With the MSFS I love to fly in India, especially the Mumbai area, as this my second home
Unfortunately some important landmarks in Mumbai, Kolkata & Co. are not well implemented. E.g. the Gateway of India (in Mumbai) doesn’t look like a historic archway, but as an appartement building. The famous Howrah bridge in Kolkata has the charme of a line in the MSFS. Also the cities don’t look like indian cities, but american cities.
Unfortunately I cannot find any scenery improvements for India, not even for payware.
For Germany, where I live, there are so many free and paid sceneries availble, but not for India.
Is it planned to improve the scenaries for India, e.g. in the context of the World Update series?
Is there any MSFS SDK community, which works on Indian sceneries?
Hi there. American of Indian origin here, and I spent many childhood summers in India so I have lots of nostalgic memories of my travels there. And I am with you. All of the Mumbai landmarks you mention would require a developer to go in and actually build them. In Delhi there is a Lotus Temple, and Agra does have the Taj Mahal. I agree with you that most of the cities look more Western when it comes to their buildings (especially housing). You would think Microsoft could at least come up with different templates for large regions of the world–East Asia, South Asia, regions of Africa, Europe, North America, etc. Maybe in a future stage.
The answer to your question is that it will probably take a little while longer for an India update from a private developer. Developers have updated India for other sims, but MSFS being so relatively new, they haven’t caught up to it yet. I’m keeping my eyes peeled.
Another Indian American here. I would love to see a full World Update for India. Would be awesome to fly over the Sea Link in Mumbai, India Gate/Rashtrapathi Bhavan in Delhi, UB City in Bangalore and see them as true to life. Unfortunately it took quite a long time for Indian airports to be rendered in high quality even for FSX/P3D. It seems like India is of less interest to a lot of simmers, which is unfortunate given how much there is to see and how few developers are willing to give it a shot. I foresee Microsoft doing a lot more updates for European countries, South Korea, China, etc before finally getting to India.
I wonder isn’t there an active Indian MSFS developer community, which would love to improve the sceneries for India? I can see so many freeware created from hobby developers for Germany, US, UK, Russia, France, … on e.g. flightsim.to, even for the smallest landmarks, but very rarely for India and other Asian countries, not even for the most important landmarks.
Considering the huge IT workforce from India working for all the leading IT companies worldwide (including Microsoft), and their impressive love and dedication for their motherland, there should be a few peers who may interested to start with this project :-
I would love an update for India, it was very interesting place to explore. I spend about a week flying around India and surroundings.
Varanasi screams for the photogrammetry treatment, should be at the top of the list. I follow my trip along on Google Maps, hence on the RL pictures included. The cities indeed look like American cities no matter where you are. No point in getting too close.
It could be worse, most of central China doesn’t even have aerial data…
Adding landmarks without proper aerial data doesn’t really work anyway. It creates this nasty contrast, for example the Konark Sun Temple
There’s plenty room for improvement everywhere, for example Bagan
with one (out of 2200) temple modeled in game
The real thing
Photogrammetry has issues as well, trees usually look pretty bad. It’s the only option though. Modelling 2200 temples and getting the sim to run with 2200 separate custom objects…
Photogrammetry should work very well for Varanasi and other cities. But firstly, improved, more localized, variation in houses and vegetation will help a lot. The same trees everywhere is just as immersion breaking as the same houses everywhere.
All of South Asia, and other Asian regions, should really be reworked to better capture temples, mosques, and other ancient buildings that are unique to each of these Asian countries.
I’d also argue that all of SE Asia needs better topography and far, far better coastlines, including the addition of countless watermasks (low-lying coral shores). Will it ever happen? Doubtful.
I’d certainly like to see an update to South East Asia. It would be a wonderful part of the world to explore VFR. I’m really looking forward to the World Updates in that part of the world. Hopefully, the World Updates will entice third-party and freeware developers to turn their attention there as well.
You forgot to rename your screenshot before uploading! Not sure if I could have found it without, but I have been there in FS2020
The home of Bollywood! I usually take long distance shots of non PG cities, close ups makes everything look the same. Btw shouldn’t it be Mullywood since the city name changed
Not much to update, Google doesn’t have any decent data either
