13 minutes ago, sjt said:

Wrong software, I believe guys. Try this instead: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/earth-view-map-3d/9nblggh1xnq7?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

...then try looking at Seattle, San Fran, Chicago, NYC or any of the major cities in the USA. Way to go - but quite the basis !

Installed it. US cities look nice indeed. Tried a few cities in Germany, they're just pancake images while looking great 3D in Google Earth.

Kind regards, Michael

8 minutes ago, pmb said:

tried a few cities in Germany, they're just pancake images while looking great 3D in Google Earth.

Yes of course. I guess that's where the AI starts to be needed. I don't suppose one or the other has all the answers as far as 3D- mapping is concerned, but adding the good bits of one to the better bits of another, and doing some AI extrapolation with the kind of processing power MS has - and it doesn't require too much imagination to see what can be achieved these days (or "some time in 2020"). Even if not "simmer perfect" (what is?) there should be enough to make quite a few people drool...………..and no doubt will leave enough crumbs for the naysayers to be able to say "I told you so"

Edited June 13, 20196 yr by sjt

15 minutes ago, irrics said:

As a consumer and born and raised Seattle person, I care about that city area being amazing, and it’s much better in the trailer. 

Makes sense.. but for me I care what is in between the cities as this is where most of my virtual flights take place, and for my part of the world we don't even have 3D cities in the 3D Earth app, so whilst I'm really looking forward to this sim just like everyone here, I'm also well aware that it might not look as good as that trailer in the parts of the world I care about.... but damn those clouds are good 🙂

3 minutes ago, pmb said:

Installed it. US cities look nice indeed. Tried a few cities in Germany, they're just pancake images while looking great 3D in Google Earth.

This was my observation as well. Only Portsmouth and Southampton in the UK, and absolutely nothing at all in some other countries I fly in compared to Google Earth. Perhaps they'll do something similar to Dubai for these other cities (so we get generic autogen versions of them), but I do think the initial 3D shots of the cities are giving people very high expectations.

5 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Makes sense.. but for me I care what is in between the cities as this is where most of my virtual flights take place,

With ortho and machine/cloud computing touching this up, I’m optimistic on this. 

 

5 minutes ago, tonywob said:

but dman those clouds are good 🙂

So true. Best I’ve ever seen in a flight sim, hands down

Thanks, Microsoft! I will hold all my new purchases addons until 2020. My wife will be happy and my wallet too.😃 Time to save money.🐷💰

 

 

3 minutes ago, sjt said:

Yes of course. I guess that's where the AI starts to be needed.

Sorry , no. You simply need correct height data an AI has no real chance in this aspect. Their terrain model is simpler than google earth. But do they have this data, will they have this data. That's in fact a lot of the work that AlPilotX and tonywob did. Where can I get which data and how reliable is it.

1 minute ago, Longranger said:

Sorry , no.

No probs. It's not my forte and only said "I guess". By AI I was including autogen creation of sensible buildings on top of the squashed flat imprints on the ground. I had believed (incorrectly - thank you for correcting me on that) that that was how realistic buildings would be placed in the correct place - even if not photo-representative of the actual building  that's there in every case

4 minutes ago, Longranger said:

 AI has no real chance in this aspect.

Boy, there is a comment that won’t likely age well. LOL

...indeed. I think so too, but not my forte 😍

 

Edited June 13, 20196 yr by sjt

1 hour ago, tronied said:

Ok, last one. Heres the view of the meteor crater in Windows Maps:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvBxAIEKll_t5H7XjGPe5mZ88dvE

And here it is in Flight Sim and you can see more autogen coming into play:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvBxAIEKll_t5H-zGkS2ONMg1u6N

It's surprisingly accurate with it's tree placement as I thought it had just guessed those in the above box and placed them arbitrarily around the river, but they do match bushes that are actually there. Furthermore, the autogen seems a bit gung-ho with the rock placement in the lower box 😉 It decided to dump two loads of boulders on the road. Still, nice to see it's making an effort and compared to Windows Maps it looks night and day.

[EDIT] Can't seem to fix those embedded images for some reason. Will work if you click on them though

The links work for me but you should embed all images partly for security reasons.  We get spammers and others who penetrate our site (but not for long) and they some times post a link to malicious code. The post might tell one to click on the link to see the images. To embed, on OneDrive, you select the file you want to embed and then look up in the menu and you will see "embed".  Click on that and you will have a link which you copy and then paste into your post.  Instead of seeing the link, the images will appear in your post.  We require this for videos too.

A few points.

There's already an SDK.  Aircraft  couldn't be developed without one, whether internally by Microsoft itself or by third party developers.  It may or may not be released to the public at game launch, or at some later date.  Depending on the architecture of the sim, it may be useless unless you're developing something to submit to Microsoft for inclusion in the sim.  Developers who want to do this will have access to the SDK.

I intend to pay for one month of the Game Pass to give the sim a try.  That's about $5 at current rates from what I understand.  If I don't like the sim I'll check out what else they have available during the month.  If I like the sim I'll buy it as a standalone package and drop the subscription.

What I've seen so far indicates this will be a client/server situation, with the sim running on the server and your computer running just a client displaying what the server sends.  Basically watching a movie.  All the computationally heavy lifting will be done on the server.  The only thing against this is that the sim looks like it's going to be released with the new XBox, and why do that (except obvious marketing reasons) unless the console will be doing a lot of processing?  Lots of things I don't like about this but I'll give it a fair chance.

I might be wrong about the client/server thing, but we'll find out soon enough.

In the mean time I have a year and a half to buy and enjoy new stuff for P3Dv4 as it is updated for that platform.

Hook

If I was a huge company moving forwards wanting to stamp my mark, up against the likes of Sony and throwing a lot of money around and pushing many ideas about in terms of gaming, right across the board, i'd def actually look at least briefly at what's currently out there and driving the current fad forwards.

If Microsoft have decided to push a new MS Flight Sim to the fore, do you honestly think they've not at least dipped their toes into these and other forums and indeed looked at the 'competition' in order to make a satisfactory plan and throw money into, what's for sure a niche market, albeit a fanatical and indeed relevant market? 

Flight Sim has crazily always been there right at the start of home computing, when computing power was nowhere near what was needed for the task, yet it figured across many platforms and has been enjoyed immensely. Now? Finally some more acknowledgment for a very loyal and valid following.

I say, go MS... Flailing around with old code and ways of doing things, when it can be turned on its head with a good injection of cash and vision is a good thing.

Pretty much done with my very capable machine and GPU huffing and puffing rendering old code to my screen in a very inefficient way.....

Go MS and i hope they deliver something beyond what's basically been rehashed code from days gone by..

Microsoft created opensource building footprints for all of the US and Canada using AI from very high resolution aerial imagery for use in OpenStreetMap, and it did quite a decent job but there are errors as well (e.g. It sees certain shapes in the water or terrain features as buildings), and it's not as complete as commercial providers, but perfectly fine for a flight simulator. These I think are now on Bing maps. For the rest of the world, they haven't done anything like this yet, and by checking Bing maps it's using various sources such as OpenStreetMap, Here, TomTom, etc... I could be wrong, but I don't think the Azure AI is generating building footprints straight from the aerial imagery, but rather the building footprints are 3D projections of the footprints that can clearly been seen on Bing maps and is tech we've all seen for years in our current flight sims. It could be that the AI is taking a good guess of what the building footprint might be, and it is also placing terrain around as well and filling in blanks. Whatever it is, it's very cool and interesting tech and I'd love to see it in action

 

 

During my Windows Maps fun today, I noticed something that could be a serious improvement to what we are used to.  KGSP, KATL and KCLT were not a flat square (As in a flatten BGL).  One can actually see the 20-30ft elevation changes.  Granted, it is not as clear as in real life, but a huge improvement over what we are accustomed to in FS.

An AI can only guess according to a pattern. First it has to learn this pattern. Some patterns are the same but for considerable parts you have to relearn his AI. The problem is that an AI has nothing to9 do with intelligence it is simply a pattern recognition model. What do you think why we want to know how this works outside cities. Do they really have an AI that would fix their current disadvantage compared to google, How often and where do they have to relearn their AI.