Previously we had Victoria falls but the river to the south was raised higher than the surrounding area. Somewhere in one of these updates, the river elevation was corrected but now the falls are completely gone.
I suspect that the algorithms for generating terrain from Bing Maps are very generic with the result being all of these issues we see including rivers and roads and traffic on the sides of mountains, trees on boats at sea, trees in runways and on approach, taxiway lights in the middle of the taxiway, coasts and docks underwater, bridges with “sides”. Apparently, it is a much more difficult problem than most would think.
Wish I had seen this before I set up and flew a flight to Victoria Falls last night. Wow that was a disappointment! I appreciate how hard it is to accurately model terrain on a global scale, but every time I encounter one of these quirks it shatters the immersion. Hopefully it continues to get better over time!
Unless they’ve been hand crafted, like the Niagra Falls, water falls look either terrible or just non existent in the sim.
I’ve always thought it would be quite a good idea for a world update for them to just do one focussing on the worlds best known waterfalls. Its the sort of thing that I think a lot of people would have fun discover flying.
I just keep thinking that MS wants 3rd party developers. That’s why, I think, MS fixes so many bugs that, “no one cares about and are not the ones voted on”, perhaps focusing on core functionality.
You might be interested to hear that I have recently been developing scenery for Victoria Falls with animated waterfalls & rapids along the Zambezi river.
It will be releasing soon.