I think the sim looks good for the most part but the Blackshark.ai treatment of general roadways, bridges etc… leaves a lot to be desired. Submarine bridges and concave riverways, looking like there is a meniscus from bank to bank, are a major flaw in the procedural creation of the city terrain.
Bridge example: The bridge across the Seine at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
Riverway meniscus example: the Panama Canal lock area flying toward the Atlantic from the Pacific.
It’s the challenge of a top-down view and then inferring height and depth. The highway overpasses in cities are solid underneath, although in some places they aren’t. That could be because built up areas don’t have as many unobstructed obliques to cross check.
For most of us running at less than 4K and Ultra, it looks decent at 2500’ AGL.
Photogrammetry and LOD draw distances make cities look terrible (in Asobo’s current implementation). Documented a lot… please vote on the LOD bug so Asobo is forced to fix it.
Ideally they can fix things like docks and bridges by teaching the AI what they are then providing the right Autogen assets for the AI to place in those spots. Things like specific bridges though require hand made assets. No way to do that given how big the world is.
Agreed, Things look good at 2.5k above terrain. I think your are right if it was photo data alone. Given that the sim has interpolated a water texture to a river and an asphalt texture to a road and Bing maps does contain the metadata of where the roadway and river are. You think it would be able to interpolate a bridge. I’m not going at the “you cant fly beneath the low bridges” but most roadways intersecting a waterway where it continues on the other side are not submarine. Also to my point water is generally level and doesn’t curve up to meet the shore. What the bridge/river bank exactly looks like can be fudged a bit but the general physics violations are more jarring. This is not a show stopper obviously but would add a lot of general detail quality without having to manually map each bridge/shore. I should probably let Asobo et al. get further along in this blind alpha and return in six months or just do Bush pilot stuff. I guess they have bigger fish to fry like terrain spikes and holes to hell in South America for the time being but, without feedback there is no improvement.
Photogrammetry needs to have a logical check versus a street map at river crossings. I’d settle for medium level of detail as long that the bridge was above water.
yep, agreed. Not worried if a downtown building it’s 100%… we’re flying. But sure as hell don’t like seeing melted pyramids in place of “buildings”
I’ve not yet reached the point where I think they are the enemy and should be forced to do anything. Letting them know what the community thinks are priorities is great, but we’re all in this together and what’s good for us is good for them.
I like to keep things in perspective. There are lots of things to fix, including those that are the target of this thread, but to say that cities looks kind of ■■■■■■ is a bit ridiculous when I look back at screenshots from any other flight sim. Sure it can and will improve and it’s great to keep aiming high…
If you truly want to keep things in perspective, thinking any of us think they’re the enemy is a bit of a dramatic exaggeration. I also didn’t say the cities look crappy, the OP did.
Again, we can add our 2 cents all day long in forum after forum after forum. However, voting is the way to get these things fixed, according to Asobo.
If you want a city simulator then play simcity.
So I’m not looking for a city sim. The submarine bridges are a step backwards in the look of the sim from predassors. My suggestion is just feedback with the intent to point out an opertunity for improvement. If you are satisfied with sub par stuff or blind alpha releases in order to cover mounting operational cost then I guess you get what you get. If they labled it early access I would have had a loosened expectation and probably still funded it. So thanks for the suggestion. I’ll take it under advisement.
I find it funny to fly the Icon A5 and land on some lakes that has snowboard style halfpipe of water levels.
Wonder if its possible to tweak the AI (or whatever controls it) to never allow water to bend more than a certain amount. But then again maybe thats when you suddenly have shelves of different water heights I have also encountered.
But yea with the scale of this fs2020 terrain project I can somewhat understand that not every road and bridge will be good.
Yup work in progress… maybe 6245762345 bridges in thew world… I am sure they will eventually get around tot hem all…
You are right about the scale. They just have to improve the procedural generation (AI interpretation of the satellite and map data from Bing) of the terrain then there is no reason to visit the rather exact number of bridges you listed individually. Since they rely on Blackshark.ai for that, it may not be in their power to fix though.