This fantastic place in Indonesia is Raja Ampat (see the first pic below). It’s a high-end ‘luxury destination’ for the super-rich (mainly because it’s a complete pain to get to, involving much faffing about).
I think those vague splodges (for splodges they are) are supposed to represent water masks (or something). All quite tragic.
I’m willing to bet that poor old, poorly served, and barely even acknowledged Raja Ampat will never get a second glance in the new Sim. Why bother with Indonesia (or anywhere in beautiful SE Asia at all, for that matter) when you could be churning out more European or North American airports and POIs? Just look at your default world map in MSFS2024. What a joke.
Sorry for the whinge, but I see the same thing happening all over again in MSFS2024: SE Asia, India, and Africa will get nothing—no improvements, no POIs, no World Updates. It’s an absolute tragedy.
The problem is these remote places don’t have high resolution photos made of them, mostly lower quality and older sattelite imagery. So they kind of have to fill in the blanks for this to look good.
It’s not really their fault either. It’s not economically viable to send aircraft to every remote place on earth. These images are not only used for MSFS, in populated areas more people will pay for imagery. The water masks are a default algorithm applied on the low quality imagery. The world is a big place. It would cost billions to get high res of every place on earth.
Yep, I know. I just wanted to complain about it. I realise it’s impossible. The problem is that because I know the vast archipelagos of SE Asia are strewn with unbelievable beauty, it chafes me not to see any of it (or very little) in MSFS 2020 or 2024.
But it’s early days in 2024, and there are years ahead for that to change. I hope so. I want to see the wonder of it all (the Philippines, Borneo, Sri Lanka, etc.) with all their frankly jaw-dropping coastal shoals, reefs, volcanos, etc. But I know they won’t ever have any sense of priority, unlike Western European updates or N. American.
Some of us like to fly in these amazing places. It’s a staggering huge part of the world, after all.
Will this get improved? Currently numerous places which had gorgeous water masks in 2020 now just show as blurry mess, with even some hard lines to be seen. This can’t be an improvement or is it?
