So, I was in my JS4100 flying a regional African route from FGSL (Malabo) to FKYS (Nsimalen). It was nighttime and I've never approached the airport before, and from 20 miles away I saw distant strobes, but from 6 miles away I saw nothing of the runway. When I was about 3 or 4 miles away the runway strangely appeared into view, and I brought my plane into Nsimalen like I would any other approach. As I came in for the final, I heard "MINIMUMS" called way too early. That's when I realized Microsoft dug a 500 foot canyon into the ground just big enough to fit Nsimalen airport into. So in FSX, this airport is completely surrounded by 300 to 500 foot cliffs, with each cliff about 500 to 1000 feet away from the runway and parking spaces.

 

Knowing Microsoft, this wasn't too much of a surprise. I've been on approach for airports in South America and Asia, and have experienced similar problems, such as in Paro, Bhutan. This airport's runway length was wrong by 2000 feet, and it's taxiways/parking spaces were all messed up. I had to go into ADE and make a lot of changes to the airport to make it somewhat realistic. Those are just two of some of the of the many examples I've experienced, though I have never experienced such strange problems in Europe or the United States. So back to the topic title... Does Microsoft care about the world outside the US and EU?

 

My regards,

Nathan3219

Well for startes do you have 3rd party mesh? Microsoft FSX was released when like 2008 so the data for Airports is very old, maybe thart runway got some added length?

I don't think its that they don't care about the rest of the world but instead they decided to focus their efforts on more "popular" parts of the world such as the EU and US. Obviously modelling the entire globe to the same level of detail is an extremely long and difficult task and they needed to focus their efforts on specific parts.

 

Rich

Well for startes do you have 3rd party mesh? Microsoft FSX was released when like 2008 so the data for Airports is very old, maybe thart runway got some added length?

 

No 3rd party mesh here... I do have some freeware airport addon scenery, but not for South America or Africa.

 

 

I don't think its that they don't care about the rest of the world but instead they decided to focus their efforts on more "popular" parts of the world such as the EU and US. Obviously modelling the entire globe to the same level of detail is an extremely long and difficult task and they needed to focus their efforts on specific parts.

 

Rich

 

You have a good point, because after all I doubt MS sold a lot of copies of FSX in Bhutan.

Now the other side, X-Plane comes with 8 DL DVDs with all the world mesh with nice accuracy. Not many detailed airports like FSX, but the included terrain mesh is a good approach.

 

Ulisses

Microsoft is a US company, and the US is a large market for computer games. Thus it is only natural that they would cater mainly for that, since it is what their staff are most likely to know about. Additionally, the mesh and satellite data gathered by the US Government is public domain, so free to a developer of flight sims, and it is generally of a higher resolution over the US than it is for other countries.

 

It's perfectly understandable why the US would want better data of their own terrain, since not only are their taxpayers funding it, but it is useful for all kinds of applications specific to their own country, such as mapping, forestry, communications, transport planning etc, etc. Generally speaking, that kind of data is not free when other countries gather it, in fact we are fortunate that the US Space Shuttle radar mapped a large part of the Earth's surface, since being public domain data, other countries and developers outside the US were able to benefit from it. Try and get hold of terrain data that the UK's Ministry of Defence gathered from its high altitude recon missions,(even if you could), and for free, and you would (ever so politely) get told to sod off LOL If you tried telling US taxpayers that, when it was them who paid for the warplanes which gathered the data, they'd storm the Whitehouse, and rightly so.

 

Al

Well, you know for the US and western Europe, data is readily available from national and commercial sources for automated development of scenery. Other places, not so much (for example, only in the last year did PRC publish data giving positions in WGS84, and just about everything in FSX for PRC is misplaced). But the beauty of FSX is, it isn't that hard to fix/improve an aiport (though doing so on a massive scale maybe isn't so easy).

 

scott s.

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I spend alot of time using FSX and fly all over the world and I've found there are all sorts of errors in the program involving airports in remote areas. Just try flying over the south pole for starters or landing at the airport there.