Description of the issue: Dry lakes (playas, salars, salt pans) around the MSFS world all (or at least a great many of them) have water in them, even if the underlying aerial imagery clearly indicates the absence of water
Coordinate or location of issue:
Example 1. Laguna Salada (Mexico) at 32.36, -115.65
Example 2. Lake Amadeus (Australia) at -24.75, 130.9167
Example 3. Namak Lake (Iran) at 34.5, 51.866667
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)? Every time
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
I originally logged this as a bug within a week of MSFS release, because flying over Central Australia was just seriously off-putting, then again after the Australia WU. The original bug report was closed as âfixedâ. Iâve since created several add-ons, available on flightsim.to, that seek to correct this issue for some locations, even if they are a long way from perfect.
SU16 has seemingly made this situation a LOT worse, and partially broken my previous fixes by changing the âtypeâ of âwaterâ. eg. from âlakeâ to âpondâ to âwaterâ, more or less randomly.
Now, I think thereâs actually a fairly simply solution. I believe the sim uses OSM data for hydrology (rivers and lakes etc). If not, they data looks suspiciously like it. In any case, the data will be tagged with attributes such as âdryâ and âintermittentâ. When population the sim with these data, simply taking these tags into consideration should resolve a majority of the above outlines symptoms.
I had Bijan Habashi fix this for most of Iranâs lakes with his trees product. It would be nice if Asobo had a way to fix this on their end. The majority of lakes that have water in MSFS 2024, donât have water and havenât had water for years in real life.
This was when the bug reporting wasnât using this form, but Zendesk (from memory). Is there a way of linking back to that? Provided I can even find it.
Hmmm, thereâs no reference as such that I can see. FWIW, here are the emails I received. I recall there being a âclosedâ one as well, but maybe I misremember, or a least I canât locate it. Given the âWe have recorded the bug you have submitted in our internal bug and issue tracker.â it must be somewhere in the system. Not that it makes much of a difference, since the problem still exists in the sim.
Now, hereâs something intriguing. This place is called âClay Lakesâ, in South Australiaâs Limestone Coast region, just north of Narracoorte. Itâs the typical âintermittentâ body of water youâll find in semi-arid regions all around the world. They hold a bit of water after heavy rains but are generally dry. The intriguing bit is that they have a transparent water mask (this is 2020). Iâve come across a few of these ⊠very, very few!
Now, while the depiction of these lakes with any water is technically incorrect (the Bing Maps imagery shows them as dry), at least theyâre not that in-your-face deep-ocean-blue.
But the sim (even 2020) appears to be capable of showing them in a state much closer to reality. Which raises the question why this âtransparentâ water mask isnât the default? I mean, even over a lake thatâs shown as a deep blue in the imagery, a transparent mask will still depict it as deep blue.
Another question, why am I not able to create these transparent masks with the SDK?
And thirdly, just curious, but what makes these Clay Lakes so different that the sim gives them this fair treatment? Because theyâre surrounded by deep-blue, red-headed, ugly stepsiblings!
This is the bottom of the Simpson Desert in central Australia. The âriverâ below us is the Finke. I carries water to reach Lake Eyre once every decade or so, and even in full flood would be hard to distinguish from the surrounding land because of the sediment/mud it would carry.
