I know the topic has already been discussed long time ago but I am surprised it does not get more traction.
I am French and when I visit places I know in my country, almost all the time there are way too many trees. It looks nice, it seems to be a paralell universe where people love trees and grow them everywhere, the thing is, it does not look at all like reality. Even French towns look like forest with houses hidden under the trees. The difference with a simple google maps 3D view is staggering. On some French islands I know there are almost no trees, but in MSFS they are covered with forests.
I don’t know whether it is that bad on other countries or specific to France/Europe.
I was wondering, any idea whether that issue was discussed with developpers? Do you think this should be reported as a bug?
There is a very effective payware by Bijan Studios that addressed and vastly improved this situation.You can still, I believe, pick it up at Simmarket.
However there is quite a lot of controversy on the forums and Discord with many people saying the developer has abandoned the project whilst posts have appeared from the developer that personal circumstances have obliged him to suspend work on it although he is now trying to get it sorted.
That said the addon still performs very well in its basic form (the automatic season changer doesn’t work) on the current MSFS version and I continue to use it. There is another, Accuseason, which attempts to do the same but I have not tried it. It’s also been said that Asobo itself is looking at the problem.
It’s not a bug so don’t bother reporting it - a search on Bijan will reveal plenty of forum content about it. Make your own choice but, yes, it’s possible to improve your experience.
Yes … last we heard Blackshark were researching ways to recreate the scenery hidden by trees in the photogrammetry, presumably this would allow whole trees to be replaced by realistically sized seasonal ones on a global scale. That was quite a while ago but I can understand it takes time.
Bijan trees doesn’t improve the situation here. The quantity of trees is burned in the textures by Shark AI with many unaccuraces and mistakes (the rocks and cliffs are mostly interpreted as trees).There is no way to change it in general. Only possible is to manually add excluded areas. Very time consuming process.
Ecxactly so. According to the feature series video, blackshark.ai has detected over 30 million km2 of vegetation using their AI algorithm. Earth’s land surface is around 148 million km2 so MSFS must be using some kind of landclass scenery that covers what isn’t detected by blackshark.ai.
This landclass scenery tells the sim where cities, towns, forests, open fields etc are. Guess a lot of improvement can be done there.
Seaweed getting picked up as trees is what annoys me most although it is probaby the easiest to exclude. Not many trees grow in the sea or that close to the coast.
OK, thanks to all for your answers, even though there seems to be no obvious path to a satisfying solution.
After your feedback I made some more research and there are actually some mods for the tree positionning. One dedicated to UK: https://secure.simmarket.com/taburet-uk-trees-msfs.phtml and one for France, BUT they are 12 euros each and for France, only urban zones are “cleaned” which is really not what interests me the most. For those flying in UK, that might be a good solution.
The most important exclude for me now, or at least a tree height limit, would be on final approaches. And within and near airports where they would be an obvious hazard for approaching/departing and taxiing aircraft. That for me is the most pressing issue.
flightsim.to has a tree height reduction mod. When you look at the 10-asobo_species.xml file, you can see how to change the min and max number to reduce the tree heights even more by editing that part of the mod in windows wordpad.
Or just drop one of these two mods into community to use it straight.
After World Update Canada, Montreal was full of trees everywhere. So I decided to learn how to fix that with SDK and I removed them all. And now I’m fixing all rivers in the province. I have two mods on flightsim.to you can find them under my publisher name AVCORP.
