Better cloud detection technology needed

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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Satellite Data implementation was one of the biggest achievements of MSFS, but of course to cover the entire Earth with the flawless sattelite map is something that is hardly possible even for the big companies like Bing and Google. So of course - there are some flaws

One of the flaws that I think everyone is aware of are the patches covered with default textures due to removed clouds. I think everyone could agree that the transactions between the sattelite and the patched textures is quite harash. I feel like the Developers were so overhyped by the abimition of what the new technology could bring that they overlooked the fact that default textures simply don’t blend well anywhere in the world.

It would be nice to have a better texture generation algorithm that would automatically color match the textures (and also just in general the ammount of default textures to chose from could be bigger) and and try to make a more believable transaction. This problem mainly affects the “wet” areas of the world like Central and South America and Equatorial Africa and most of those patched areas happened to be forests. So, I think that won’t a be way too hard task since MSFS already is capable to color match the trees based on satelitte underneath them

Getting and implementing a new satelitte data may take years, and considering the fact that this problem mostly affects non Western countries I doubt it would be easy for Bing team to get that data easily. But creating a new color matching algorithm with dozens of textures to chose from could make flying in Equatorial Africa, Brazil and Colombia and the entire Planet a whole different experience

You already got ORBX in your team and they have a great experience with they FTX products for FSX and P3D. I believe that by combining ORBX knowledge with Blackshark AI you could make it happen

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Sorry wrong category. Moderators, please, move it to the wishlist
I promise I will double check next time to see if the category I am typing the message in is indeed the same category I want it to be in :wink:

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That’s interesting. Didn’t except such a technology to be available for general use

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I’ve been trying to do flights in remote places of the Earth and I’ve noticed something that can potentially ruin immersion big time, and this is when satellite imagery used in these areas are pictures taken at a moment when the sky was clouded. As a result, you can find yourself traveling during hours above a terrain full of white patches all around. In some areas the terrain can look like this along several hundreds of nautical miles. One example is the north of Brazil, all the way through Suriname, Guyana and Venezuela.

I understand that acquiring satellite imagery that’s absolutely clean for these areas could be hard and costly.
Third party satellite imagery addons won’t solve this completely either.

So I ask that if getting clean satellite imagery is not possible, maybe you can develop some kind of AI solution that can create some kind of “disguise” for these white cloud patches.

This would be a nice solution for most of these areas since this happens mostly over more or less flat coloured areas, rarely over urban areas. It would improve the experience a lot for those of us that enjoy traveling in remote places of the Earth.

Thank you.