I have mixed image of PG. Speaking only of the cities I’ve actually visited, I find that the reproduction is fairly impressive (relative to the power of my system), if not somewhat dated. The featured models of POIs are good considering the context.
However, I see all kinds of goofy things as well. Mostly, bad terrain to height mapping (cars/trucks/roads/rivers on the side of hills, buildings in 2D stretched across a cliff face), car/truck movements are very often just wrong (you all know what I mean ), flooding (shiny texture in strange places), some kind of color mapping issue (whole chunks of terrain seem to be overlaid with a bright green), AI planes composed of nothing but the lights (no plane model at all), …
I think it’s quite possible that what you are seeing is the best it’s going to get.
Photogrammetry isn’t perfect. The buildings will not be perfect replicas. They will be deformed to some degree. But for me, on my system, when I first fly into an area (or after I delete the cache file and start over), mostly what I see is flat blurred aerial imagery with a few dark deformed buildings. The smaller buildings are fairly flat and the view distance is a few miles at best. As I repeatedly fly an area, the smaller buildings ‘grow’ (for lack of a better term ) out of the ground as more data gets downloaded and the view distance – the distance that objects are visible – becomes greater until it reaches about 12 miles.
The cache works for me on my system. I know it works for others. What I don’t know is why you or anyone else feels the need to question the fact that it does work for me and others. I’m sorry it doesn’t work for you but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all.
Washington DC is really good. The whole town, especially the famous parts were basically made to be photographed from the air. Plenty of space around the sides of buildings. It photographed very well.
I just went there after you posted to have a look. Never been before. But I don’t see PG? There are a lot of nice modelled POI’s and some bespoke buildings but it’s 3D modelled, I’m sure. It’s too clean and there isn’t any smaller details. Send us a screenshot of what you are seeing?
Talking about Sunnyside, Washington. Did you see photogrammetry in the city then?
It’s the outskirts (housing) that give it away totally at my end, just autogen. I didn’t realise Washington was so small compared to other “famous” American cities though. Quite an eye opener.
Photogrammetry is very dependent on internet speed. Part of the problem is that many of us do not have access to that speed. There needs to be some way to make it less demanding on our internet speed.
Sorry, I do agree that reducing the number of triangles is advantageous to both them and us, but, to clarify, by “cleaning up” I meant something more like a person looking at a specific building (like a well-known skyscraper), recognizing a particular face of the building is, say, a rectangle (based off reference photos, personal familiarity with the building, or other information), replacing the cluster of triangles there with a single rectangle, defining the different materials (concrete vs. glass, etc.) of the texture as areas of different reflectivity and other properties, going to the next part of the building, and so on to make it more of a “bespoke” object. I assume you could create and train an AI to do something similar, sort of like what the Blackshark does for imagery, but I imagine most existing automated ways of doing that without a person having to manually look at each building would be more like a geometry LOD sort of thing, where it would just try to reduce the number of triangles or vertices without any real “understanding” of what the building is supposed to look like, and I’m not sure how sophisitcated those would be at “guessing” which corners are “important” and worth retaining while rejecting others and what not.
I have 50Mbps and wifi but in taskmanager I rarely see more than 10Mbps actually used by MSFS. Perfect PG everywhere even with LOD 6 … 8gb rolling cache on ramdisk probably helps.
Flew there just now. Agreed it’s one of the better / clearest I’ve seen. No melted buildings. Very good shapes to them. Even the trees looked good!
It’s a bit of a boring and flat city though. I wonder how old this PG data is as it seems there is a whole load of new areas being built up to make the city bigger (just road networks and grids in place, like SimCity!).
San Antonio (USA) is pretty good. Covers quite a wide area, not too dense but various regions with different styles of stuff going on. Quite clear most of it.
), flooding (shiny texture in strange places), some kind of color mapping issue (whole chunks of terrain seem to be overlaid with a bright green), AI planes composed of nothing but the lights (no plane model at all), …