Ok, India I like.
I just picked a random airport in the southern part of the country, and haven’t seen much yet, but I can see myself spending serious time exploring.
It doesn’t hurt that my only real familiarity with the region is from books and documentaries either, so I’m not aware of things that aren’t quite right so much.
Yes, Bing seems not to be a very good source for what it is meant for MSFS.
I live in Switzerland and when i flew near my home town, i noticed a very strange color of the ground. I checked Bing Maps then and discovered, that the area was partly captured in winter and partly in summer. This leads to a very uncommon landscape.
Especially annoying is the fact, that the satellite data of Bing Maps partially is so bad, that the structure of the terrain is rendered in very low quality. In the attached image, you will notice the mountain range of mount Stockhorn is covered in clouds. This is often the case on Bing Maps, if you check the Swiss Alps region, for example.
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=dfb8f687-63a5-4a57-bb66-4a3608435926&cp=46.718325~7.625121&lvl=16&style=h&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027
Well, it is very unfortunate to be relying on better quality of Bing Maps (which probably will never happen) to have a decent scenery in Switzerland. Though, i am very curious if and when this will be improved or maybe MSFS will push the improvement of Bing Maps overall…
Despite the odd looking buildings, the scenery itself is amazing, especially natural beauty places.
You want some ideas about places (and nearest Airport) hit me up. In fact, I think, I will create a thread for that. Just in case there are others who want to explore this vast country
100% agreement here.
One of the problems of hyping a forthcoming product as providing a totally realistic experience is that the sense of shock at how far it falls short almost outweighs the very real progress it represents. Nothing in the pre-publicity prepared me for the fact that, apart from a couple of manual renderings, there is not a single historic building in the UK - not a single parish church, for instance.
My only departure from your take is that FS can only increase the pressure on MS to improve Bing Maps by buying in the data they need. And I’m optimistic enough to believe that if and when they do make that investment, they have the processing power to integrate it fairly quickly.
Until that time it would be better if they didn’t post videos like the one I watched this morning explaining to me how wonderful and technically advanced Bing Maps is.
Face reality MS - Bing Maps really isn’t in the same continent, let alone ballpark, as the competition. And it’s just embarrassing to listen to you trying to convince me.
the simulator would be unplayable if every historic building or single parish church would be the real model with own textures.
models and textures have to repeat to keep the performance up.
Not at all true.
The rolling cache is there precisely to provide the local data from the huge overall data set representing the real world. Fly over New York and tell me that it’s built from repeating models and textures.
The Bing Maps promotional video available through the main menu makes it perfectly clear that when they have aerial data other than satellite, what you see is a 3D rendering of the actual building. It’s just that they don’t have anywhere near as many areas covered for aerial data as the competition. That’s why I can see my house as it actually is in the competition but a only a vague guess occupying the same plot in Bing/FS.
Here is something to get you started with places to visit in India
[Wild speculation alert]
I totally agree with the comments on Bing maps trailing behind its competitor, and share @Magnus1985’s surprise that it’s still going. But it has occurred to me that maybe it was a solution looking for a problem, and that maybe MSFS is that problem. I imagine the rate of data streaming from Bing must be hundreds of times greater than it was before release. I’d like to think that MSFS will lead to further investment in additional photogrammetry and improved satellite imagery, and will secure Bing Maps’ future.
It’s still more fun looking at this terrain than X Plane.
Microsoft uses ‘blackshark.ai’ to create the buildings in microsoft flight simulator 2020. In many cases they have 3d information (‘bird’s eye’ view) but that data was taken long before the current 2d data. Unfortunately they don’t combine the two. They also could have taken into account how long shadows are (which are clearly visible in MFS2020 regardless of the direction of the sun).
They also don’t take into account where the buildings are situated. Petrol stations look like a two story house. I even saw a large chimney in a port area turned into a skyscraper.
In The Netherlands all tall buildings are reduced to the same level as the cities they are in. Completely removing them as orientation points which are important in a flight sim, even at night at 10000 feet.
I have to agree and disagree. Ive noticed many streamers fly over NYC and the draw distance is not even a mile or 2 and loads in very blurred or as blobs of grey and looks terrible. I personally know the West Coast LAX SEA and SAN are not even close to being optimized or capable of photo 3d buildings. I didnt figure this out intill extensive research on the forums. Apparently for now, you have to disable the the Photo imagery in the Options>Data>Photoimagery. So what happens is the sim displays regular Autogen and its ehh okay. Almost equivalent to Other simulator Imagery. Pretty much like flying in Orho Imagery which im very familiar with in Xplane.
For Example almost 90 percent of the Imagery for major cities in the USA are not covered at all. Example would be I live on the West Coast and all major Cities on the West Coast are Grey blobs.
Everything you say is true but that does not alter the fact that the need for clever guessing is largely eliminated if you just pay for the data - as the competition has.
We can all hope that’s true. The very fact that more people will be discussing Bing Maps has to be a good thing. Presumably MS would not have committed to FS again if they thought it would be permanent reminder of how far behind the competition they are.
I found that pretty much every house around where I live is shown as a Bungalow, probably because the AI only has top down roof images as you said, so there no height data to work from.
Looks like they already did:
blogs . bing . com/maps/2020-06/bing-maps-is-updating-its-base-map-data-source
Tomtom also has 3d imagery for most cities. It looks like they are transitioning, hopefully this will be visible in MFS2020:
windowsunited . de/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/06/BingMaps.jpeg
Thanks for the heads-up.
Cos the Dev team is French and either had ancestors at Agincourt or uncles who’re fishermen.
j/k
I wouldn’t say that American cities are well-rendered. NYC is a mess. Looks OK at night when the lights get painted on the buildings, but during the day it looks like a post apocalyptic recreation. Depending on what mood the simulator is in, it either looks bombed out, or most of the buildings render like stalagmites – a triangular cone where each building should be.
I’ve spot checked a few US cities and see the same.
Then I go fly anywhere else and it is a totally different simulator.
It is clear that the quality - and the believability - of Bing imagery varies greatly. I spend a lot of time flying MSFS 2020 in SE Asia (specifically Indonesia) and Australasia.
Man, some of those maps are rough (Borneo springs to mind).
I guess the commercial incentive was there for MS to get Asobo and its colleagues to put the emphasis on N. America and European scenery as that’s where the bulk of its flight sim customers come from, but even so - some of the world’s far-flung places (for me, the far more interesting places) have not received quite so much love from this mapping system.
Will it get better over time? Perhaps, but what incentive, exactly, is there for Asobo and/or Black Shark to spend countless hours and cash tidying up locations few will ever likely visit (except nutters like me)…?
