Would be nice to see this as the latest Spain update seems to have only updated 3 buildings in the whole of the Canary Islands. Siam Park Tenerife, AC Hotel Las Palma de Gran Canaria, Maspalomas lighthouse, La Palma lava field are all Poi’s that have been ignored.
No Madeira update has also disappointed many.
Would also be great if by the WU9 release Costa Brava could have at least the buildings over 7-storey modeled.
Currently not a hotel balcony in sight there - hotel balcony is the number 1 danger and feature of 90% of Spain holidays.
Barcelona is not Costa Brava. It goes from Blanes to the French Border.
We were also promised a v2 of USA world update, last year. For those who quickly want to say “USA is already done” – it was only partially done; obviously it’s an enormous country with multiple major airports and POIs… they need to finish it. The maps in the USA are literally 10 years old, in some places.
I remember Jörg saying that there would be three updates to the US.
But, I imagine that people would be out with pitchforks if they didn’t go around the world once before updating the US again.
I’d like to see some real continental variety on these updates. 9 known WU so far and currently there are zero photogrammetry cities in South America, Africa, Middle East, and apart from Japan none in Asia either. These places cover more than 80% of the world’s population and would provide heaps of variety in the scenery, if they existed.
I know that availability of data is a factor in these decisions, but look at AquilaSimX’s MSFS world map, https://cutt.ly/fsmap, it’s clear that both Europe and USA have huge coverage compared to any other area of the world. I’m sure to some extent this is understandable but I feel it’s gone far enough.
I want to fly over Rio, Delhi, cities in Africa, and many cities in Asia, for a completely different experience to Western countries cities. I hope for the next few WU to cover some of Africa, S America, Asia and redress the balance.
I think the way Canary Islands were handled is quite alright for a World Update. After all the Canary Island’s main features are nature, and the great mesh as well as the new road textures make the Canary Islands very good.
Also the Canary Islands received three hand-crafted POIs on La Palma and Tenerife. That’s more than you can expect considering the sheer size or the area a World Update has to consider. So getting three POIs of 98 for an area this small IMHO is adequate.
In addition there are several good freeware mods available for La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas and the observatories on Tenerife. And there’s a simple mod that removes the trees from the volcanoes. Would have been nice to have that included in the WU.
In contrast I was disappointed that the Islas Baleares have been totally ignored in WU8 and the Palma cathedral is still a large office building.
The Azores and Madeira also have mainly natural beauty and very few architectural landmarks. So I can understand there are no POIs there - HOWEVER the mesh still is the same as before and Madeira still has all those rivers flowing down the mountains where the artificial levadas are in real life. That simply looks ridiculous. However, I also was in contact with a known dev recently who told me currently there are no high res meshes available for the Azores and Madeira.
To summarise:
I don’t think the Cape Verde Islands and the rest of Macronesia are worth a WU. The area is tiny. There are few architectural landmarks, and just an adapted mesh and a few changes in vegetation don’t warrant a large update.
For anyone disappointed with the fact that neither the Canaries or the Balearics have been noticeably updated, there are a number of decent freeware addons at flightsim.to. I regularly use the Palma city and Ibiza sceneries which I think are by Ezro (He has done a lot of great photo sceneries if you search for him).
There are a few for the Canaries too, though I can’t remember the best ones offhand.