Just kind of curious, but when you run with no PG and just bing maps enabled you have all these things wrong or at the very least not finished.
Fly along the roads in previous versions of the game / and competitors game, and you’ll see roads that are grey/black road color, in this you have some sections that look like roads, but more sections that are just green, bridges that are either at a higher level then they should be or collapsed. There is a section of the freeway coming out of Cleveland Ohio heading east where the road actually disappears into the water on both East and West bound sides. There are no Radio Towers, Light Poles etc. Well there’s sort of radio towers, the lights are there for them at night, but no towers under them, and when the sun comes up the lights go away. Also the lights on the towers do not blink as they should.
This is just to name a few ‘peeves’ I have at the moment. So is bing maps data considered finished or they just havent gotten around to working on that part of the sim at the moment?
I don’t really know for certain but I would guess that Bing Maps is an ongoing project that will be improved over time and kept as up to date as practicable to remain relevant. If it gets outdated/not improved then I would say that that would limit its use.
I take your point about the green roads. Also it would be good to be able to fly under bridges. I suppose it will all be fixed/improved at some point.
Remember that Bing maps is not the only source for the scenery you see outside the Photogrammetry cities.
MSFS uses blackshark AI to enrich the satellite images with more data in terms of buildings (e.g. roof colour) and OpenStreetMap data for building sizes (height is not visible on satellite images) and special attributes (e.g. power towers, churches,…).
Since Bing Data, OpenStreetMap data and the capabilities of the Blackshark AI will further improve/develop, you’ll get constant improvements in the source data.
The question will rather be how often this translates to the sim. They said the current state of the OpenStreetMap data is from before the initial release last year. So any change done in OSM since then didn’t find its way to the sim yet.
Same for Bing data, I think they update it in the world updates for the specific regions, but do not pull the full data for the rest of the world regularly.
Time never stands still and the answer is they will never be finished because something will always need updating. We should expect cities and famous landmarks to get priority but I’m pretty sure that now with MSFS Bing will be cataloguing the most neglected areas for immediate attention. Currently there are whole continents with inadequate and missing data so if you can’t inspect your guttering already then don’t expect to be able any time soon. The good part about that is with ever changing technology the longer you must wait then the better it is likely to be.
Hopefully soon, Bing maps are horrible compared to Google ones in most places. Especially outside of USA. One of my first msfs2020 navigation experiences was flying to a location of a nearby airport (from another airport, since it wasn’t available to start on) only to find that instead of 1 km long paved runway there is an empty wheat field! (and also a nearby dam got turned into a tourist bridge over a lake)
… So I checked the Bing maps… and right where the airport was supposed to be, there is just an extremely low quality greenish square texture about 3x3 km large, in the middle of rather decent satellite footage, the satelitte taking the photos probably fell asleep for a while…
Now there seems a good way for Asobo or Third Party to get micro-transactions?
A group dedicated to pushing city updates?
Or a group that uses alternative providers like those that support the Roofing Businesses. All usually HD Drone captures. They are usually used to get square footage for roofing jobs.
One day it may be almost be pushed in real-time.
Real Time updates for LIVE events like: Olympics, Super-Bowl etc. would be neat.
Hmmm interesting concept except why the hell would I pay someone else for something that should already be in there in the 1st place.
The cities are fine BTW its all those little things that are missing especially in such a dynamic beautiful sim such as this that should be there in the 1st place.
Get yourself a nice 2 petabyte hard drive, a terrabyte of fast ram and some godlike hardware to run it on and I’m sure you can have uncompressed. The quality of some recent Bing imagery is quite good but there’s plenty that is old and poor produced differently with older technology.
