being at my parent’s place with my PC and having proper internet for the first time in years I thought I’d give FS2020 another shot tonight after not touching it for a solid 4 weeks.
Went to Britanny, France (where I’ve been on a road trip earlier this month) and flew over to Presqu’île de Crozon, a very pretty peninsula with a lovely coastline and cool rock formations especially around Pointe de Pen-Hir. In real life, the place looks like this:
Rolling hill like soft edges wherever you look at, no crispy rocks and cliffs anywhere but a ton of trees right by or in the water. Seriously?
Google Earth too seems to struggle with creating single 3D objects like the big rocks in the water out of 2D (?) satellite images. But at least the coastline is nice and crisp even up close.
I used to believe many add-ons wouldn’t be necessary anymore cause FS2020 would sort us out nicely, but looking at that, and many other things, I’m pretty certain we’ll be again throwing tons of money at ORBX et al for better looking scenery because it’s just not there yet despite the resources.
Now I do wish I weren’t so unimpressed, at times even disappointed, at some things in this sim, but as of now I just can’t quite enjoy it as much as I’d like to. I’m sorry I’m not like many others who fly around NYC and have the time of their lives in FS2020, but as someone who loves flying along the edge of land and sea I just keep finding myself in this state of despair. X-Plane 11 with ORBX’s True Earth series was okay, but that was how much for a bit of England’s south?
Just my two cents. I just wish coastlines would look better, especially around those popular and touristy places …
Lots of us are extremely disappointed so you’re in excellent company.
The water masking which looks fantastic in the advertising trailers is only applied to like very small bits of the world’s coastlines. Apparently it can’t be done systematically? It is on the bug list and wishlist. If Asobo decides some day to publish an actual development roadmap, hopefully it will make the cut.
They also seem to have nuked water textures with the last patch. There is yet another thread about that.
It is kind of sad that 14 years ago OOTB FSX had better water textures and features globally than MSFS does.
I’ll say the coastlines are definitely underwhelming in some areas (even though they’re miles better than FSX)
Though I don’t see how it would be possible to get better resolution terrain with satellite data, it’s a gap I can only see being filled by photogrammy data (from aircraft with LIDAR) or custom 3D models from 3rd party devs.
Can we please stop leaning on third-party developers and actually hold Asobo to account? They have a lot of work to do to bring nearly everything up to the level that was advertised. That advertised level is the minimum threshold for the game, if third-parties want to go even further than that, great. But the prime is responsible for everything up to that point.
I can see holding their feet up to the fire…but if the data doesn’t exist, how are they supposed to do it? You can’t create something out of data that doesn’t exist
FSX and P3D (and XPlane) came with way less. Flight sims always gave a basic feature set and framework for 3rd parties to build on so that people can configure their sim experience how they want. MSFS does that pretty much, with some things that need fixing. But asking for premium 3rd party features to just be built in for no extra charge is just silly and not fitting in with how the flight sim market works.
Calling them “3rd party features” lets the developer off the hook for just about everything. That attitude is exactly why the flight sim gaming segment keeps getting crapped on in its extremely infrequent title releases.
The data does exist. The water colors around most of the coastline I’ve flown over (Caribbean and US east coast) isn’t even right. The wave animations are hilariously poor along the coast. It is like they didn’t even try. There are small parts of like Turks and Caicos where they’ve applied some of the water masking and it looks decent. They just have a long, long way to go.
A lot of the World is mapped to quite a lot high res than they appear to be using here. If you use Ortho4XP you can see the difference when using a high res DEM and low curvature tolerance, you can get some very nice terrain. A lot of MFS seems to be simplified and will hopefully be improved.
Those resources you speak of are prioritizing major issues over trivial ones. It doesn’t mean they won’t get to them, just that it’ll take a while - which still nullifies needing to pay for addon after addon. The only addons I’ll be buying are small bush strip scenery and aircraft.
Asobo is already bringing you the entire world in next gen with Bing photo data. Don’t ask them to manually work on every shoreline of the world, this makes no sense.
Unfortunately was also unimpressed by Brittany. I don’t even want to talk about Madeira which isn’t very different from a vanilla FSX with better autogen. There is nothing that can be done except for hoping for third party addons or Bing photogrammetry.
You do not have to manually work on every shoreline to get decent results.
What is key is the underlying data for the autogeneration.
Key data is: Satellite imagery, 3D Elevation data, coastline vectors etc.
Here the example of Nihoa Island NW of Kaua’i Hawaii:
Note: The texture on the island is copyright by Maxar Technologies (2020) and shown for educational purpose.
MSFS implementation (Note, with my machine I have low settings, the result can be a little better with higher settings - but I think texture as well as elevation mesh will be similar):
Note: Image taken from MSFS and shown for educational purpose.
I admit this is a very remote location, but as can be seen this can be implemented better - even without manual retouching.
The question is if MS/ASOBO can get their hands on higher quality 3D elevation data than they are using - Or their data is good, but they have a mesh cleaning algorithm that smoothes too much.
Also better quality satellite imagery in this location would be nice - and it exists - but this is a copyright issue of course.
Edit - Here a little bit closer view of my X-Plane implementation (I think the result is decent - but not perfect):
This is exactly right, and what I was getting at in a different thread yesterday. Not everything has to be manually re-touched. It is possible to apply something like a water mask systematically. In my opinion, the worst part about the MSFS image you posted is the transition from land to water (no waves or churn), and the water itself (flat, lifeless). This has been heavily commented on since the last patch which is theorized to have nuked water textures for whatever reason. Hopefully, the next patch will bring it back again (it still needed work prior to being deleted).
I was hoping for so much from MSFS 2020 with regards to SE Asia’s stunning coastlines IRL. In the sim…? Imagine my complete disappointment. The terrain models are nothing like their real-world counterparts and low-lying coral sea (also known in FS parlance as ‘water-masking’) is almost completely AWOL. In some ways that’s a stunning achievement - for all the wrong reasons.
Guess I’m going to have to wait ten years to discover if things like this - which I don’t imagine are high on anyone’s list of priorities - are ever going to be fixed.
I was also hoping for more.
The game was advertised with a heavy emphasis on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud data, BlackShark AI etc…
I have to say : Photogrammetry is not the best (lots of weird misalignments on buildings, most building with unconventional architecture get butchered, can’t fly under bridges) but it’s good enough,
For the regular AI generated content the countryside looks ok (fields, trees, and the occasional generic building), could be slightly improved by having dedicated countryside looking building like barns and grain silos.
But outside of that, things need a lot of work. Coasts are indeed very problematic :
Shore lines not matching between the game’s water level and the satellite photo
No cliffs
Water colour is generic blue regardless of what’s underneath (which is visible on the satellite images)
No so, its the underlying mesh that shapes the land masses, improving the resolution of the mesh would help enormously. This is the trouble with streamed data, there is always a possibility of lower resolution meshes and textures to keep the server loads down. I know MS can do better theoretically, they are just choosing not too.
