USA is in rough shape and getting worse with every update. At this point we need a re-release of the World Update USA and fix all the sea levels and waterways with flickering terrain next to entire melted cities. Looks absolutely terrible IMO. I have all the landmark packs and airports installed in major areas and it just looks BRUTAL lol.
Who would ever want to cross the pond and arrive to post apoc USA with melted buildings and bugged out mesh is beyond me. In places it still looks ok and is fun to fly but overall UK and USA are the worst places to fly now IMO.
I dont think London ever looks good. Even if the building geometry is correct it still looks as if an enormous Independence Day Saucer has parked itself over the city casting a large gloomy shadow over everything. Its dank and miserable looking and doesn’t blend in well with surrounding autogen at all.
If I got to Google Map, look at Bristol or London in 3D and get close to buildings, 2-3 seconds and they render well with bright accurate colours so the sim should be able to do the same job. If I move forward at a rate that is well beyond what I would achieve in something like the C172, the same thing, a few seconds and lovely rendered 3D buildings.
PG is poor in the UK in many places and the way the sim draws it, it doesnt even match up to what Google maps can do which I think tells us something. It is after all doing the exact same thing, streaming data and rendering a 3D representation of a city on a 2D screen.
Yes but the point stands, if Google can do it so can Microsoft. And take a look at the birds eye views of cities in Bing, the colours are there as is the quality.
oh yes, i really really wonder why there is this greenish too much shine at a lot of places
and how the heck didnt they notice that, very easy to fix.
also the still in almost ala harbours the sunken boats.
still i like it.
probably because they work with very fixed timetables. it has to be ready that date…
I have tried London again today at approx 15.30 local,still a melted bombsite.Then went directly to Main Menu ( so no full restart) and chose NewYork and 2 mins later this photo from 1100 ft .North Europe showing 19ms.How come London can look so bad for me,whereas minutes later New York can look so good in comparison.
Seriously,if there is a good reason why the quality differs so much between london and New York please let me know as I am absolutely no expert on the subject.
I think it’s obvious that the NY data is just much better than the London data. The PG seems to get drawn with lower complexity the further away you are from it, and there just might not be enough information in the London data set to draw a realistic-looking building except right close up - and even then they still don’t look as good as those NY buildings.
It can’t be the servers. Not as the root cause, anyway, they might make things worse. It’s got to be the data. In which case, London won’t improve until the data improves.
Isn’t the problem that London (UK) simply hasn’t been digitised into Bing Maps. If you check using the Windows Map Viewer the only London available is in Canada. The only UK city listed is Southampton.
Again, I’m pretty sure London, like much of the UK & a couple of other cities abroad is a completely different data source & not Bing. Hence why the quality, colouring & LOD system they use stand out so much from the rest of MSFS.
The G word has over 50 brilliantly mapped cities/towns in the UK. Bing only has a couple. They really need to shake a leg & improve on this.
Bing gave up on 3D according to something I read today, arguing that birds eye view was more popular. So we should not be surprised that they are struggling to match what Google can do I suppose.
There is a difference in PG quality between the regions. As a test though, try flying over the PG cities in Spain or Portugal - the PG data in this region is excellent (even at lower LODs at distance). If you’re getting melted / malformed buildings, there may be a network issue at play.
Couple of things to try are to disable IPV6 on your network adapter, try a new DNS server like Google or Cloudflare, and switch servers to test (even to a further one with higher ping).
I don’t think it is a server issue actually. The reason being I have downloaded multiple photogrammetry cities in the UK on flightsim.to, Plymouth, Exeter, Thanet, Canterbury etc. These all suffer from the same LOD issues even though they are installed on my PC. The PG can look excellent once loaded in, but often times I’m flying over places and its just melted buildings until I’m almost flying directly over them and then the LOD pops into high detail.
I also have the same problem with a rolling cache and without, which wouldn’t make sense if it was a server issue as, again the data would already be installed on my computer.
Asobo have long since proved they’re not at all reliant on Bing to provide them with photogrammetry. They’ve been sourcing it independently for the sim for a while now.
As far as London is concerned Jorg said they were planning to look again at it doing it better. It was apparently done in a real rush when they did it initially for the UK world update.
As things progress, certainly as far as PC hardware is concerned anyway, they should be able to really up the resolution of photogrammetry. I’m pretty sure in 5 years time the quality of photogrammetry will be a lot higher.
I still think Asobo and Microsoft should just bite the bullet and start buying PG from Google.
Yes but I think Bing are still involved in the processing of the data into a useable form for the sim, I seem to remember Jorg saying as much in a development vlog.
I think that if we require hair sharp scenery close up, we would also need much more powerful machines.
Hand crafted (drawn) buildings are of course a different matter. The ‘melting’ buildings do so close up. For normal flying height all seems fine. It is a flight simulator afterall.
Compromises have to be made I guess.
