Not everyone knows that PG can be turned off. Maybe give that a try. All the ExPlaners seem to love flying in sparse, generic, repetitive, scenery…LOL. I tried turning PG off a while back just to see what the sim looks like without it. Honestly, with all the warts that PG has, it’s still leaps and bounds better than a bunch of Amazon fulfillment centers, which is what the non PG scenery looks like to me.
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But like I wrote above, I mix of photogrammetry and AI would be perfect for people who don’t have infinite bandwidth and don’t want those blurry texture. I know the generic scenery use aerial imagery and is doing a pretty good job, but having more data like type of texture, height, number of floor, would greatly improve models if they mix photogrammetry and generated scenery.
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I agree completely with your sentiment. It is 100% possible that they could use photogrammetry to obtain the shape of buildings, use a calculation to smooth the shape out (make the angles/walls sharper) and then use color sampling to approximate the look and or texture. This is a great idea. The question is would they be willing to sink additional development into it. Considering what they already do with a lot of “ai” buildings it doesn’t even seem as if it would be that hard for them as well. Lets hope they look into your post.
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Wanted to share these projects ive highlighted before again, look at what Simplex have achieved in regards to photogrammetry, amazing and on another level.
Pretoria, South Africa https://simplex-smart3d.com/ces/sa/app/?pos=28.2119483,-25.7416018,1516.406&ori=0,-45.0023469,360.0000000
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Hi everyone, It looks like I am late coming into this conversation.
Photo Geometry that is in high resolution and realistic where you can fly say a helicopter at low altitudes over your home and area where you live to see your home from the air or fly over landmarks where you live or fly at low altitudes around beautiful islands etc., is at extremely low, low, low resolution where most of the roads, streets, buildings etc. is not recognizable.
All of the previous Microsoft Flight Simulators Photo Geometry is of very high resolution and extremely accurate where you can fly a helicopter over your home in your area and can see your house from the air or fly a long a street or highway you travel frequently and see the scenery from the air that is beautiful and amazing.
The Photo Geometry in MSFS 2020 for most of the world is pathetic.
ASOBO has been extremely selective on the limited areas they have chosen to have extremely high resolution, accurate and realistic Photo Geometry for MSFS 2020 at this time.
My understanding is that ASOBO might add extremely high resolution, accurate and realistic Photo Geometry to most of MSFS 2020 in a few years from today.
The Photo Geometry from Google Maps is in extremely high resolution, extremely accurate and absolutely realistic, I can clearly see my home from the air, I can zoom on my home, I can see my streets and highways, I can see the land marks in my area, the bird sanctuaries, the marinas, the boats, cars, trucks etc. all with extreme accuracy.
Huh??? Which previous Microsoft Flight Simulators" are you talking about, earlier versions of MSFS 2020? Or the last MS flight sim before that, FSX?
Yeah, looking at Google photogrammetry is a great way to get dissatisfied with MSFS/Bing photogrammetry. Sure, I’d love to see Google work with the P3D team or the XPlane folks and bring their best photogrametry to the sim world. Unless Google wanted to do it just to highlight their mapping tech, I don’t see that happening. I can’t see a case where there’d be a profit motive for Google considering the server and internet bandwidth costs to supply that data to everyone flying those sims. I doubt MS is making enough money with Asobo to pay for all the servers we enjoy. I think MS just sees is as advertising for Azure and their cloud services and also a technical exercise to learn and optimize their cloud and big data services. Thing is, Google maps is surely a very profitable thing, or at least it’s integral to Google’s very profitable search services in general. I suspect Bing is losing tons of money for MS every year. Who uses Bing maps??? I sure don’t. But it’s a chicken or the egg thing. If Bing wants to actually compete and become profitable, MS needs to invest a LOT into it. MS has VAST resources, so it’s just a matter of priorities and strategy on MS’s part. Do they want to lead in 3D mapping the world? Or just keep their costs, monetary losses low? Or do they want to equal or better Google’s more or less universally used map/search services?
I really do hope Bing data gets a LOT better and closer to what Google is doing. Yes, more details tend to mean more data, more internet bandwidth and more demands on our CPUs and GPUs, but also, it takes more polygons to make a blobby building than a nice clean rectilinear building. Really good algorithms, perhaps using AI that could be better at placing vertices more accurately at precise corners and removing all the less accurate polygons might help a lot with accuracy AND data density/amounts. There’s data density and data accuracy issues at play here. And yes, I’d love to see the same or similar AI that’s used to make auto gen buildings used to replace photogrammetry trees with MSFS built in trees (and a lot more types of trees and vegetation in the MSFS libraries). Palm trees, like you see ALL OVER Southern California are the ugliest blocky towers and look nothing like palm trees. And while MSFS has palm trees in it’s tree library, they almost never get used. So Los Angeles which in real life has more palm trees than other trees is covered with fluffy green trees in MSFS and there’s pretty much no palm trees to be seen. It really kills what would be an amazing place to fly. The building photogrammetry in LA is actually very impressive unless you are RIGHT on top of the buildings or you land on a city street. The whole Pacific coast from Baja Mexico to BC Canada is epic scenery, yet much of it looks horrible below 1500 feet. Especially the parts where palms are the dominant tree, from around Santa Barbara down into Baja, proper MSFS palms replacing very bad photogrammetry palms would vastly improve those iconic areas. And man, the Santa Monica pier is also very sad, low res photogrametry. I’d love to see the AI clean up roads and keep them (and rivers!) from being unrealistically tilted onto the sides of mountains. Marinas, boats, piers and cargo ports all tend to look HORRIBLE and AI sure could help those areas immensely. Sure would help coastal areas a LOT if it could put plausibly sized auto gen boats/ships/piers/docks in place of the jumbles of random polygons they are now. Seems no extra attention is played to coasts, yet the vast majority of humanity lives near or near-ish to coasts and those areas tend to be among the most scenic.
I do hope there will be huge improvements to both photogrammetry and AI scenery in MSFS. On one hand it’s a gorgeous sim and pretty much a darn miracle. We have seen nothing even close to his sim when it comes to accurately showing the entire planet. But that’s an impossible task to do perfectly and there is TONS of room for improvement. I’d at least like to see the Bing data get updated so no big city or dense population areas have data more than a few years old.
Anyways, this is a topic I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about. Maybe you can tell if you read this post all the way to the end! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk!
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Yes, I agree there are several weird points about MSFS/Bing/Microsoft photogrammetry data.
About 10 years ago I was impressed to see the aerial photography that Bing maps had for my home city, a mid-sized university city in Germany, when Google still had basic satellite imagery with a resolution of about 1m. Bing didn’t have photogrammetry at that time, but you could change the perspective and view my house (and the beautiful city centre) at an angle from all four cardinal directions, at a resolution that must have been around 5-10cm.
Nowadays, the situation is the exact opposite: Bing and MSFS have stepped back, the resolution is 30cm at best, the map is only visible from straight above (so just the roofs, no side walls or windows visible), whereas Google Maps has great photogrammetry throughout the place, with a resolution of 5cm.
It seems like there has been a big change in strategy at MS concerning Bing maps, aerial photography, and photogrammetry since then, but it appears they’re again giving it a higher priority now with MSFS. Unfortunately there’s a lot of catching up to be done, as they’d already had the rights for all the necessary data around 10 years ago, but stopped caring in the meantime.
The algorithm they use for creating the photogrammetry at Blackshark seems a bit weird to me too. The underlying aerial photography data they have for Paris and London doesn’t strike me as worse than the Google data for my city, but the 3d objects they created from it look weird and melted. It seems like the Google photogrammetry process is a lot better at understanding the basic structure of a house, i.e. using a box with a roof of two inclined planes as a reasonable approximation for a house, and identifying correctly the corners. Photogrammetry in MSFS (at least in Paris and London) on the other hand seems like it totally ignores this basic concept of a house and tries to guess the 3d positions of all vertices from the aerial imagery, not caring about corners, boxes, roofs…
And when you’re far away, buildings such as the skyscrapers in New York don’t get shown as a rectangular block / cuboid, instead they use pyramids as the lowest level-of-detail approximation. This only makes sense insofar that triangles are the basic building blocks in 3d graphics, but common sense tells you this is a stupid way of drawing low-res buildings.
I enjoy MSFS as it is most of the time, still I have the feeling that there are lots of issues where I don’t understand the logic behind their reasoning because it totally defies common sense. It seems they didn’t have the time to polish many of the details, or they’re still learning how to improve certain aspects of the sim. Anyway, I hope we’re going to see more improvements to these details in the future.
From what I see, they do care, and they listen to the community, although bringing the results to life in the sim can take rather long.
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That‘s because Blackshark is not providing any photogrammetry algorithm in the first place.
What they do is „AI based shape recognition“: based on 2D satellite imagery they try to
A) locate structures and objects (buildings mostly, but I guess also tree density etc.)
B) Derive the type (church, office building, shopping mall, living house, …), orientation and height of buildings
C) Algorithmically create those objects
Of course also taking other data sources (open street map for one) into account.
That has nothing to do with photogrammetry. It‘s almost the „opposite“: if you disable photogrammetry (only) then you see the BlacksharkAI generated buildings.
There is a developer video „somewhere on YouTube“ explaining their work in more detail. Worth watching.
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Uhm… yes! That‘s exactly what photogrammetry is all about! It doesn‘t have the concept of „this is a roof, that is a flat wall“ etc. All it does is - visually, based on photographies taken from „well-known positions in space“ and from different angles - try to reconstruct the original 3D object. And the algorithm has no clue whether that object is a building with a flat roof, a car with rounded corners or a tree with „fuzzy borders“.
All you get is a „mesh connecting millions of points in space“.
You then have to „clean up that generated 3D mesh, because there will be redundant triangles and in general „a lot of noise“. But by „smoothening“ the mesh (reducing the „polygon count“) you do not want to loose too many details either.
And needless to say that you want to automate this process: manually cleaning the mesh by 3D artists and engineers would be way too costly (for „free Bing Maps“ or even a game like FS 2020). Sure, there will be manual work steps (checking the matched colours, or the occassional manual intervention where the algorithm just produced „garbage“) every then and when. But they are the exception.
But in the end it‘s what you get: „a mesh of something“, overlaid with the (processed, colour-matched, …) photos as „textures“.
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Having a better photogrammetry from the besinning from the source will directly impact the quality in the sim.
Well then, photogrammetry or not, this approach breaks down when apparently the depth information in the data isn’t very good. So it’s useful to have additional background “knowledge” in the system that has a certain understanding about the data it tries to build 3d objects of. You could see this approach very clearly when Google began to create 3d cities from the data they obtained from Streetview, the walls were all flat even when there were additional structures in them, balconies, terraces, etc.
You could then later observe the same in places where they didn’t have Streetview data, still they started from the assumption of flat walls, and where the 3d-data from photogrammetry was very good, they improved over this simplistic 3d model by using the real depth information.
The results of 3d reconstruction always get better if your method can make use of additional assumptions / knowledge about the type of objects you have. Even if this isn’t strictly photogrammetry, it’s still closely related… 
Appears I was wrong to believe they are also responsible for creating the photogrammetry data. I’ve watched very closely the videos about their method of using AI to create the “autogen” buildings and trees, so I’m well aware of that part. Well worth watching!
Doesn’t change my main point that the algorithm for the photogrammetry did seem to produce some weird-looking results in London and Paris…
and more data to download on the fly, people never think it out here.
there is a limit about the amount of data that can be streamed.
i rather would like to see better algorythms serverside, wont impact much.
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I have noticed this too. Theres many places I came across where google data is much better. I do hope Bing maps are updated soon.
For those who dont know , to get an idea of what a sim might feel like with google data - download Google Earth and then try the “flight sim” thats built into it. In places where their grammetry is excellent its actually pretty amazing. Of course it cant match the atmospherics and 3D AI placed vegetation of MSFS.
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Be careful what you wish for, Google maps PG uses 10x the data of Bing and would impact every part of your PC’s performance.
Google Maps with photogrammetry on runs quite well in a browser on my 5-year-old Macbook Air with Intel integrated graphics 
Yes I’m only joking. I know there’s more to it, the viewing distance is rather limited in Google Maps, the rendering quality is different too… Anyway, if it’s too much for a user’s PC to handle in MSFS, they can still give us a setting to limit the quality.
to update bing is going to take years and then still not all will have been done, this
is the way it is. on average fo rme it spretty good, but yes here and there these awfull places inserted, funny, doesnt bother me much,
I just want my distant skylines to not look like the pyramids. Not really fussed if buildings look a bit melted if you fly down the street at 10 feet as I mainly fly airliners.
That said if you like helicopters I can appreciate your annoyance!
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Hi, I have gone to the Bing Arial maps to view the surroundings where I live.
Bing Areal maps are HORRIBLE ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE.
Extremely poor geometry meaning extremely low resolution graphics.
Severely outdated, meaning several years old and not showing current landscape buildings and surroundings.
ALL Flight Simmers use the Bing Aerial maps and look at your surroundings and you will see right away what I am talking about.
Bing Arial Maps is not what Flight Simming is about.
ASOBO needs to rep[lace the Bing Arial Maps with the Google Aerial Maps.
Now go the GOOGLE Arial Maps and look at your same surroundings.
You will see your surroundings are extremely accurate.
You can zoom in which will display extremely high graphics resolution.
Extremely high resolution of all surroundings.
INCREDIBLY AMAZING PHOTO GEOMETRY.
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