I really hope Water masks are implemented in Sim Update 2

We’ve seen many trailers with fantastic water masks, but nowhere to be found in the sim.

Many have now been frustrated with this ‘false advertising’. The devs say it takes time for the water masks to be implemented in the scenery database, but it’s been too long now.

I really hope these are addressed in this weeks Sim Update 2 as it’s the next major update to the sim.

Image credit: ChaoticBeauty-Avsim.

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me on 22 december

image

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Are U praying for water masks
or is your post off-topic because you are praying for an update with no new bugs so that we can enjoy the sim over the holiday period.
:grin:

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double prayer :smiley:

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Posted by Jummivanna (community manager) as answered in the last Dev livestream.
Answer: World data is continuously changing and getting better. Trailers are showing the latest updates to the world that are released in one of the next upcoming big update. Water masking of some areas in Asia was updated with previous updates and is already in the sim. So usually there should be no more than a few weeks or a month of delay between some new world feature visible in a trailer and the game. This applies to all improvements to world data including water masking. We could do our trailers based on the current public version of the data ; but then, just a few weeks after the trailer is out, it would already be obsolete and the sim would look better than the trailer… And we can’t update the trailer once the world has been updated, would be too much work for our video team. So we produce a trailer that contains the latest data, even if it is a few weeks to release.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/state-of-water-masks/322710/10

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This is the most ridiculous explanation ever, as if anybody, really anybody would be negative, if the real product even looks better than a trailer. Bice versa, as we have it now, it is false advertising without a proper disclaimer. End of the story.

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Agreed! That explanation is sketchy at best and dishonest at worst.

What’s worse is their lack of use of any disclaimers which at least state that these water masks will come at a future date.

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The point is of course not that the sim might look too good, but that they want the trailer to look as good as possible.

So you were the guy that people think is the lord? :joy:

Didn’t they mentioned in a Q/A Twitch session that watermask are updated on server side out of sync of sim update or world update? Hawai wasn’t updated last week?

@AnkH828072, @CaptShawarma,
That post from Jummivana was a summary from the Dev Q&A. Here is the full answer from the last Dev Q&A.
They are looking into a map to show where water mask data is now available.

Yes, according to the last Dev Q&A, they get the water masks first in their development environment before releasing them to the public, and the trailers are done out of the dev environment. A few weeks to a month after having them in the development environment, they are released into the sim.

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Are they? The Oceania trailer is several months old and most if not all watermasks shown there are still not in the sim…

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Exactly a lot of these watermasked areas have been shown for months, even months before the initial release. These kinds of explanations from the development team is a very big reason why many of us don’t have any trust and not a whole lot of faith in them. Some may believe that completely (you know what 8 letter word of an explanation) but many of us can see right through this. All the game developers do this these days though. Just like politicians or lawyers. Can’t just give us the truth… they would get a lot more respect if they would and could actually gain some trust from their userbase.

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There are places with watermasks in the Caribbean. Look at the smaller islands with shallow shorelines. Some of them are very spectacular. You can see underwater coral.

I’m not contradicting you. I understand your point. There should be many more watermasks around tropical islands all over.

These posters are right though. Yes there are many areas with beautiful water masking, and yes those areas were absent for weeks recently! And just recently reintroduced. Definitely seems to be server side. That said, uuuuh yeah… you can’t get away from a trailer showing specific areas but you fly there and it’s lame boring flat water with no beautiful water masking coral as in the footage.

Stop making excuses. It’s plain and simple false advertising. Why?? Because they are using it in advertising footage! Seriously, do we really need to explain this?

Guess this post will be flagged by the time I wake up in the morning :expressionless:

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So they always want the trailer to look better than the sim LOL

We apparently need to pen down an algorithm to guess what water mask region to be shown in which sim update, that’s way too complicated to follow up.

The screenshots that the OP posted go all the way back to August 20th. The very first World Tour video, on launch day.

So we are way past “a week to a month”.

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Yet in a previous Q&A, the devs said the trailers were being made with a version that has no special water masking at all, makes everywhere shallow water, and simply allows all of the default reef and shallow imagery from Bing to show through. Which made sense because the trailers often showed really obscure locations that you wouldn’t expect to receive special attention.

But this latest Q&A makes it seem like all of these trailers are instead showing special water masks that have been created at these specific locations, but not yet added to the public release build of the simulator.

Either something is getting lost in translation, or people aren’t being totally forthright and honest about why the trailers don’t match the simulator. I hope it’s the former and not the latter.

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