo this seems completely unnecessary. 9 times out of 10 in real life these streams are 5 or 10 feet wide at the most and most are obscured by trees. What would be nice is if Asobo could work to exclude minor streams and dry desert washes from the stream map data. For instance there are water masks all over washes in Arizona that in real life would have no water in them. Letâs take Tucson for example. The sim shows large rivers all through out the city when in reality these are just sand 99.3% of the time. There is a stream that comes off of Mt Lemmon that is so narrow I could stand across it in real life. But it has a 75 foot wide water mask with an exclude over the data. In real life this stream is completely obscured by trees. I think it would be fairly easy to exclude minor streams I would think, but maybe not so. Could the AI figure out that if a stream dosenât show a certain amount of a certain color not to draw a line over the location of the stream? Or is that data completely separate. I have noticed this all over the world. Madeira seems to have canals on the side of the mountain or data got corrupted and those are supposed to be roads? This is my biggest wish.
Edit: Seeing comments for other people, it seems this happens everywhere.
Some very narrow creeks that are almost imposible to see in satellite imagerie, in the game are very wide rivers.
I was flying over my work, and I had a hard time recognizing the place, until I realised that big river I was seeing, it was in fact the small creek I know.
It can be found in these coordinates.
43°17â20.4"N 2°51â41.1"W
43.289012, -2.861426
I have seen it in more places.
Anyone knows if this has been reported to Zendesk ?
Any coments on the issue before I report it ?
Itâll be the water mask height I guess (could be wrong) but nearly all the water is still way too high, coast is a good 3 meters higher than it should be, apart from anything else it spoils the look os the coastline, especially estaurine areas where the complexity of the saltings is a particularly interesting scene. They did lower it a bit for 1.9.3 but it still needs dropping, coast, inland and river systems all way too high.
Itâs not the height, itâs how wide they are ⊠10m instead of 1m
I think @KimG53 was saying that because the water level is too high it covers more ground than it should which results in it being wider as the ground level lowers to where the river/creek is.
Wow, so you think the water system is so flexible ⊠that could flood entire zones then if too high
There is no âwater heightâ outside of photogrammetry areas. They simply paint the surface mesh wet or dry. Iâm guessing the land/water map layer theyâre using is the culprit here, but a screenshot would help.
I doubt reporting this to Zendesk is going to result in anything. There are thousands and thousands of these issues and only the most egregious ones that interfere with missions/major airports seem to get fixed.
That makes more sense than my notion, although I am pretty sure the sea is a mask, it would be difficult to do rivers that way as they all vary in elevation anyway. I agree itâs unlikely to be addressed this early into the program though.
The rivers get the same treatment as the sea usually, where a blending mask is used to transition from the satellite land imagery to the water texture. The satellite imagery, land/water layer, and elevation mesh are all separate sources, and they often times do not line up. This causes all kinds of gnarly issues where the water can flow uphill, or there is âblue landâ that should be water.
The land/water layer might be vector data, and for some of the really tiny creeks, they might just be 2D polylines. Then the simulator assigns a default width to the creek, which might might make it way bigger than it actually is. If thatâs the case, the creek should look rather polygonal, like an angular canal. This is what FSX did, and Iâve seen some screenshots of areas that looked similar in Flight Simulator.
The real fix here is to get new, better data into Bing Maps. Maybe a future world update for Europe.
Itâs everywhere - tiny streams ( we donât have creeks in the UK 
) are depicted with broad polygons that make surrounding areas appear to be in heavy flood. I see no way they could improve it realistically though.
I just had a little fly around the highlands of Northern Ireland near Donegal. Beautiful scenery with many small rivers and streams. The only ones that looked good were those that the algorithm had missed - ie just photo textures - they looked perfect. I donât need to see unrealistic reflections off a surface (that has waves on it) attached to a polygon with straight segments, that is a straight copy of an OSM map, for my brain to work out there is a river.
The glinting of sunlight off water is a valuable clue to spot a river at a distance of a few miles, at low angles, but at close quarters, it would be better for it to fade out completely, especially on streams. At the moment, you only get this when looking directly down at 90 degrees. After all, the photos of all these small rivers show dark ribbons of water, not bright silver sky reflections.
Please at least give us the option to turn those polygons off completely. Alternatively, have a fade OUT as we get closer - IE a negative LOD.
I have been manually altering the rivers in the scenery area I am working on. Its a pain in the butt to do but basically its done by using a river exclude polygon each side of the creek/stream to hide the water where it sits on the land. It works up to a point but its fiddly and in areas where bridges cross the river there are some deep pools that seem to work differently and look a bit odd. Its still a big improvement though to what the default looks like.
A fade out is not the way forward in my opinion.
Another advantage with this exclude poly is that the trees that the default river excludes start magically appearing again as you place the poly. You can see where the trees should be on the orthos around a lot of rivers. It seems like rivers are generally glitchy.
I canât see manually editing every stream and river happening in my lifetime. There really needs to be at least the option to get rid of these water polygons completely imo. I donât see that happening any time soon either, but we can hope.
Thats not only in Colorado - Gemany the same - very unrealisticâŠ
UK, same problem exists. Have voted.
Judging by the timings of current top issues, donât expect anything before 2025
This is also especially noticeable in Australia - salt lakes in the middle of the desert show up as water, and it looks the same as the ocean water. While this sim is visually amazing and a great leap forward, this is an example of something that has gone backwards from FSX which had a greater variety of water colours.
Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it? - no
I wonder if Iâm the only one thatâs upset about this. Regardless of the graphic perfection I appreciate in fs2020, one detail is very far from the overall level. I mean the default width of small watercourses. I fly mostly in a mountainous area and each stream marked on the map, actually 3-10 feet wide and generally not visible from the air (because it flows in a canyon, surrounded by dense vegetation) is represented in FS 2020 as a broadly spilled river, about 50 feet wide , additionally covering the road, railroad and surrounding houses as well. It looks extremely bizarre when flying along the mountain range, I see such wide waterfalls, looking like icy ski runs starting just below the summit and filling every steep valley. Yes, thereâs a watercourse on the map, but for Godâs sake, it doesnât look like that from the air. Even up close, it should be invisible, because it is barely dripping over the rocks and is sheltered by trees and bushes. Would it not be possible by default to reduce (radically) the width of the mask of watercourses, which on real maps are defined only by a line? Or giving us the option to turn them off?
`Location of issue: Europe, mountains in generally
i5, 1600gtx
Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue: - current version
Why are there so few votes for this? For me itâs an immersion breaker and it seems like it would be a simple thing to fix. At least make the minimum default stream size a configurable thing.
In the UK where there is a stream alongside a minor road, the stream covers the road.
Cars drive through the âfloodingâ.
Canals are way too wide.
Not a âshow-stopperâ, but annoying.
Needs scaling on waterways.
It seems that problem appears where bing maps depict a given stream not with poligon but with line. Then a generic, about 10m wide water mask is applied on the top of the terrain. Looks horrible most time as those streems should be hardly noticeable from air.