In a nutshell, it’s a wreck. It wasn’t always this way, but I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now.
The LOD is appalling, and it never loads up to full detail. I have 1GB fibre and no rolling cache. The second you’re over the top the LOD drops away so you’re left with a load of ugly triangles representing buildings.
I’ve tried removing just the UK stuff, removing and re-installing all other photogrammetry but nothing seems to work. Lack of time has meant I haven’t looked at anything other than UK & USA but the USA still looks great by comparison. Good performance, good LODs and much better quality than the UK. It’s not just London, this eyesore is apparent over every UK photogrammetry city.
So…is this just me, or is the UK photogrammetry terminally broken? As it stands there is almost no point in having it on at all.
This is settings at Ultra with a TerrainLOD of 230. You may need to zoom in to see the issue but it definitely never used to be like this. The only reason you can make out any buildings at all is because of the ORBX London Landmarks pack.
The two at release in Portsmouth & Southampton are very decent but almost everything after that have been pretty terrible.
After seeing how great major cities were in the sim i was really looking forward to London in the UK update. The quality, colouring, size & LOD system are terrible. Jorg said himself that it wasn’t up to standard & they’d redo it in a future update. Hopefully they don’t use the same 3D data service again, it certainly wasn’t Bing.
The Cambridge photogrammetry done in the same UK update is very similar to London in it’s quality, colouring & noticeably weird LOD implementation & after how badly received that photogrammetry source was, I hoped they wouldn’t use them again. Worryingly though, they did use them for a portion of Derby in the GOTY update. It looks even worse as they mixed decent quality photogrammetry for a large area of Derby with the bad source for parts.
Another city i was looking forward to in the GOTY update was Nottingham & whilst the quality, colouring & LOD system is pretty decent, they might as well not bothered as it’s just a tiny square of photogrammetry of the large city.
I know the big counter to these complaints is ‘they are free updates’ which i agree with, it’s just pretty disappointing that the UK has been done so poorly compared to the other world updates.
I’ll have a look, but a LOD of 400 generally cripples the main thread of a 5900x to be honest. There aren’t really CPU’s out there that can run 400 without big problems around a lot of scenery.
All the other photogrammetry looks fine, even with settings lower than Ultra. The problem seems to be the UK’s alone. I’m gonna fire the sim up quickly and have a look at Amsterdam by comparison. All the UK cities depress me, and that’s where I do most of my flying 🫤
@moxiejeff You are right of course, 400 is better, but the difference is waaaay more pronounced in the UK than other areas.
So I think somewhere between SU6 - SU8, they’ve changed this sliding scale a bit more in regards to what “ultra” means . i.e. if you want trees completely drawn out as far as the game allows, 400 slider is where you need it to be. In regards to photogrammetry, the same I think applies (could be wrong, technically). But yes, I do think to your point London’s PG is just bad from the source. I do see the melted buildings/pyramids in other USA cities, too.
I wish there was an option to cache the fully rendered photogrammetry areas? So it loads up fully rendered and does not disappear till you’re out of visual range. Maybe some mild LOD degradation but not GD triangles!
Here’s my understanding. Please correct me if I’ve gotten it wrong.
LOD determines how far away terrain detail will be displayed. It really affects the CPU because high settings require the CPU to display exponentially more objects at all times than do lower settings.
“Buildings,” “low” to “ultra,” determines how much detail is shown on buildings. For example, “low” may show nothing but a featureless flat roof on commercial buildings whereas “ultra” displays every HVAC unit, vent, moulding, and stack.
But neither of these settings should affect the rendering of the atrocious melted buildings in UK cities and other cities in Europe – Wien, for just one example. I doubt that Internet connection speed has anything to do with it, either, because enabling a big rolling cache and increasing bandwidth hasn’t helped anyone (that I can recall). The cause of and the solution for that problem must be in the photogrammetry system alone; I’d presume it’s all accounted for by abominably substandard PG data.
Vienna looked bad on the first pass but started looking really good after flying around over it for a few minutes. Paris same thing.
That has nothing to do with my internet connection, which is quite good, but I wonder if it has to do with getting data out of whatever data center it is hosted at. Pure speculation, but maybe some PG scenery is less optimized and takes longer to download and is bandwidth limited from the server.
Zoomed in PG scenery never looks good anywhere IMHO.
Vienna, some LOD, some settings, on my old computer with some specs (forgot most all of those numbers). The buildings in the middle are not PG but the surrounding buildings are. This was after flying around over the city for maybe 10 -15 minutes checking things out.
The early PG, Japan and the US, looks and performs far better than the recent updates. Its not just the UK, Paris and Vienna both look like melted wax. The UK in general seems to perform poorly however, whether in a PG area or not.
Perf in UK is pretty bad too. Even flying over at high alt you can really feel it killing the FPS. Today I even thought maybe I should just turn it off and focus on the airports.
Stop press: I’ve been checking up on this and I’ve heard on the grapevine that all UK photogrammetry is going to be pulled off the servers and not replaced.
It will happen gradually, starting today, and will take some time.
The implication being that there will simply be no UK photogrammetry any longer? That seems likely to cause more uproar than the poor quality of what there is. London is a world city and to not have it rendered as well in the game as New York or others is just unacceptable. I do take note of what date it is today, mind you…
In terms of UK PG data just being poor, fixing that is a real problem, especially for London. Aircraft aren’t easily able to fly close enough over the city to get good aerial photography suitable for PG. I recall someone noting an aircraft flying low passes over central London during the early pandemic that people assumed was an aerial photography flight, and noting that they could only do that because there was practically no other traffic around due to no commercial flights.
