Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the western half of New Guinea in Indonesia (Papua, West Papua, Central Papua, South Papua and Highlands Papua provinces), have some of the most fascinating and challenging bush flying in the world. With a long history of bush aviation and a high density of bush airstrips in often rugged terrain, there are active communities like Bush Divers dedicated to PNG/New Guinea bush flying.
There are huge problems, though, with the scenery in current default MSFS. Many, many mesh glitches resulting in weird spikes in the landscape (one is higher than the highest New Guinea mountain!). Very poor satellite imagery in many areas.
A world update to gather better mesh, better satellite imagery and better water masks would go a long way to improving the flight sim experience in this amazing part of the world.
Hooray! This has, of course, now happened: World Update 13 Oceania, released in April 2023, contains many great improvements to PNG/western New Guinea and other Pacific Islands countries.
I like the general idea of a PNG/ pacific islands update.
It is worth noting though that very little information is available for a lot of PNG, a lot of the maps are just wrong and there is limited low level aerial photography available.
Well yes it’s true that geodata for PNG / New Guinea generally has lower resolution than some other places, but there is definitely much better elevation data available than MSFS currently uses, and also definitely much better satellite data in many regions.
The mesh appears to be based on SRTM (the Space Shuttle data from 2000) which unfortunately has many glitches (i.e. spikes and holes) in New Guinea - the same data used by OpenTopoMap. There are other DEM datasets around which don’t have those problems.
Lord Almighty, please bestow your mercy on this beautiful land, rid it of its hundreds of horrid spikes and the miserable mesh, give it the high resolution textures it deserves and put it out of its torment.
Aehm, thanks man!
And if you are there just look for things in Fiji, it also looks bad there. And anyway, the whole area, please dont forget it.
Awesome! Yes, I see it also includes Antarctica. Very excited about this one. Would be great if they could do similar ones like that for South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Arctic, before moving back to more detailed updates of smaller areas.
