Since it erupted today and is guzzing out lava onto the countryside will we see lava if we fly over it in the game?
nope, satellite imagery isn’t updated that often, or at all without world updates.
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You won’t see real-time geological activity in the sim. At least not in terms of lava flows. Ground textures come from satellite imagery, and it’s not real time. Unless updated in a World Update, the ground textures used in MSFS were Bing imagery from 2016 and earlier. Even the updated stuff is at best a couple of years old.
It’s not impossible that someone could create a mod for that though. Just don’t expect to see that in the sim proper any time soon. Although I know at some point there was talk about the ash and smoke plumes from volcanoes. That part could happen at some point. Not sure when or if it’ll happen, but it’s something that’s definitely on Microsobo’s radar. I just suspect it’s a very low priority item.
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We’ve built 10 more high rise office building and condos in the Tempe Az area since the sim came out. Still don’t have those updates.
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I wonder if these types of updates could be crowd sourced at some point as a natural extension of the scenery gateway being developed. The world is too large for one team to centrally update it on an ongoing basis.
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There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating said mod for it right now. No need for a scenery gateway for that. It just depends on whether a modder feels something like that is worth their time.
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Correct, but that’s not a scalable substitute if the goal is a reasonably updated cadence to the world globally. That’s also the reason for the gateway for airports, which are already out of date compared to release in August 2020 (to say nothing of missing airports or airports with problems like lighting or terrain issues).
We may see updated maps eventually from Asobo, but that’s probably more of a timeline measured in years, if it happens at all in lieu of more piecemeal World Updates.
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Having listened to the SDK Q&A from last week, it looks like the scenery gateway (called “World Hub”) won’t do any of this anytime soon. That appears pretty limited to just airport logic/flow and maybe some cleanup. So don’t expect anything crowdsourced in terms of updating the world anytime in the near to medium term future.
That’s a real missed opportunity, because there is no way the maps and generic scenery don’t become more and more out of date as time passes and Asobo struggles to keep up (if they try at all).
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Outside of areas covered by world updates, I don’t think there’s been any effort at all, to be honest. To be fair, outside the Canada WU which was a downgrade in many areas it covered, they did a good job with the other world updates in terms of upgrading ground textures with more up to date data.
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I imagine that this is something they will get to at some point, but (and this is only a guess not based on any internal knowledge) I want to set expectations and say that I wouldn’t expect this in the coming year. However, you may wish to add to this Wishlist topic if this is important to you:
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It’d be cool if Microsoft had the capability to manually add certain events like volcanoes, wildfires (even if just smoke), snowstorms, etc.
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If one wants to see lava flows or Tempe highrises, flightsim.to has a request feature. Post the request and then wait to see if someone makes it. I made a request for KTRM because it had no buildings in the sim and is a major GA hub. A fantastic version was created within 3 months and is being updated.
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