As of June 24 (it could have been earlier) Bing have updated their World Maps. This is a huge improvement. Does anyone know when MSFS is going to update its World textures (Bing new Maps)?
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I vote for anything better than what we have now because itās actually a horrible patchwork of acceptable and ugly low resolution tiles.
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It really upsets me that there is new and better quality map data, and itās not being implemented natively. Nor is it even being talked about by the developer.
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Data from Bing is not taken āas isā into the MSFS related world data. There is a lot of post-processing (or pre-processing, depending on how you look at it) involved. This has been illustrated in a video about 4+ years ago (perhaps someone has a link).
UPDATE:
Not sure if it was this video that I had in mind: there was really one going a bit more into the technical steps required to adapt the world data for MSFS.
As such we could be weeks or even months away until we see that updated data in MSFS. Be patient, no reason to be upset - lifeās too short for this 
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This has been brought up on more than one occasion during the live development streams on Twitch.
Yes, they will be updated over time.
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Do you have a source for this? Your comment seems to imply that there has been a significant global update. I have always been under the impression that Bing is continuously and incrementally being updated as new data becomes available. This would mean that small areas get updated all the time on a rolling basis. Having a one time global improvement seems implausible.
Yes, here is Jorgās comment in the April 2024 development update stream. His comments confirm there will be a Bing maps update around the time of MSFS 2024 launch for both sims.
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Funny how the Partnership video with Bing Maps from 3 years ago shows New York looking good. Here is my view of the New York skyline from the IniBuilds A320neo V2 on Xbox X. So besides the much needed (an hopefully more frequent) updates of the map data, they really need to improve viewability.
Look like your sim turned online data to off without you noticed, itās seem all missing scenery and data.
No, itās the current memory optimization, introduced in SU15 (but not completed due to the rollback of the new Microsoft Game Development Kit, GDK) to only render what is close to the plane.
Iād welcome it but a huge amount of the ānewā data for the UK was done during an unusually extreme heatwave a couple years back where the normal lush green countryside was replaced by a dry & yellow look for a couple weeks.
I thought the simulator always used the latest Bing maps, didnāt I?
Jƶrg talked in a dev Q&A some time ago about the bing map integration ant what has to be done to get it integrated in the sim. maybe you remember that one? 
If I remember correct, the topic was about the water masks and during this the general bing integartion situation was discussed ā¦
No, you cannot transfer the standard bing maps into the simulation without editing them. If you did that, the transitions between the individual square texture tiles (which so many people are upset about) would be even more emphasised than they already are.
In other words, there will be at least some kind of colour grading, which is not necessary for normal use in the bing map app or webpage. Furthermore, the water areas also need to be masked. Then there is the whole treatment with the AI to recognise trees and buildings.
So there is a lot of work that needs to be done before the latest data from bing can be used in the simulator.
And weāre not even talking about the interaction of the TIN cities, in which case the data can come from all kinds of data providers, not just bing.
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There seems to be something wrong. I suggest a MOD conflict. This is not the way it looks in the sim!
No, it was not a dev Q&A (but I do remember the watermask discussion ;)), it was really a dedicated video showcasing how they built the MSFS world, with all the (high-level) steps it takes to transform the Bing world data into a suitable format for MSFS.
That video might have even appeared shortly before the MSFS release (August 2020), or within the first yearā¦
No mods, itās the current state of Xbox
It was a dev Q&A specifically the November 2023 one - that was the one I had in mind.
And there is another one talking in more general terms about World updates and what needs to go into them - also covering the aerial photography:
May 2023 Developer Live Stream
Regarding older Videos, there is the one already mentioned in this thread:
But there is also this very old one, in fact the second video posted on the Microsoft Flight Simulator youtube channel:
Ah ok xbox, I see, maybe it ran out of RAM and therefore reduced the grafical fidelity? Is it by any chance a xbox series s?
In todays developer stream they talked in great length about the hurdles they have to overcome to serve the very limited xbox hardware, especially for the series s which lacks of RAM.
My money is on new world map data being prepared for the launch of MSFS 2024 and then, sometime later, also being applied to MSFS 2020.
āKilling 2 birds with one stoneā as it were and apparently in line with what Jorg was suggesting.