You just have to take a look at Bing maps. They only have straight-down satellite imagery. No aerial data at all so every building is just a flat pancake. So the ‘AI reconstruction’ in FS has nothing to work on and every large historic building becomes a office building or block of flats. Same for Paris.
Berlin, on the other hand, has aerial data and renders well into 3D.
And, of course, most American cities are well-rendered.
I wanted to fly round my own country admiring its countryside and built heritage. There isn’t any built heritage but I have to pay the same price as Americans who can see their own house in 3D.
My home city of Mysore is called City of Palaces but well, the Palace is essentially a huge office building and so are all the grand temples.
MS consumer services have always been US centric and I doubt if this problem will ever be solved. There is a reason why nobody uses Bing/Bing Maps (both of which I use all the time but thats mostly because i dont like Google)
The UK still looks pretty decent for default though. Asobo have said they will import bing map updates and they’ll make an occasion of it. I’m with you though, roll on Britannia month!
Edit: check out southampton and portsmouth, both are done in photogrammetry
Speaking of Berlin, I am not that sure it’s so much better. While it works great with some buildings, it totally fails to deliver with others. I have areas where several “modern” 6 floors flat roofed blocks are displayed as 2 story point roof houses. Entire neighborhoods get ruined that way. Pretty disappointing…
Good news is that we know Asobo said they will keep updating the maps for more detail and the AI autogen will get better.
Give it time, it’s gonna look much better overtime and I’m sure ORBX after the failure of their London pack will want to hold up and release something that can surpass FS2020 scenery, so we might want to keep an eye out for that as well.
Well, not every American can fly over their house. A majority probably, but certainly not myself. They buried mine in a none existent Ai generated evergreen forest.
I get you though. I’m an aviation tourist. I love to go places low and slow and see the famous landmarks and such. I was really looking forward to some European touring, but I’ve been very disappointed with a number of places so far.
They’ve said they’ll work on it of course. Hopefully, with any luck, the task won’t require terribly long before we see results.
Wouldn’t hold my breath on the AI generated tree’s invading everything. Some area’s I fly in during Beta I still report on in the release as its only been worse.
Sadly, no amount of AI improvement can reconstruct a 3D shape from a rectangle, which is all they’ve got from satellite without some aerial photography to give side-on data.
It’s great that they take the trouble to correct important buildings but the problem in London and elsewhere is that there is nothing to correct. The flat rectangles provided by satellite can only ever be made into concrete blocks - it clearly just guesses from the size and roof colour what kind of building might be under it. There is plenty of aerial data for London to give some side-on views but they haven’t got around to incorporating it. Google Earth’s London is brilliant - sadly Bing Maps is not a scratch on it.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to become much better either.
It’s not just the AI that is the problem. It’s the source as well. Bing Maps is really bad compared to the obvious competitor. I understand why they had to use Bing Maps, but the main competitor is unfortunately lightyears ahead of Microsoft and there’s nothing Microsoft can do about it in short terms. They need to invest heavily in Bing Maps (and Bing in general) to close the gap to the competition. Of all the things Microsoft tries and fails at (which is a good thing - that they try new stuff), I’m amazed that Bing is still alive. It has never been, and will never be, as good as the competitor.
Looking at my own house in the two maps, Bing has this partly blurry sattelite image with a brown-ish filter applied. All the tarmac roads in an around the nearest airport is green/brown in Bing Maps. No wonder why the kindergarden next to my house looks like a stereotypical american school building in MSFS. The AI has an impossible job. In the competitor maps however, I can zoom in and almost identify people on the ground. I’m also able to tilt the map and all the houses in the neighbourhood appears in 3D with the correct colours and shapes. In these situations, it’s not strange that the AI is not able to produce accurate buildings.
In other situations, the AI needs serious work. Just take a look at the award winning opera house in Oslo, the capital of Norway. Amazing architecture in shiny white, and is a huge tourist attraction. It looks like an ice berg. In the “other” map, it renders perfectly fine in 3D. In MSFS, it’s a green/brown almost square building, even though it is shiny white in Bing Maps as well …
I don’t think neither the AI nor the Bing Maps has an easy and fast fix.
The poor rendering of the UK also makes local area VFR flying much harder. I fly GA in real life and was very excited about this sim, but I feel more than a little misled about what it was going to deliver, and the constant crashes are maddening.
I live about 25 miles from LHR, there is a small row of houses built to the side of my back garden which was constructed around 12 years ago. These still do not appear on Bing maps and the overall image quality of my area as discussed above is very poor compared to Google maps. That is the reason I decided to try game pass first which in hindsight I think was the right decision. On the plus side install was fairly painless and frame rate/quality is very good even on ultra as opposed to the high that it recommended for my Asus i7/rtx 1080.
Spare some pity for farther-flung destinations, too. India and SE Asia are sadly (not yet) well served by Bing data (or, for that matter, by often wildly inappropriate procedural vegetation - in MSFS 2020, Sri Lanka and the Philippines (not to mention huge swathes of the Indonesian archipelago) apparently has a poverty of coconut palms).
Yes, there are plenty of issues. Over time, much of this might hopefully be addressed.
Oh dear lord, I’m flying over China right this very moment. Horrid. Absolutely horrid, lol.
I don’t know enough about the buildings to know what’s missing, but the satellite photography is severely lacking and mismatched. I was heading out to look for the Great Wall, and checking out the capital, (which does actually have a fair number of poi, I’ll admit), but forget it. I can’t stand looking at the terrain anymore.
I knew going in (I am an adamant Bing and Bing maps user, and living in India) that the terrain will look bad with bad data, simply because MS has limited data in our country.
So, lowered my expectations accordingly. I know some issues will get resolved but in countries like ours where people dont even know what Bing or Bing Maps is (anytime I mention it, the people here think i just made a funny noise/sound), the situation will never improve.
Still though, my wife and I are very impressed with what little visuals we are getting. Considered the poor data set, its actually very beautiful. Yes, our hundreds and thousands of Palaces and Temples look like modern day office buildings but I suppose, it is what it is. Some retro past/future fusion where our ancestors built modern day buildings hundreds of years ago before the western countries did
