One thing I’d love to see is for roads to actually be rendered rather than just have them as ground textures. The textures are sometimes low quality, blurry, discolored and can have imagery of cars on them, which really breaks the immersion.
Real Life:
Simulator (blurry, discolored):
Hopefully this can be added to the sim.
Oh my… Now that is noticeable. Nonetheless, I still think rendered roads would be better. Even if it takes a hit on performance.
Around where I live many roads are underwater.
Around where I live many roads are underwater.
That’s global warming. MSFS is just 10 years ahead of the game.
There are pros and cons with both methods, I actually prefer how MSFS does this. My main issue is that the colour of the roads are green in a lot of places.
My main concern when you render roads is that it doesn’t look natural, it tends to look as they are painted on top of the landscape.
Depends on how it’s implemented I think. If they are PBR based and reflect light properly, they wont look painted. They’d look like what the existing runways and taxiways look like in the sim currently.
Taburet (who is known as DreamScenery in the Microsoft store) has a series of road packages for different countries. I had just bought 3 of the France VFR packages which details an absolute tremendous amount of things in France, so I got the roads package for France to go along with it. I have to say, it looks good. It doesn’t stand out, but it also doesn’t look all blurry like the default road look either. I do get the point that if you have something so starkly sharp and clean, it will stand out, but it can be done in such a way that it looks good.
The trouble with the way MSFS does it is that its sometimes neither one method exclusively or the other but a mix of both with road textures appearing intermittently.
They could do it just like trees; base it on draw distance. If you’re close, roads are rendered. When you’re far, they’re just ground textures.
I used an add-on in X-plane that made the roads transparent. I really don’t want a road overlay, it can look really bad.
I think road textures might be a little heavy, especially in large cities. But maybe a compromise where the sides of the roads are enhanced for clarity?
There certainly is a big difference with the real photo versus game.
Everyone has so many demands for this sim. One person wants trains. The other wants more realistic raindrops. Another wants rendered roads. Truth be told, they’re all going to have an impact on performance.
That’s why we have an entire section in settings dedicated to graphics lol. So it can be adjusted depending on if your PC has Intel HD 4000 graphics or you’re running the sim on a Summit supercomputer.
I could imagine this being done with autogen but I can also imagine autogen making a lot of false-positive or false-negative road detections. Having higher resolution Bing data would help automatically.
I think if they use Bing road data to create the autogen roads it can be pretty accurate in terms of placement over the Bing satellite imagery.
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