well, this might be true. But google earth has way more data then bing will probably ever have. Lot’s of places where bing has clouds over the images where in google it’s clear. Also many, many more photogrammetry cities in google earth. And they look better too. I understand that msfs will never use google as an source. But i doubt bing will ever get close to Google.
Btw google earth images aren’t only updated in huge important cities. In the Netherlands for example there’s allready lot’s of photogrammetry cities wich aren’t huge or very important. Like my hometown for example.
I am comparing things to my gaming desktop with a RTX2080ti. Of course the Xbox beats some inferior gaming laptops. The bow to the potato army, I am telling you. Leaving us high end guys in the dust. My RTX can definitely store textures as they are shown in bing for the area display in MFS
Read the rest of the post you replied to for an explanation of why the textures are what they are. It’s not for performance reasons.
Asobo in the last Q&A session even mentioned a ‘higher than ultra’ setting they were planning to release in the future. So you don’t need to worry about ‘leaving high end guys in the dust’. And you don’t need to look for scapegoats to blame.
Yes it is a little bit worse than the straight Bing image … but just think about all the things it has to do to produce the image in the sim:
Firstly has to rotate and shift the perspective to match the way you’re looking.
Then the sim has to work out which parts of the image you can’t see from the Bing image, and then invent them (look at the sides of the white building, these aren’t in the actual image).
Then it has to work out where the sun is, depending on time of day and latitude, then it has to work out where the shadows should be and put them in (note shadows on the left of white building for example)
It has to look at the relief of the landscape, so it can show slopes/shadows in the ground - and maybe even hide things you shouldn’t be able to see
It has to work out where the roads are as everyone wants little cars driving on them
It has to work out the colour of the light source (sun, hazy sun, rain clouds for example) and colour correct the image based upon that
It has to check for any water, and work out reflections if there are any
Then it has to display the image!
And it has to do all this between 20 and 40 times a second!
Of course, the Bing website just displays the image it has stored, and does nothing to it.
I actually think it’s pretty amazing it looks as good as it does. Sure it will be great when it looks even better … wouldn’t it be great to be able to fire up the sim to check the traffic before leaving for the morning commute?
In a lot of areas the resolution of the textures seems lower than in Bing maps. I think they do this to make the terrain look even. If you don’t do this you will see seems in the terrain between different quality photo’s like you see in bing maps often.
What do you mean about rotating and shifting? It’s an image on a globe… Like bing maps.
The sides of the white building? you mean the autogen object that is put ontop of the image? The image itself is still the same image.
The shadows on the image are just the shadows that are baked into it when the satelite image was made. The real time shadows in game don’t change those.
It doesn’t. Maybe there’s some sort of bump map used for grass or something. But everything else comes from height data. Not from the image i believe.
This is done using the bing maps data. This again has nothing to do with the image itself.
I don’t think coler correction is done in real time. It’s probably done to the source files to make them blend in better with the world and each other. But all the other tint changes are just done by the ingame lighting.
Also this is done by using data from bing. All this data is allready around. It’s not the ai guessing that there’s water in one place and puts some reflection over it. All the rivers/sea’s are allready in bings database so msfs only has to assign a mask over the image so it can add water there.
It’s basicaly just an texture mapped over the entire world. (in tile shape ofcourse) Autogen buildings are placed on top. Roads are layered ontop. Rivers are layered on top. But all of these things have nothing to do with the quality of the texture.
But correct me if i’m wrong anyware. But reading your post i though you aren’t actually sure how this world is created.
The colour space used in the sim must be revised, seemingly greenish because of the summer season set currently the only one present natively in the sim. Most probably, it will get fixed when the whole seasons are done, which is deferred further to 2022, unfortunately.
Yes, this is definitely true. I mean it looks somewhat worse than native Bing now, but who knows what the future brings. I should also rephrase ‘horrible’ to ‘not like bing maps’.
One thing they seem to apply is making every second pixel black, thus making the image storage size smaller in terms of MB and this helps of course streaming it in. When you zoom in, they always have this rasterized look in addition to being of lower resolution than native Bing maps.
This is good news. I hope they feed my RTX2080Ti with gigs and gigs of textures in future. It has a big belly of 11GB VRam and my internet is 100Mbits/s. I also do not fly with any live traffic/weather/multiplayer, so all 100Mbits/s can be used for Bing maps. Bring it on!
I am genuinely curios about this, do you see it as your job to come here and answer posts so very defensively? There is no reason, not one, why the in game texture should be green, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just poor quality control and if they can write code that make it green they can alter that code so it looks normal.
I was just interested in the tech behind the AI world generation, so been diving into it a bit.
I’m not saying it’s always perfect, and/or that it does or does not require any fixing/improvements. Of course there are possible improvements.
I’m just explaining (to the best of my understanding) how the tech works, and how that might explain some artefacts we might see. If you want to call that defensive, that’s your prerogative.
About quality control; They have an entire globe. You don’t seriously expect them to go over every square mile of it manually do you? If you find issues with the world, make a report to Zendesk so that they can improve it in the future.
Just a firm reminder to keep posts polite and constructive per the Code of Conduct. We’re starting to see some replies headed away from that. If it starts to get worse, we’re going to have to take actions with this thread, up to and including locking it. Thanks.
I was going to say the same… It looks pretty good to me, it’s just that stupid green tint that’s on everything in MFS. If they could fix that scenery would be so much better. Its interesting in the screenshot with data off the roads are actually GREY but missing a lot of the detail bing adds! Just hate the green tint.
According to the devs, it is completely wrong to think MSFS is being dumbed down for consoles. They have said the opposite is the case, and that the necessary optimisations that are coming will mean a beyond ultra setting on PC.
MSFS is very young, and a huge work in progress. Give it time, and give the devs a chance.
Based on my informal transcription of the last Dev Q&A, jump to around 32:00 where Martial is detailing the other teams who work on scenery and world updates, as a supplement to Jorg answering the resourcing question of who works on the Sim Core versus other features.
Martial mentions QA and Engine teams checking for corrections - such as color tints - as new aerials from Bing Maps team becomes available. Implication - Bing Maps team is outside the MS-Asobo core team, so they are an authoritative and sole-source for any streaming map updates - which will happen at their schedule, not the Flight Simulator team.
to be honest, I do not believe it either that they nail high end PC players to the cross for the sake of consoles. I nevertheless like to say it at every opportunity to make sure they KNOW we are watching
Best example is tree draw distance. After all those reports that it was dumbed down I expected a real disappointment yesterday compared to last time when I played in September. But it is just fine, maybe even a bit farther out. So from my side I can safely conclude that all the tree draw distance complainers had their tree mods running, and the difference they see is obviously because the mods do not work anymore. But the vanilla tree draw distance is just fine. So yes, good hopes that Asobo with serve the high end PC crowd well.
