One thing this sim has taught me is how far we still have to go to make accurate digital maps. Bing is behind Google yet Google maps is far from complete as well. So many unnamed rivers and places, northern Canada nothing but a pixelated mess. Siberia mostly missing, most of China as well. Middle Africa is a blank slate, many islands are a mess.
What disappointed me most about Australia is the fake water covering up all the seasonal salt lakes. It looks so colorful on google maps, in the sim, just lakes or white blotches in the desert.
Rain forests, mountains, volcanoes, islands, anything that’s regularly covered in clouds is a mess of ugly standard textures patching out the clouds captured on the sat/aerial data. Where there are no clouds, baked in shadows on mountains and cliffs make it all look off, as if there are two suns on the sky.
I prefer to fly low, the higher you go the more glitches are visible. Yet in many places the resolution is very poor closer to the ground. We have a long way to go before we have have a decent model of the Earth.
The grass is not greener on the other side though. California has the best textures and the most photogrammetry areas. They stick out like a sore thumb in most places, colors don’t match and the buildings only look decent f a very narrow distance range, not too close, not too far. Data is from 2014 at the latest (as seen from different construction projects) and the Grand Canyon looks pretty ugly up close. But at least it’s there, China has no mountains at all in a lot of places.
Not much Asobo can do, apart for maybe getting a better height mesh. Bing maps needs to step up as MS most likely won’t allow FS2020 to use Google data.
What I would like to see is a subscription model for integrating 3rd party enhancements. Managing add-ons while flying all over the world is a hopeless task. (not to mention the costs of buying all add-on content) So I opt to buy none. Having the sim pull detailed premium data and landmarks of the server where available would be a much better solution than managing the community folder locally. Worth paying for imo. MS is all about game pass, why no world pass.