Is OSM the reason why every small GA airport has hangers that are 8 stories tall that could hold blimps?
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Seriously, I canât understand why they chose to have water-masking THAT close to the coast everywhere. I donât know the exact technical limitations or details on the matter, but I would expect the intense water masking to start at least a kilometre from any coastline. Could it be a problem of not having good coverage near the coast? But weâve seen many incredibly looking places(like random atolls in the Pacific) fully mapped in Bing maps and in their World Series as well.
e.g. Midway islands (US)
Here is how clouds should be filtered by the AI over reefs. The cloudy part of the imagery is replaced with general ocean textures(or even reef textures if the AI knows it belongs in a âreefâ classified area.
I thought there was already a way implemented in the AI recognition department ,an algorithm that took care of clouds and places without satellite imagery coverage in general. We see it all over the world , where land satellite textures that have been âfiltered outâ by the ai are actually replaced and patched with the basic/general autogen terrain that only includes OSM/vector data. Any water body without satellite imagery coverage could be patched âeasilyâ by the algorithm since it is only âgenericâ water, or simply masked with the lower resolution Bing Maps imagery to get the general water coloration of the area. Maybe I am wrong, maybe they are working on it. I hope we will finally be able to see this intense water masking at least go further away a couple hundred meters from the coastline. It could have made a hell of a difference from what we see right now.
Also, this was shown during the early stages of the alpha.
(It looks incredible. https://streamable.com/bgpd8 , https://streamable.com/72iw2)
Source: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/09/the-new-microsoft-flight-simulator-looks-unreal/
Everything looked very nice even back then.(no masking was present,yet had a lot of issues) Over-Masking everything isnât a solution when the method is/was there. Maybe an update is needed within the AI algorithm, but fixing the whole world by hand ,isnât realistically possible.(unless, we had a way of fixing it through the SDK tools, like adding polygons with a water transparency specification choice). Maybe a big Bing Maps update is needed. Who knows. All I know, is that the coral reefs have to return into the sim, one way or another.
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I donât know.
but i didnât see it that often.
Things looked so good back then 
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Thank you. I just flew over it and I can see it too. At least now I know it is not my settings.
I have observed that in other ocean areas I get a solid 55 fps, and when I fly over Eleuthera, then it drops to 30 fps. no problem for me, but just my observation.
I thought we could at least see all the places they showed in the trailers, which is not the case. I also assumed that if you can see it in Bing maps, you could see it in MSFS. Wrong!
Thatâs what it is. They could tweak the blend distance between the water mask and the aerial image, and that might help with the docks that appear submerged. But no matter how far you extend this blending distance, reefs and shallow areas are going to get obliterated. Masks just donât work for areas that cover thousands of square miles like the Great Barrier Reef. They need to just remove the masks altogether here and either let the AI clean them up or let the mixed imagery quality stand.
There are a ton of problems with the aerial water imagery though. The clouds you pointed out could be fixed using existing techniques, but stuff like this is immersion breaking and itâs literally everywhere:
Nasty seams, huge disparity in quality, resolution, and color, and the waves are baked into the aerial imagery. Itâs going to be a huge project for the AI to clean that up.
My suggestion was to make the water volumetric. Give it real depth, and map these aerial textures to the seafloor on a terrain mesh that extends below sea level. Then a lot of these seams and open ocean waves will be covered up by hundreds of feet of blue water and not visible.
In addition to your cloud fix, the water imagery could be color corrected to remove the blue absorption from the water:
Bing image on the top, color correct on the bottom. This could be used as a seafloor texture, and blue water of the correct depth added back on top. It would work real well in the shallow areas, and the details in deeper water would be covered by actual water, not just artificially hidden with masks.
That first one is Arachon Bay in France by the way, and those water masks do exist in the game.
The early teaser trailers only âworkedâ because they hadnât implemented any water masking at all. Itâs not that they had solved this problem, or created great looking scenery and masks, and now theyâre gone. They simply cherry picked locations where the default Bing imagery was presentable and showed that, probably hoping that theyâd have an actual fix by the time the game was released, but of course they donât. My suspicion is that these shallow areas and reefs that we keep seeing in promotional screenshots and the Around the World trailers are from a much older build of the software before they had to add water masking to cover up defects in the imagery. Itâs not a new feature or new scenery that theyâre working on.
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+1 here. I hope at some point they compile all the temp fixes art dept did for those videos into a release.
Exactly,these are the problems that are actually keeping them from removing the water mask altogether.
They said in a Q&A that they were trying to find a way to implement bathymetry elevation data to solve excessive water masking. Maybe they are thinking of using a depth-oriented approach using the imagery as their base texture. This + clouds cleared by the AI could be the possible solution. Also ~40 ~50 meters of depth(maybe less, depending on the data classification-threshold because there are many shallow areas which could have the same problems), would be just generic ocean floor , because no ocean floor is visible deeper than this in most ocations. Some color correction is needed as well (As you said above) for them to be used as ground textures. Lastly , I believe that satellite images with different coloration and quality stitched together, is just a disadvantage when using satellite imagery. We see it on land imagery too and it sometimes looks very off. I think we can live with that right now and eventually(hopefully) future updates within Bing Database can improve some of these issues in some areas.
I agree with everything you said except for this part:
As I understand it, what they showed us in the early alpha shots and promo videos is a âraw versionâ of the sim without watermasking, in which water bodies look exactly like in Bing Maps, the beautiful parts as well as the ugly parts (of which there are plenty). Looking at Bing Maps Iâm sure we wouldnât be too happy with that version.
But I agree that itâd be great if they could implement an algorithm that detects rubbish water imagery and replaces it, or come up with an easy way for the community to do this.
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I do not understand why marketing people do not show coral places that really exist in the simulator if there are some. To show places in marketing videos that are just not there in the simulator, especially when everybody can just fly there and look for themselves, is just clumsy.
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Yeap, I should have made it more clear. I donât mean that it was ok or perfect in the early builds. I meant that they didnât have any masking in place back then and this is how it could be now if we had the water masking issues resolved. They are pre-Alpha gifs and images, so itâs difficult to make assumptions. I just hope all these issues will be resolved over the next year or so .
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I donât think Asobo has inhouse AI team for the tasks people here suggested to do. However, MS does have strong AI departments that could definitely support the endeavor if they are willing to invest more.
As for volumetric water, I think it could be possible when thereâs additional computational power to be leveraged, or thereâs a demand for water-based simulation (more seaplanes, boats, etc.)
My wish is that they could open up APIs for
- auto-gen (modders could implement different AI algorithm with different texture lib customized to each region)
- post-processing for satellite imagery (color correction, algorithm based water masking, etc.)
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Super pics!
Kind of negates the argument here too.
Further, and rather more pragmatically, that - down to the last blade of grass - level of detail that we all crave is but a pipe dream until we are all sat in front of our nice, new, shiny quantum computers!
But of course MS should firmly espouse WYSIWYG with any and all promo shotâs.
Which argument? The main issue discussed in this thread is that Microsoft is advertising features with supposedly in-game footage, and those features donât actually exist in the game. Or did you just mean the ill informed XBox comment that ExpressTomato was responding to?
The few locations where they manually added aerial imagery of shallow water detail doesnât excuse the dozens of other locations theyâre showing off that donât have it. Itâs false advertising to say this scenery is in the game when it actually isnât.
In my opinion, a bigger issue is that itâs misleading in how the game works in general. They show off these locations, so one might naturally think that theyâve included broad and diverse scenery for tropical shallows. But then when you actually hop in the Icon, you discover that the shallow seas are largely featureless and empty, and that this scenery is only available at a handful of select locations, and not even in most of the locations actually being advertised.
The screen shots from ExpressTomato are pretty, but thatâs about the extent of the substance they represent: pretty screen shots. Thatâs why there are always replies like, âWhere is that? I donât see anything like that when I flyâ.
Itâs computationally inexpensive, and other titles have been doing it for years. Thereâs no other scenery at that spot requiring attention from the GPU anyway. Thatâs why I was surprised to see the water in this state in a ânext genâ sim that shipped with a seaplane. I just hope that they donât invest so much in manually adding blending masks that theyâre dissuaded from a long term solution, which will effectively undo all of their work.
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+1 I dont undestand the downgrade in all patchs.
We are, broadly, in agreement then. Excellent.
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The users themselves flag the posts to be hidden usually, not an oppressive regime. Usually because of petty name calling or because the post doesnât add value to the discussion, but sometimes itâs simply because fans donât like what is being said.
To be honest, I think the most pointed criticism should be directed at the corporate level, not the developers at the game studio. The developers have to endure Q&A sessions, but where are the representatives from daddy Microsoft answering for why they railroaded the devs into an early release, and signed off on and released an incomplete product?
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The day the devs call it out I will be the first to start pointing towards âdaddyâ Microsoft. The problem is that it doesnât really seems like the problem is what you are saying. A few minutes watching their lives you can tell the BS. Starting with VERY SELECTIVE questions sent for them to answer. I said in another post not long ago and I will repeat what I still think: This franchise was way too much for Asobo in terms of complexity - although I must admit they did set a new parameter for visuals in a Flight Sim (to the point that I would never play a FSX or P3D again, probably).
And even this good part that I said above is kinda of fading away after the latest updates. Night lights, pixelated clouds, LOD problems, water texturesâŠ
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I agree, it is frustrating to fly through places with a tropical coastline and what you see from above is far from reality, wrong water textures and no palms . Hope than development can find the way to fix it.coz, we all here want to travel to places that we have never been or will never go and we want to see it in the most real way possible⊠
I will not deny it, effect of the waves is extraordinary, but without a coral reef, no party.
Example Bavaro Beach , punta Cana ( Dominican Republic),
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According to some 'itz coz debz downgwaded for VRz"
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