Bing Maps don't cover the entire planet?

It seems like the entire planet is covered with Bing Maps is a deception with a euphemism.

I flew the Tbilisi UGTB - Batumi UGSB route today, and I am so frustrated the ground is only covered with Bing Maps within 10KM diameter around Tbilisi leaving the rest 99 percent of the flight over ugly FSX texture set :

Tbilisi and environs looked amazing but most of the flight was such a disappointment :

I have seen this in many other regions too ā€¦ but I am still not sure what the reason is.
I made a similar remark a while ago in this topic:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/please-fix-photogrammetry-and-or-lod/279217/215

But the ā€œdefault textureā€ issue does not seem to be a ā€œfeatureā€ of ā€œexoticā€ places.
I often see those textures (1 or just few tiles) right in the middle of otherwise perfect satellite images ground. From that I guess that there are other reasons that might be at play here.

Without a detailed understanding how the game (backend code) works I can only speculate (which does not really help). But ā€œslowā€ loading times (or too high latencies) seem to be one factor in my cases ā€¦ and since I have a fiber optic uplink I guess the latency is more on the server (storage) side.

Less frequenty visited places might suffer more often, as the data might not be in the ā€œhot cacheā€ on the Bing side.

But then ā€¦ clearing my cache ā€¦ and revisiting the places on a different day usually did reproduce the incorrect ground textures. So it can not only be related to ā€œlatencyā€.

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The game puts those generic textures in place of clouds on the sat or aerial data. You can check on Bing whatā€™s going on underneath, some parts of Africa are particularly bad. For example:

And then you get stuff like this in game

Or you reach the end of aerial data which looks like this, switching to low res sat data

The source data just isnā€™t there

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Seems like itā€™s slightly more than a cloudy image issue.

I checked both Bing and Google aerial images on their corresponding web pages in the region, that is Batumi, GEORGIA, and it turns out that my theory was true that Bing Maps simply donā€™t have the detailed aerial images for this part of the world to show in MSFS, only the black tiles. Furthermore, having checked through some other parts in the near vicinity the result was quite the same, unfortunately.

Here is a comparison between Bing and Google aerial images for Batumi and environs :

Bing patchwork :

Google perfection :

So everyone else is happy with Bing Maps coverage.

I really love to fly in MSFS2020, because itā€™s revolutionary and marvellous in many aspects but aerial maps and photogrammetry coverage are hardly enough to live up to my expectations, and I donā€™t see any sign of improvement.

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Give them time.

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Yes Iā€™m exceptionally happy that this technology even exists in the Microsoft Product Stack to make MSFS possible the way it is. Itā€™s an incredible achievement to pull these technologies together and only a company like Microsoft could have pulled this off.

Regarding Bing coverage, itā€™s Bing or nothing - Google was never an option to Microsoft while Bing exists. It sucks some regions are lacking but with the World Updates there are opportunities to improve this should the data becme available.

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Iā€˜m not completely happy with it either but Iā€˜ve come to accept it. Luckily, thanks to the autogen buildings, trees, weather and great lighting the scenery still looks very good in most places. Improvement is certainly slow, but Iā€˜m sure it will improve over time.
For the UK update they announced a complete new set of aerial imagery, so that will be an interesting update. Itā€™d be interesting to see some before and after comparisons, especially of places that have poor imagery in the current version. Furthermore I hope that they implement imagery with higher resolution. In the US update I didnā€˜t notice an improvement in this regard (maybe I missed it).

It was actually the US update that made my hope vanish about the aerial image and photogrammetry improvements.

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I was slightly disappointed as well, particularly because those areas that are in dire need of an imagery update such as parts of Alaska didnā€˜t get any. Instead they updated regions that already looked good without really improving the quality of the imagery. Itā€˜s certainly better than nothing (more up to date), but still.
As I said above, Iā€˜m curious about the UK update. Iā€˜ve just had a quick look at it in Bing Maps and I noticed that the imagery for the UK is not too bad (it might be a bit outdated but it seems to be rather complete and I didnā€˜t see any baked-in clouds). I really hope they got more high-res imagery for the UK, otherwise I donā€˜t see much room for improvement imagery-wise, apart from up-to-dateness obviously.

Still, what is good is that avionics improved so much with the latest Sim Update II that we and therefore MS / Asobo now can focus more on the graphics data and the like.

:wink: agree with you

Lol no, however google is far from perfect either. At least not in the part of the world Iā€™m flying in atm, Kyrgizstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. Amazing mountain ranges to fly through, marred with bad textures and uneven transitions throughout.

However itā€™s much better than without aerial images, you still get amazing views. The bigger problems are the height mesh data and low detail river polygons. The latter really screw up the beauty underneath and I wish there was a way to turn the water overlays off. You often get these highly detailed rivers with a straight angular blue line over top as the official ā€˜riverā€™. Or beautiful shaped lakes on the areal images with ugly angular water polygon over top covering most of it.

That has nothing to do with Bing, those ā€˜riversā€™ look like ā– ā– ā– ā–  as well on Google maps and thereā€™s a shocking lack off names for mountains and rivers in remote areas. FS2020 opened up my eyes to how far behind digital maps still are in 2021!

Yet improving those aerial images takes time, an immense amount of it. Plus the tops of mountain ranges are often in clouds or very hard to fly over in the first place. Itā€™s disappointing to reach the summit or caldera and see nothing but a blurry mess, our tech level simply isnā€™t there yet.

Perhaps one day high res satellites become cheap and numerous enough to get high res images from space for every part of Earth. The land area of earth is 510,100,000 square km. Aerial imagery goes down to 3 inch resolution, about 169 pixels per sq meter, yet 1 foot resolution gives great results already, 9 pixels per sq meter.

Here I found a sat image at 50cm resolution (4 million pixels per sq km)

46mb, 11846x9945

To cover the land mass of Earth in that detail would take 17.3 million of those images. In data size itā€™s not even that much, 760 terabytes. Getting all those images to match up, same seasons, time of day, tides, flooding, free of clouds, smog, smoke, etc, is the hard part. (Actually youā€™ll need multiple images from different times of day to get rid of shadows)

Knowing all that, Iā€™m very happy with the current Bing maps coverage.

Btw photogrammetry needs even higher res data from multiple angles, plus getting good shots of shallow water and the ocean floor, reefs etc, another big challenge.

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Nice, but I think your maths might be a little off :slight_smile: if you assume 4 million pixels per sq km is around 32MB then the total for the land area of earth is around 16.3 petabytes. Lets say you use a more conservative file format of 8MB then itā€™s still over 4 petabytes :stuck_out_tongue: and then thereā€™s coastal images and water masking letā€™s not forget that again! :crazy_face:

I was using the file size of the pic I found. That jpg is 46 MB, 11846x9945.
8 bit jpg, already compressed.

So thats 46 / (11846x9945) MB per pixel x 4,000,000 = 1.56 MB per sq km = 796,703,327 MB = 760 TB

And yes, thatā€™s excluding oceans, seasons, photogrammetry, and for cliffs and steep mountains you need more than top down pixels.

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Ok I understand :slight_smile: but I think a 4mp (4 million pixels) camera image is 10 times that size and thatā€™s compressed. Raw size is bigger still. :sneezing_face:

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True. Kinda makes that claim of 2 peta bytes for FS 2020 data feel very little :slight_smile:

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I donā€™t think that storage of the big data would ever be an issue for a tech giant like Microsoft. Itā€™s the pettiest of the matters we rack our brains for.
We also witness that itā€™s working almost perfectly, some glitches of course hap, tho.

My point is so brief: using aerial images and photogrammetry in a sim is great, and amazing, or even awesome but seeming reluctant to improve its coverage and quality is no good. :wink:

Somebody posted a video on Youtube that explains how to bring in Google Maps Photogrammetry Data into Flight Simulator 2020.

Here is the link on Youtube:

Iā€™m currently flying at Africa, many places seems not to be covered by Bing maps terrain data.