One user, with dedicated time and no other simulator to build, found a publicly available dataset on ODP, and didn’t have to track down the ultimate source of that compiled data (which a company would have to do), didn’t have to engage in any licensing talks, and didn’t have to integrate it into the huge pipeline with he rest of the data or run extensive testing on it, making sure it actually matched the imagery everywhere, etc etc.
What that user grabbed from ODP and quickly sent through a converter is really cool! But we’re talking apples and oranges here, truly.
I don’t really see these as excuses, and development is not a charity: the amount of resources committed to a project has to reflect the budget reality of the customer base. And anyway, a year ago streaming the world into a sim was unheard of. I feel like a more realistic take is warranted.
But hey, that’s just me, as an end user talking. I still marvel that this thing exists at all. Nobody has to agree
Flying mainly low altitude GA planes I can tell you I see the Bing Maps Transition lines (as seen in your first screenshot) a lot and all over the world, that’s not an issue for Asobo to “fix”, they need to wait and rely on Bing Maps Data to update.
You’re essentially talking about asking questions, which the developer of that DEM addon and others did Digitale LiDAR-Geländemodelle von Österreich | Digital LiDAR-Terrain Models of Austria - DTM Austria 10m v2 by Sonny - Open Data Portal Austria Unless Asobo and MS consider it to be unduly onerous to send emails and make enquiries. As for testing… I can only shrug in response as the testing regime for this game has the all appearances of being, at best, cursory and ineffective. The default for that area has some pretty glaring problems with mismatched textures so I’m not sure where that leaves your point about matching up imagery.
I do appreciate that you, as a developer are willing to come here and post about these things. It’s a shame that Asobo themselves are not quite so forthcoming.
This is honestly, and by lack of better words, plain stupid.
Africa looks incredible, Japan, China and Indonesia are a feast for the eyes.
Covering the whole world is impossible and the AI will fail at certain areas, just report it in zendesk.
I mean, we’re a first party developer working directly on the Flight Simulator team, so you’re already hearing it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. We all talk together about these things every week, they’re all on our radar. The problem is always time and resources, and there just aren’t infinite of either. The team does the best they can trying to prioritize a new world update batch when a good source of data is found and can be moved past all the hurdles I mentioned.
Whether or not you believe that or instead choose to assign malice is totally your call, of course.
Well, I may go there in time, I already went from Alaska via Eastern Russia to Japan, that wasn’t a real success however it was somewhere just after the Japan update so things may have changed. I did fly the route below back from Australia to Europe with the Caravan and that was very nice. Especially the part from Thailand to Europe.
Since this game launched almost 9 months ago very little of any substance has changed. The entire game is a user experience calamity that, as a user, you have to put up with just to make it work. You will forgive me if I have zero confidence in a group that releases a piece of software that, upon asking Steam to load it, doesn’t show anything to the user that it has even started for about 60 seconds. Go and use the manual cache tool, use the flight planning map, get the game running smoothly on VR.
Perhaps, within your answers we actually have our answer. You say you talk about this stuff every week, but you don’t actually fix it. What we do get is a lot of gaslighting about time and resources. A DEM upload is not the first time a solo user has done what Asobo didn’t, we all remember the terrain spikes that one guy fixed in 2 days and Asobo got around to it weeks later, perhaps after another long meeting.
That’s plain wrong. It’s just a matter of priorities.
That’s not gaslighting (better read it up before using such harsh words), that’s just how ANY game developer works. You seem to basically forget everything that IS worked on just for the sake of the argument that a few examples that you’d like to have fixed is currently not worked on.
