This is Borneo. It’s pretty typical of the state of things in this part of MSFS 2020’s world. No beautiful PG, no WU, no POI’s for this little corner of the world…
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I don’t understand the lack of Australia content. I don’t live there but man…so beautiful.
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ms have probably got some kind of agreement with orbx to do australia, i guess, but the sim didn’t even come with sydney harbour bridge (though there are a couple of freeware options.
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Where does this speculation come from?
They always said they check the traffic where players fly most and try to focus on that since it benefits most simmers. Also it depends on when and where the Bing team gets new data.
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Well, the greater Tokyo area alone has a way higher population than Australia so i guess OCE is not the hottest of priorities.
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From flightsim.to I downloaded an add-on for Sydney and it’s great. You can fly over the British-built (sorry, just had to put that in hehehe) Sydney Hardbour Bridge and over a decently rendered Opera House. If I could be bothered to fly out to it, Ulura (Ayers Rock) is also decent. Other than that, being truly honest, what else would you call an internationally known landmark in Australia? Fly over Australia and the vast majority of it is brown desert… and yes I’ve flown right over the whole country on my way to New Zealand (a much more interesting country in my humble opinion)… but what else does Oz have to see from the air?
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not an Oz hater or a troll, I am only saying honestly that I don’t see much more worth adding to the Australia scenery and POIs. Feel free to prove me wrong 
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I would like to see KMCI, KSTL, KMEM, KTPA, KBOS, KBWI, KCLE AND NO MORE BUMPS TO SPOIL LANDINGS.
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Apparently it’s copywrited! 
I really wish for a bit of official love for SE-Asia. But available data is light on, and I guess it’s less trafficked by the simmers (although that would probably change if it was featured).
Pop a report in for those spikes though, that’s not right at all…
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I really agree that Africa and South America should be improved.
But also when there are no buildings or POI’s, some of the nature scenery is great, outside the main regions of interest ! Fly into Cameroon land inward…
Or e.g. take off at Isabela airport, Galapagos Islands and fly along the coast.
Bali has some beautiful places, as well as Thailand.
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Yes, they need to be improved, places like the Iguazu Falls, the Amazon, Andes, etc are poorly represented as are the big cities like Rio, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, etc
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Maybe, just maybe this is to the fact that most users live in the u.s. or europe. And ofcourse there’s more data available. But it’s only logic that those parts will be upgraded first. There’s many world updates to come so you can’t have it all at once.
Btw. Lot’s of places in africa/middle east look great. Even better then in europe or the us.
And really, photogrammetry in these places isn’t gonna happen till someone invests lot’s of money in creating this… And to be honest, i think lot’s of countries don’t really see this as a priority…
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I can explain the process a bit here.
Getting high quality digital elevation data is a long process of chasing down the various local authorities that are responsible for that data. Some locations have no real survey authorities and so you’re left with contacting third parties for portions of the data and then figuring out how to stick it all together. So in some locations it’s easy, because the data is readily available and public, and for other areas it is difficult because the data is incomplete, segmented, and privatized. Even when you do get good data access, getting data that is of a high enough quality to be acceptable in a sim with this kind of visual fidelity is no easy task either. Oftentimes data packages might be great in one area or kind of data and downright awful in another area. Even public data backed by large survey teams can very in quality and age drastically in the same dataset.
Then, when needing to go with non-public data (and even with some countries public data) there are associated licensing stipulations, which all have to be negotiated and cleared by both parties, and that process can take some time. The whole process from front to back is incredibly fiddly and requires a good deal of manual effort to make work across all the grades of quality, data formats, etc. It’s nowhere near as easy as just downloading a file from a data provider and uploading it to the cloud someplace. It takes serious person-hours. And it never ends, because the data is constantly changing.
Jorg specifically works incredibly hard at this kind of stuff, and he’s really really sensitive to being too US or euro centric. But there are practical limitations to the efforts. That being said, when really great sources of data are found, they do find themselves into world updates, and he’s talking with data providers literally daily.
-Matt | Working Title
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But great frame rates!!!
Same for central & east Europe. No PG. Can fly without stutters or slideshow.
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Very true,
A lot of SE Asia countries mapping data is classified as “national security”, and the stuff that you can access is not as detailed or is out of date. So, there has to be some compromises made which aren’t always the best.
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Funny about that approach is that as long as those parts of the world are horrendous most people tend to stay away from that. I would like to fly around Africa, Russia etc but as long as those parts don’t get updates I’m not going there.
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Point well taken.
yeah that’s the main problem, it’s a vicious circle… People don’t fly where it’s bad scenery, so designers don’t improve those areas because people don’t fly there… they should know better than that. When MSFS was first announced I hoped to travel to all the abandoned places as I hoped they would be beautiful now. Well, they are not. So guess what, I stay away. It’s a real shame but why should I spend my time there?
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Wasn’t the thread starter talking about how frustrating the sim looks in Borneo, Indonesia ?
I fly a lot in Papuasia, New Guinea as I like the bush pilot way of flying (I am looking at very small trips in Youtube and go fly there) and I think those areas look great. For sure that could be even better, but still great now