I’ve never been to New Zealand and it couldn’t be more unfamiliar to me if it tried.
I just took off from NZMO and just started flying around at 1500’ not paying attention to any sort of heading and taking it all in.
I came across a large body of water and thought, “Where am I?” I grab my iPad open GaiaGPS, zoom out, find NZ, zoom in and within moments locate myself on the map simply because the world’s terrain and bodies of water match the shapes on my topographic map.
Maybe I’m the Mayor of Simpleton, but that really blows my mind — still — after having been flying this simulator since last fall.
I just flew into Milford Sound, that was pretty awesome, too!
I’ve got a question about the terrain, however.
Does it look this way because the satellite imagery had cloud cover over it when it was photographed? This is at 10’ MSL and isn’t it summer in the Southern Hemisphere? The detail is pretty poor, too.
Also confirming what @TheSevenflyer shared, there is no snow to sea level anywhere in the country in summer! (Only seen vary rarely to sea level in the South Island in the winter)
It’s funny, if you’d scroll up, you’d see I flew into Milford Sound (awesome!), posted a screenshot and a link to a real world article about visiting the place in winter.
I have to say I agree with the OP here. These forums usually are so full of people who simply just want to COMPLAIN about something, anything, and there seems to be a lot of anger towards the system. Especially where it comes to graphics! As someone who - okay, wasn’t there QUITE at the start - I started with Flight Sim 5.0 on Windows '95, to see where we have come from there, all the way through FS98, FS2000, 2002, 2004 (which I used to have lots of addons for!), through FSX to where we are today… It is MIND BLOWING. I mean - my house is literally in the game. No autogen, it is actually photogrammetry, I can see the skylight on my bathroom and the patio area and the road with the reddish cycle lanes down each side - and all the roads and buildings, and elevations around here all perfectly modelled. Even when I’m flying high altitude (I don’t actually do much low-level flying but isn’t that the first thing everyone does in the sim – go and find their house?? ), to look down from 35,000ft and see coastlines, and rivers, and fields, and roads, and towns, all rendered perfectly (even if a little out of date sometimes), is simply incredible… To see how MSFS2020 renders the atmosphere (I’ll include an example here over London), is also simply amazing. I think probably most haters are youngsters who don’t understand how difficult this stuff is to do. I’d like to see them try. From where we’ve come from, to where we are now is one hell of an achievement, and something Asobo and Microsoft should be (rightly) very proud of – and it’s only getting better!
XPlane and P3D are like antiques compared to MSFS. The satellite and photogrammetry, the conversion of 2D satellite objects to 3D objects by Blackshark AI, plus the streaming of this to our PCs so that we don’t have to buy a separate hard drive to store TBs of ortho, is what makes MSFS so much better than XPlane and P3D. I’m not sure how XPlane and P3D will compete, they are so behind in technology.
Actually, my post was meant for General Discussion>Screenshot - Challenge.
Bing satellite imagery does have some visual qualities in FS20. Time of day and Level of Detail settings are a big help in enhancing terrain visuals and so forth. Such is the case with screen shots of Terrace Farming in Nepal and elsewhere.
New Zealand Local Series Index
), to look down from 35,000ft and see coastlines, and rivers, and fields, and roads, and towns, all rendered perfectly (even if a little out of date sometimes), is simply incredible… To see how MSFS2020 renders the atmosphere (I’ll include an example here over London), is also simply amazing. I think probably most haters are youngsters who don’t understand how difficult this stuff is to do. I’d like to see them try. From where we’ve come from, to where we are now is one hell of an achievement, and something Asobo and Microsoft should be (rightly) very proud of – and it’s only getting better!
