Bridges, towers, cranes and anything with girders are displayed as solid objects. Bridges look like they have walls from the roadway to the water on both sides. Cranes and towers are solid blocks.
Is this a shadow issue?
I am pretty sure this is a known issue to MS. Hopefully it will be patched soon.
Yeah. Same here. If you fly over G.W. Bridge entering NW Manhattan from NJ, it looks like cars crossing the bridge are entering and exiting low tunnels as they go under what in real life are high arches between the towers at each suspension point. The suspension cables are not depicted for the bridge either (3 cm resolution per pixel at maximum zoom level?! Ha, ha!). And it looks like there is a solid wall down to water level under the middle suspension span. Really destroys any immersion effect if you have an idea how that bridge looks in real life.
The lack of photorealism as promised for a city that supposedly has HIGH detail photogrammetry makes one think that a lot of the claims for the sim have been oversold by the PR department and alpha/beta testers very grateful to be first on the block to try it. When I fly over the region I live, all the trees look like green blocks, a fat water tower looks like it’s just a tower with a tin pan hat. When I look at Google Earth and the ~true-to-life detail around where I live, if Google made a flight sim out of Google Earth, it would kill Microsoft but perhaps it does not have the cloud infrastructure that Microsoft does to support its own efforts. But with Google Stadia, if it ever gets off the ground, who knows?
Edit_Update: Here’s what the G.W. Bridge looks like in Google Earth. Click and drag the image in a semi-circular motion around your screen while holding down your Control key - the image adapts quite rapidly and maintains high detail. Comparatively fly over the same area in MSFS.
Google Earth (hold down Ctl key when you click & drag): https://earth.google.com/web/search/George+Washington+Bridge,+George+Washington+Bridge,+Fort+Lee,+NJ/@40.85134295,-73.95236319,-0.80654009a,809.18422923d,35y,151.09440371h,45.00021208t,0r/data=CigiJgokCXYUxNYGbURAEVpIi3iybERAGQGtxojgfFLAIQyik80jfVLA
Google Maps (hold down Ctl key when you click & drag):
The rotation is EVEN BETTER than Google Earth, ~instantaneous.
Google Maps
Bing Maps (nice photographic detail but no map rotation or 3D):
To fly the George Washington Bridge in FS 2020, use these GPS coordinates in the World Map Search
40°51’12.3"N 73°56’47.3"W
(paste with Ctl+V, then single click the coordinates, and then on map pick Set as Departure). Set your world time to something like 5 pm UTC (~noon in NYC). I recommend the Icon-A5 as a nice slow airicraft for circling the bridge, although it is spawned in Airborne mode at 100% throttle.
Any area that has photogrammetry has this issue. The process renders everything as solid objects and that is the result.
Don’t hold your breathe. Those things would each have to be hand edited. Considering theirs hundreds of thousands across the world, you’ll most likely only ever get the most notable ones fixed.
I doubt it, other sims have managed to achieve it.
How can Google Earth be so much better than the “photorealism” in Microsoft Flight Simulator then?! If anyone hasn’t taken a spin in Google Earth recently, I highly recommend it. I have an affinity for the Mann Gulch Region of Montana. One of the most famous forest fires in U.S. Forest Service history occurred there and if I use Google Earth, I can actually see and follow the backcountry trails there in a very infrequently visited remote area that’s hard to get to but has a memorial on a high, steep hillside to the smoke jumpers who perished in the fire in August, 1949. Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: Maclean, Norman, Egan, Timothy: 9780226450353: Amazon.com: Books (Young Men and Fire) and Amazon.com (A Great Day to Fight Fire).
P.S. The Mann Gulch region would be a great region to fly to in MSFS. It has some of the most rugged terrain in the U.S. east of the Rockies. Haven’t tried it yet myself but flying down the Missouri River from Helena towards Mann Gulch should be totally awesome (it is in Google Earth). You can see what the jumpers were up against on August 5th, 1949, as they learned the fire had jumped a ridge and they had to race UPHILL for their lives, a race most of them lost.
Edit_Update: The Mann Gulch Region in Google Earth (click and drag in semicircle while holding down Ctl key to rotate map). It is something like a 1500 ft ascent in 2 miles from the Missouri River to the spot where the smoke jumpers perished. Parts of Lewis & Clark’s famous exploration party passed through the Gates of the Mountains on the Missouri River on their 1803 trip to the Pacific Northwest.
https://earth.google.com/web/search/Mann+Gulch,+Montana,+USA/@46.87827365,-111.9133262,1097.47606366a,3489.38776052d,35y,0h,45t,0r/data=CoMBGlkSUwolMHg1MzQzNDBjM2YyY2M5MGE1OjB4NDNiOWJkMDdlNTY0MmI1ZRnV9fpJa3BHQCEe5bvvc_pbwCoYTWFubiBHdWxjaCwgTW9udGFuYSwgVVNBGAIgASImCiQJmX5f_mtsREARduQmRNtrREAZsQj7Iy98UsAhHCzopHV8UsAoAg
Google Maps (click and drag in semicircle while holding down Ctl key to rotate map):
https://goo.gl/maps/A3Jk2tFtec8JYbA9A
Bing Maps: (nice photographic detail but no 3D or rotation):
To fly the Mann Gulch region on the Missouri River near Helena, Montana, use the following GPS coordinates:
46°52’44.1"N 111°54’47.6"W
(paste with Ctl+V, then single click the coordinates, and then on map pick Set as Departure). Set your world time to something like 7 pm UTC (~noon in U.S. Mountain Time). I recommend the Icon-A5 as a nice slow aircraft for circling through the mountains(!). It’s spawned at 100% power and you might need it all to avoid crashing into a slope, especially if you’re flying Live Weather and spawn on a nasty day! If and when you can change the seasons, flying in the winter should be interesting.
BTW, to get in the proper spirit to fly the Mann Gulch region in FS 2020, rather than read either of the books that I recommended above, you can just watch and listen to the YouTube video of a folk-rock song inspired by reading the Young Men and Fire book, the song “Cold Missouri Waters” by the Canadian folksinger/writer James Keelaghan but covered more famously by the American folk singer Richard Shindell, that succinctly summarizes the disaster, written and sung from the imagined deathbed confession of guilt by foreman Dodge who also survived the fire at age 33 but died at 38 from Hodgkin’s Disease, never fully recovering from the traumatic shock of the disaster and never jumping on another fire again.
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Nice write up. It does come down to the data Bing vs Google to your point. The team has said this will be improving as they go so I guess we wait and see.
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