I know that good satellite imagery is probably a little more scarce than it is for US/Europe etc, but if you look around China on Google/Bing Maps, you’ll see it’s really not that bad in terms of quality and coverage. On MSFS however, the whole country is a patchwork of messed up terrain colours, ugly jarring borders between images, huge chunks of mismatched autogen, etc. It is functionally unusable for doing anything other than flying over it at FL400, at night. It sucks because China is a visually spectacular region with some incredible geography.
For a sim that has used “you can fly anywhere in the world!” as a marketing line from the get go, it just seems weird to me that such a huge part of the world has been left in a broken state. It’s not just China, much of Central Asia and a lot of South East Asia is similar. And this hasn’t really changed in 3 years.
I’m not expecting the same visual quality as southern England, but there has to be a better alternative than the awful mess currently present in-game.
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If you use the rolling cache, have you emptied it lately?
There are limited resources and Microsoft focuses on the regions where their customers are.
Mathijs Kok
PMDG
3 Likes
Without expanding on the politics of it all we get the use of photography that is readily available. Some places have been covered excessively others not so, some places would rather Asobo do not show that even if it exists, still others become more complex… China being one of the more complex.
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The dev team has mentioned this plenty already. It has to do with the quality of the data they are allowed to get from the region. It’s why places like South America have been hard to come by as well and why it took so long to get the data for the Nordic countries.
When it comes to photogrammetry, it seems like there is a difficult process which involves approvals from the governments to allow for accurate satellite detail. I highly doubt they’d be able to get that from China unfortunately.
I’m sure there are other ways they can smooth some of it over so it didn’t look so disjointed, but that is the reason why it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as US/Europe.
I’m sure the Chinese government is in no rush to give out updated photogrammetry or mesh details. The regime is very secretive about things like that.
We (USA) have excellent satellite and topographical data of China 
but they were all obtained through spy satellites. So that information will never see the light of day outside of intelligence communities.
Marc
MSFS will never get China’s land information. I think this is as good as it will be and even when MSFS 2024 comes out it will still be the same in China. They block even Google …