msfs-2024
The trailer shows a helicopter flying over a beautiful rapeseed field. Has anyone seen anything like that in the sim yet? I only had dry tufts and some grass at most. I haven’t found any fields like the ones in the trailer yet…
In the autumn I found bales of straw in a field. But to see them you had to land directly on them with the helicopter. When you get close they suddenly pop up. As soon as they are more than 50m away the objects are no longer visible…
It’s similar with multiplayer and AI planes. These can also only be seen from close up. Or have I set something wrong in the settings.
Have you messed with the time of year? Crops are dynamic and respond to seasons. That said, I haven’t tried it myself so I don’t know if that’s the issue.
but i did find that the scenery varies a lot in quality between the usa and europe and the rest of the world
if you fly over the fields in center usa, they actually look pretty decent… nothing like the trailer though… but they are allright
Yeah thats what I’ve found. I love flying over the Palouse region of Washington state. Famous for its vast hilly fields of wheat. The actual terrain looks great in the sim. The new terrain system does a good job carving out all the contours of hills showing every little ravine and ditch. FS2020 looked nowhere near as good.
However FS2024 really doesn’t put proper crops in the fields, which is something I thought it was supposed to. It also get the seasonal colours wrong. August is the middle of the harvest season in the Palouse but the sim has the fields all green still. Its not until October and November that the sim makes the fields look harvest ready.
Also, in the fields the sim just turns everything into a green meadow with wild flowers. It does put some crop like plant in fields but it doesn’t really look anything like wheat. I might have been totally mishearing what was said in one of the dev streams but I’m sure they were making a big deal out of the fact they had lots of different crop variety accurate to the types of fields and geographical location you would find them growing in.
I guess as with so much of the sim its early days and hopefully this is an area they’ll work on. I also agree that the terrain detail draw distance is pretty bad. To the extent that it actually makes landing a bush plane pretty tricky as so much detail is only drawn in when you’re a few feet from it. Again its something I hope they improve.
indeed it does, and if you remember what we talked about trees a few days back
massive difference in the usa
in the “curated” areas, it is evident the sim runs some sort of Ai/machine learning/magic digalidoo that places trees where they actually make sense, so they don’t look like someone dropped a bucket of marbles on the floor
one would assume this is an ongoing process
Yours is one of the first posts that I have seen that may allude to the new LIDAR data said to be in the sim that should accentuate landscapes with much more detailed terrain mapping.
Otherwise I haven’t seen it in the sim or people talk of it so it is good to hear that it is at least likely implemented in some regions with it.
I have also asked about the differences in the trailer and the sim since the trailer was said to be in game footage and flying over the English countryside and farmland with crops and cattle and sheep really appealed to me but alas there is little to no evidence it looks anything like the trailer.
I haven’t seen fields of cows and sheep in videos either which I imagine there should be, but again maybe it is broken LOD’s.
Jorg even said you can herd sheep with a helicopter.
Then there is supposed to be new higher res global satellite data but again I haven’t seen anything that looks better than 2020 so far.
We were also supposed to be getting this imagery for 2020 upon 2024’s release but no sign of it?
On top of that,
Double the photogrammetry cities with some old ones improved such as Miami, no sign of them.
Improved road traffic, don’t really see it.
New autogen. Not implemented yet
Machine learning to recognise scenery features such as paths etc and apply appropriate textures (Might have seen this but probably not fully implemented or still in its infancy)
So currently I am not sure how much the sim resembles the product shown on the trailers and what can be improved or implemented to get the visuals up to scratch but fingers crossed the first major patch greatly improves things.
The trailers don’t reflect reality. It’s a scam! Honestly, MSFS 2024 is a big disappointment in every way. I would have been interested in the amazing visuals, but the textures and photogrammetry are terrible.
You can definitely see the new terrain system at work in mountainous areas. The Swiss alps for example now look spectacular up close. It would probably make for a good mountaineering simulator.
I agree with the rest of your post that there was a lot of world rendering stuff I was expecting that just doesn’t seem to be implemented or working. My guess is a lot of things were not finished in time. I think everyone agrees the sim seems rushed to market.
Yeah for sure. Its very early days. The over all environment and world rendering is something they’ll work on and develop a lot. For example I think the future for the sim isn’t ever higher resolution photogrammetry. Its machine learning that can make very realistic buildings.
Yes those mountains look great, much better than 2020, perfect implementation of LIDAR.
Let’s hope they can expand the data region and keep updating regularly.
Although the mountains in the background look quite low res still. Maybe it is photogrammetry and not LIDAR in this instance?
Yes it was definitely rushed to market.
It must be really tough being a dev and seeing your work not shown in its best light because of corporate machinations.
Same for Jorg who I like for a corporate man, although he loses some Kudos because he talked up the idea of the sim being ready right up to launch and even after the launch disaster seemed in a state of denial with his somewhat bombastic explanation post which was out of character for him.
Perhaps it was just the strain he must ahve been under.
I remember when FS2020 came out, I was so keen to do all sorts of crazy bush flying in exotic locations, only to be continually disappointed by how awful much of the world outside the USA/Europe looked. The autogen terrain in areas with little satellite coverage/cloud-obstructed imagery was a blotchy, blurry mess. Oh well, I thought. These world updates they’re talking about will surely fix that!
4 years later, the world updates made the areas that already looked pretty good even better, whereas the few non-Western areas that got updated just got a few landmarks/airports and maybe a higher definition mesh. Barely any fixes to the ugly, half-baked terrain autogen system.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on them fixing non-Western areas in FS24. They’ve got their curated areas that they can show off, so the job is done.
The biggest hurdle is procuring decent data from (for example) the likes of China and Russia. No data = poor aesthetics in the sim. There’s not really a lot anyone can do about it — even Microsoft with their seemingly bottomless coffers.
But I’m not talking about areas that were poorly built. I haven’t found fields like these anywhere else. Switzerland is otherwise very detailed. Other parts that I’ve already flown also look pretty good (apart from the washed-out ground textures, which were much sharper in 2020). But I haven’t seen any fields and plants like those shown in the trailer…
The trailers are really false advertising, we are shown one thing and get another. Granted, we can all hope that it will get better, but what I expected when I paid my money is not what I got.
I don’t recall seeing that but I could have missed it. Wording is everything, though — I’m sure MS wouldn’t allow a slip-up significant enough to subject themselves to product misrepresentation.
… you will remember the song.