Bing Maps don't cover the entire planet?

But I don’t think they are reluctant at all and have already published 2 significant updates. The job is never ending - the data never enough and they can never get enough images - but little by little they are improving what is there and making it better. It is agargantuan task that they have already achieved - but to bring the entire world up to the standards of the best bits we have today…well we are probably only at the end of the beginning of that work.

That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m fairly optimistic Germany will be fixed at some point, but can you imagine a “World update Kazakhstan”, “Eastern Siberia”, or “the Congo”? I guess it will be like it’s always been, North America including the Caribbean, Western and some Parts of Central and even Eastern Europe, Canada, Australia, NZ, some fun Pacific islands, at least FRENCH Polynesia, Korea, maybe China, too, Southeast Asia, Israel, even for parts of the rest of the Americas I see that coming, maybe from other sources, probably stretched over five years or so. But that’s not “the world”. Still, I very much hope I’m wrong

I guess Microsoft should have a more powerful initiative to improve and invest in Bing Maps than just MSFS… I don’t think World Updates of MS/Asobo team would suffice to do the job we want the Bing Maps to do.

That’s the point. While Google is regularly updating images, Bing has done almost nothing in recent years, and it shows. It would be a lot of work and expensive licenses to try to catch up, and since Google seems to be fully established as map provider, navigation software etc I’m not sure MS considers it’s worth a try to get going again.

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You would think the US has good coverage of Afghanistan, kinda needed when you have military campaigns there. Maybe it was never shared with Bing because Northern Afghanistan is as bad as Siberia.

Having flown over he Himalayas recently, I’ll say good height data is actually of higher importance. Even where the textures are good enough, the low res height mesh ruins it. Nothing but rounded mountain peaks and ridges with roads and rivers painted on the side of smooth hills. From a distance the textures still imply decent ragged terrain by the shadows captured on the aerial images. Yet then the sim plasters rounded shadows over top from the rounded height mesh making it all look rather underwhelming.

Melted mountains are everywhere, is there simply no better height data available or is it a fundamental short coming in the sim?

Seems like someone has mistaken the mountains for popsicles. Of course there is better mesh available (you can get it for other sims), but I don’t know how hard the implementation would be. It sure will eat frame rate. Asobo has to clean up their messy code before they scale up the mesh, otherwise they will face a sh*tstorm by people admiring their sharp edged mountains only as slides or stills.
Anyways, this is off topic, and its #9 on the official wishlist, upvote to help the cause!
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/disappointing-mountain-terrain-in-the-alps-and-many-other-areas

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Yesterday, I just hopped from Quito, Ecuador to Guayaquil and it was only around the cities that was clad in aerial images, so I had to have most of my flight with FSX default textures instead.

From the latest Q&A series I got the impression M/Asobo is more dedicated to improve aerial images during World Updates.

My humble suggestion, however, is, perhaps the one following the WU 5 (wherever it would be, be it Spain or Germany), they work a general world aerial image improvements package including a global water mask betterment, so that the entire world would get what it deserves on this awesome simulator.

The problem is, garbage in, garbage out. Bing needs to step up their game and start by providing at least full satellite coverage.

For exmaple Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon


I wanted to go checkout this amazing glass bridge.

The bridge wouldn’t be there but the canyon should be, or not. On Bing

Most of China is a mess. Not just China, half of Africa, middle East, huge parts of the Himalayas and parts of India, most of Russia and the list goes on.

I guess Asabo can try to fix all the sharp transitions, even our the color grading, and maybe find a less ugly way to paint in cloud holes. The default farm and city textures used currently don’t really work anywhere.

Then you have the very low detail water polygons making a further mess


An option to turn off single line water polygons would be much appreciated.

… I guess I would support that idea. Those single lines look strange.

Perhaps Asobo will find a way to “preprocess” tose OpenStreetMap water lines and … e.g. via some “Photoshop like” magic fill algoritm … convert those lines into areas.

But another problem … especially in Deserts … is that the dry river beds or salt lakes are “filled with water” even in the blazing hot summer seasons.

Yep, while the textures underneath show a beautifully detailed mostly empty water course. It’s a shame when it gets covered up by water polygons and looks much better without.

The road overlays can be problematic as well. Especially in China, as you can sort of see in the screenshots above (the google one with the bridge), the road overlays don’t line up with the aerial data. There is a weird 400 meter offset on both Google and Bing between road overlays and aerial imagery in most of China. This carries over in the game as well.
(There are other things going wrong there too, in Macau cars are driving vertically up landmark buildings)

Asobo is a little misfortunate having to work with Bing Maps, I’m sure they, too stealthily wish to work with a company like Google Maps when it comes to cover the whole planet in the simulator.

I just flew around Mauritius today, it was no different from FSX experience, almost the whole island is FSX textured with patchwork farm fields, etc.

The reason is actually brief, the aerial images are infested with clouds in and around such tropical regions.

They have made it worse with the latest update (1.13.16.0).

I flew in Yukon, Canada YESTERDAY and all was good. Some rough patches, but nothing major.

But today on the same spot, the scenery is just gone. Even worse it seems to overwriter perfectly good scenery as you come closer.

As you can see in the pic on the left scenery is good, but on the right just non existent. This is just a small patch with about 20km. But I have found bigger ones today where perfectly fine scenery (elevation and textures) is replaced with blobs of color.

Upsetting to see what we had is taken away in an awkward way, let alone ask for any better.

While visiting South Korea I started to wonder what really is the underlying cause of some of the low-res/FSX/OSM visual appearance.

Just a little south of Jukbyeon (RKTB) - on the east coast of the country - I have a visual “crack” between sat image terrain and OSM generated terrain.

First I suspected that mabe the Azure/Asobo servers might have been overloaded on a Sunday afternoon, but even clearing my cache and revisiting the site at a different time and day did not change the visuals. So it seems persistent (on my side … maybe someone else can confirm too)

I then checked the Bing maps data … and

  • there is real high quality sat data
  • and there are no clouds on those images / regions

So I do not understand how the large spread of quality can be explained. “Clouds” and “Missing Bing data” does not explain it here. There must be something else going on in the games backend design.

Here is one screenshot of that location:

My suspicion is that FS2020 works with a copy of Bing map data, it doesn’t use the live data set. Blackshark AI needs to go over the data before FS2020 can use it, as well as color grading and other adjustments to make it match better. Doubtful that happens real time.

So Bing maps might have been updated after the copy was made for FS2020 and FS2020 won’t be updated until that area comes around for a world update.

Looking at that area in detail, the data in Bing is from after Nov 2015, but still older than Google maps somehow. I checked a housing development in the ‘bad’ area in FS2020

36°59’13.7"N 129°24’17.8"E Bing left, Google right


More houses completed on Google

Both don’t date their aerial imagery but Google has street data there which has a date on it. That crossing doesn’t exist yet in Nov 2015, it’s all forest where those new house are.

So somewhere during development of FS2020 the aerial imagery got updated (assuming it takes a while go from untouched ground to street layout with some completed house)


It has all the signs of the source data having been covered in clouds

take Afghanistan, its full of inconsistencies.
Not talking the bad DEM/mesh but the photo-terrain. First I thought its an intervention by the US military but that can’t be:
Bing maps has some parts surprisingly bad indeed (e.g. Ashkasham area and Wakhan Corridor
36,724514, 71,601759
and the sim makes it even worse.

However in the famous Korangal Valley GPS
34,890533, 70,910866
Bing map resolution is excellent, on par with Google Maps, down to individual trees and the sim looks like FS9 nevertheless.


where are the Petybytes of streaming data?

…and its not a cloud thing as in some parts of the world (e.g. the Ruwenzori mountains in Uganda), here you can see a clear cut tile boundary running N-S, it has no equivalent in Bing (Laghman district).

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