Tell me about it.
I can’t use it as a flight simulator, because it has even less challenge and engagement than Fsx.
I can’t use it as a virtual tourism simulator, because as it approaches reality in appearance, now any time it comes up short, which is more or less happening constantly (whether people choose to admit this or not) , it completely breaks the immersion.
Well what ever the reason for this mess , It would be nice if they just covered with trees.
I think in the case of Alaska, the problem indeed is with the quality, or lack thereof, of good satellite data available for Alaska (or so it seems). Even in recent years, the makers of photoscenery did not find much satellite source mapping available for land other than the “lower-48” states. I think one source of same said they got the satellite data from the Dept of Agriculture, used for plotting growing patterns or such. With Alaska mountains covered with so much snow, it probably limited the availability of good stable data points.
Maybe this will change, but like I said, the quality of the graphics will increase in step with the quality of the data sources, unless it is embellished by hand editing.
For sure, I tried to make Alaskan ortho for XP and is was a nightmare to find consistent satellite tiles. you would have one tile in deep winter next to one in summer, or a tile almost covered in clouds. Let’s just say I’m reasonably happy with what we have and don’t want to go back to those dark days of making satellite tiles!!
Look at ketchikan. The airport is flat. Badum tsss
What for? So they can only fix 4 small things every update?
The important things are listed as WIP / NOT STARTED/ BACKLOG.
What we have to be ready for is if they change an area incrementally. Suddenly, a cohesive look we were used to in one area before, may show blocks of Images taken at different times of day, Or different seasons. Take a look at Virden, Manitoba as an example. The town image is dead of winter, surrounding area is a different season. If this happens to a person’s most loved areas, they will not be happy. I hope there will be some quality control in this.
Don’t report anything, let those things stay in the game. Do nothing, OK? Just keep screaming and crying.
Yes, i was very disapointed by Ketchitan. Perhaps intentionnaly to allow ORBX, their partners to sell their Ketchitan.
Don’t blame me for something I didn’t do, you probably wanted to write this to other person.
There’s definitely more to the lack of satellite data in-game than meets the eye. I’ll put together a thread tomorrow with some screenshot examples of some pretty strange things. In short, there are areas in the game that don’t bring over satellite imagery, despite that imagery being perfectly fine in Bing. In scouting for bush strips to create, I have found this in Alaska and in PNG, where it cuts off satellite imagery right in the middle of a runway.
That 2-nd picture like FS2002 
18 MSFS’s ago lol
I second a comment here, since it was censored by some salty person who knows they are right.
Congrats. You got the “Press any key to continue” feature removed.
So vastly improved. And it only took a month.
If that’s at the top of their list well, I am sorry but you’ve wasted their time and it’s not looking likely at this point that anything fundamentally wrong with the sim is ever going to be improved.
They have not wasted time. They said they already use a version without the “key press…” internally and even it was in their backlog and it was very easy to remove, just they forget to do it. so it doesn’t take a month but a few minutes for them.
Much of the world in not covered by bing data. Just about everything north of the 60th is not covered, especially in northern Canada. In some places bing is taking cutouts of farmland in the USA and pasting it on areas where there are missing parts in a bing data map. Russian farmland patched with cut outs of USA farm land. Doesn’t even look right. What a joke.
I’ve been reading back through this thread after the usa update to see if anyone had posted. I’ve just looked at Denali National Park and it doesn’t look as though they’ve touched it. With regard to comments about there not being any decent data to use, when I looked on Google Earth, the representation of Denali is way better than fs2020. However, it was all winter photography. But then surely even working from their data , digital artists could be involved to make it look like the fs summer scenery. In fact a lot of the scenery is just rock anyway. I reckon with the money made from the million plus sales they can do way better than this. Here’s hoping the future brings better results.
If you read the devblog about the last update, they actually show the areas of the US where they implemented new high resolution elevation data. If Denali National Park isn’t part of that, it’ll look the same as it did before.
Look on Bing if you want apples to apples comparison. Google has a much larger, more detailed and higher resolution data set than Bing since Google have been at this mapping game much longer. Unfortunately, MSFS runs on Bing. Not a whole lot can be done about that unless someone creates a scenery mod using Google elevation data.
It’s not like the sold 1 million copies are suddenly have swimming pools full of money to dive into. Remember, this game was in development for 5 years prior to release and had to pay for teams of developers, consultants, hardware, flight lessons for the dev teams, etc. MS sunk a boatload of money into development over that time. The intial sales recovered that investment. And more money needs to be sunk into it for future development.
Changes will come in time. In fact, in the Q&A they specifically said that the USA world update was really a “Part 1”. The USA is a pretty big land mass. Updates will be made iteratively over time.
Agree its all about the data available. Mountains in Alaska are ok from a distance but too rounded closer up
@Paco572 up there is correct. Bing has very poor coverage north of 60. The AI is only as good as the data it’s fed. It’s not even perfect when it comes to high res data, but when fed poor data, it has to interpolate things the best it can. And the results aren’t always good.