Sir - that was nice of you to cross-post this. I am actually lacking words. Thank you - this was a very nice thing to bring up. I am happy we agree. Friends, don’t shoot me? 
(sorry, was watching too many war thunder videos recently)
hope to see you in the sky in the future…
Once the other bugs are sorted out! I can arrange to swap paintwork lol
cool… i really hope the bugs are sort out 1 day…
Is Bing maps out of date or the snapshot of Bing maps Asobo took when they started development? Because if it’s the latter it’s totally understandable. It’s the whole world they worked with, and likely a lot of work has been put in to make the data work in the sim. I think it’s all way more complicated than us armchair developers think it is.
Come on guys a bit more respect, we just sit behind a PC all day playing games, 99% of us don’t know anything about their work.
3 Likes
I thought this was a flight simulator, not Sim City!
Granted, the occasional road misplaced affects VFR flying, but come on, compared to FSX this is leaps ahead, compared to F-19 Stealth Fighter for the C64 this is Light Years ahead, I think you need to get some perspective on the vast undertaking this edition was before criticising it too much.
Exactly! As long as the big VFR POIs are there, I’m happy. I do hope it gets an update during it’s lifetime though.
I live in Hungary, Vecses (a small town next to LHBP). My house was built 1.5 years ago, and it is in the sim, pretty well recognizable. My neighbour’s house was built 6 months ago, it’s not on it.
I’m very happy with the quality of how the sim AI renders the buildings. Some distinct landmarks are missing obviously (LHBP itself is super basic), but for VFR it’s spot on, my son loves to fly the routes we drive daily when going shopping, to school, etc.
For balance, bing was more up to date than google for where I live for a good 6 years at least until the last year or so.
It is the former, not the latter. I am not attacking the game developers here; I am asking why Microsoft is content to let one of their products be objectively inferior to the competition. Why is Google Maps able to have fresh images of my area, while Bing Maps can’t even keep its MAP data current, nevermind its satellite images? There are seriously new roads in my town that are two years old and don’t even exist on Bing’s map.
Please do not mistake my rant for being aimed at the actual game developers. Far from it. It is Microsoft that I am annoyed at with this. No one can deny that this game would be objectively better had it used Google Maps instead of Bing.
There are areas of RoK which uses what appears to be procedural terrain rather than satellite imagery. If I could find where my screenshots are being stored would be useful…
You can paste your screenshots directly into these forum posts. Just PrtScrn in the game and ctrl-v in the message body and you’re golden.
1 Like
Yeah it feels like Microsoft gave up the fight to have the best maps app. I don’t know how this works exactly but i think google just hires external companies for the images and 3d data? Microsoft should be able to do the same?
It called a map, people should be able to conceivably use it for directions and its 5 years out of date!
Earth probably looked nicer 5 years ago.
Area east of Gunsan, you can clearly see the procedural. What’s better - out of date satellite maps or DCS-like terrain? I know which I prefer!
I bet the vast majority of the time you can do VFR navigation just fine even with 5 year old sat data. I’ve had zero issue with it. The lay of the land just does not change that much that quickly. To me this topic comes across more as nitpicking than being practical.
Again, it’s a cost vs. value proposition. How much value is it really going to add to MSFS to increase the frequency from say a 5 year cycle to 2 or 1?
It’s my understanding that they’ll be doing rolling “world updates” of different regions here and there. But the reality is there’s a point of diminishing returns with sat data update frequency.
5 Likes
Bing maps was abandoned until FS2020, imagery from Madrid is 6 years old as well
2 Likes
75% of earth is water, no need for update, and those prices are not for bulk.
To everyone who is complaining about outdated maps there is a way you can improve them, they appear to import data from OpenStreetMap which costs them nothing, I’m not sure how regularly they do this but my own town which previously had no building outlines now has them due to the work I did, this may also result in more accurate scenery when they refresh it, it’s not terribly difficult to do and you’ll be contributing to a great project which provides free global mapping data.
1 Like