Trees are making many cities look like post apocalyptic waste lands

[SCLINC]

PC / MS Store / No developer mode

I’m really enjoying flying around anywhere I want and having such true to life scenery. However, many cities in particular look like they’ve been abandoned for decades and become overrun with massive vegetation. I like flying to various state capitols in the U.S. and finding the capitol buildings but many of them have massive trees growing in them that show through. (I would have included a screenshot but I only fly in VR these days and there is no way to program a screenshot function to my controls from within the sim (and I don’t like fiddling in with the external apps).

I’m not a dev but I’ve tinkered with some programming and it seems to me there should be someway to stop trees from spawning in and around buildings. And maybe tinkering with the maximum size of trees located within urban areas (or within a certain distance of buildings) might help this problem. I realize that many cities do have some big trees around, but I think making the mistake of undersizing some trees would look a lot better than the situation as it stands now.

BTW, this has been a significant issue since the beta at least. In fact, I did post some screenshots back during the beta of buildings with trees growing out of them, so I was a bit disappointed to come back to it a year later and see the same problem.

[Broseph4245]

Agreed. Some areas get downright ugly from 500 feet give or take. There shouldn’t be trees IN the road. Presumably they know where the roads are right?

Another thing I find puzzling is the roads/streets in urban areas (LA or Seattle suburbs for example) that have road markings, but don’t look anything like pavement/concrete/blacktop. The sim clearly knows it’s a road…there are cars driving on it and it has markings and it’s in or near a city, but the autogen paints it green. Surprised this doesn’t get more attention.

[CurriedCat]

The size of trees in photogrametry areas are much bigger than those without for some reason. Turn the PG off and trees return to something more sensible.

It’s an old bug that desperately needs fixing.

[saschpe]

That’s indeed what happens. Areas without photogrammetry look just fine, especially after SU6 and the tree LOD fixes. Photogrammetric cities however seem to have a tree scaling issue.

So, did anyone file this officially already?

[CurriedCat]

I have done with screen shots. Pretty sure they are aware and working on it, just there’s bigger things to fix first.

[noxbox4methx]

I thought that was Photogrammetry

[EarthFlight42]

@SCLINC

However, many cities in particular look like they’ve been abandoned for decades and become overrun with massive vegetation. I like flying to various state capitols in the U.S. and finding the capitol buildings but many of them have massive trees growing in them that show through.

I had the same observation and my suspicion after some tests was confirmed by the 3rd party developer “Bijan” in this forum:

Photogrammetry trees are usually perceived as ugly, especially in old photogrammetry data like in Nuremberg. Dedicated 3D models look nicer and blend better with the landscape having no photogrammetry. Thus Asobo does the trick of hiding the photogrammetry trees beneath 3D models which are modified so they always show in the foreground. In order to more or less completely hide the PG tree blobs the 3D models must (a) be larger than the tree to be hidden and (b) they must be evergreen for the camouflage to work all year round.
The result is oversized 3D evergreen tree models in many photogrammetry cities like Nuremberg, Berlin, Vancouver, Paris etc.

Thus I am sure this is by design, and it’s the lesser evil they chose.

If you purchase Bijan’s “Seasons Enhanced” addon (for FS2024) and remove the files for the photogrammmetry exclusion polygons then you will see what happens otherwise: With his correctly sized trees you will see the photogrammetry PG tree blobs within the tree models and it looks equally poor… just a different type of poor, so to say.

Now, can this get fixed?
Just imagine trees (e.g. conifers) standing in close to the front of buildings so that you cannot see the facade behind. It’s simply impossible to get a photo of the facade from the air without the trees, agreed?
Since even newer photogrammetry models with better quality cannot get completely rid of the trees without removing parts of the buildings behind them, this is almost a “Won’t fix” issue. I say “almost” because as technology advances it might become feasible to use some (maybe AI-powered) algorithms to detect and get rid of the trees in the 3D mesh anyways and then fill in the created gaps in the facades behind and the ground below with “something plausible”, then place (only) the 3D tree model over it and maybe if the 3D tree hides the correction well enough then you might not notice it until looking very closely.
I hope I could explain this well enough.

[BlueFalcon2021]

ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Description of the issue: Too many trees are being generated in places they clearly shouldn’t be in MSFS 2024

Coordinate or location of issue: Occurs worldwide, looks like. But location in screenshots is just south-west of OMDB

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

Every time

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

1. Load into latest SU4 version of MSFS 2024

2. Make sure photogrammetry is on

3. Load into one of the south-western side gates of OMDB

YOUR SETTINGS

This issue occurs on both modded and clean install

Trees and grass are both on Medium, Photogrammetry is on, TLOD is 200, OLOD 100

What peripherals are you using: T Flight Stick X, Keyboard and Mouse

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?

Ans: Was using developer mode in screenshots but didn’t make any changes to it, issue occurs with devmode off as well

[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?

Ans: RTX 3060 12GB

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?

32GB DDR4, Ryzen 5 5600G, NVMe SSD install

MEDIA

The first screenshot is of my modded game, second is of an unmodded game, 3rd one displays gmaps images clearly showing there aren’t many trees in the region, 4th is another user getting the same issue but on the SU5 Beta

**OTHER DETAILS:
**
This issue was reported as solved in a previous update, but either that wasn’t the case, or something broke it again and it seems to be back. From the screenshot of the area behind DXB irl, it looks like the game is misidentifying patches of grass or slightly greenish roads as trees. This also seems to have a negative affect on performance

Also excessive trees are not only behind the airport, but also on the approach to runway 30L. This can be clearly cross-referenced with landing videos IRL, and it is seen that there are excessive trees