Number of 3D cities in MS2020? - use Earth View 3D to see them!

[highflyer2020 607]

1 hour ago, domkle said:

The common sense I was speaking of is not to expect the whole world in PG, if I am not mistaken they never promised that anyway, and make generalization about what they should or shouldn't do without knowing how MS makes the choice of towns and cities. 

May I add that overflying a city like Paris is forbidden (and this interdiction is strictly enforced within minutes) so I don't care if the center is not exactly recreated. 

 

Where did someone say "the entire world should be PG"? You keep trying to stick your head in the sand when we point out this very minor criticism of the sim which is some major European cities have been left out of the PG game.

 

You can fly over Paris just like you can fly over London albeit with a special permit before hand otherwise it's normally off limits for VFR and IFR flights.

 

 

[Dominique_K 10,150]

37 minutes ago, highflyer2020 said:

 

Where did someone say "the entire world should be PG"? You keep trying to stick your head in the sand when we point out this very minor criticism of the sim which is some major European cities have been left out of the PG game.

 

 

 

 

Obviously, the art of a  friendly chat is not your forte. Bye bye.

[Paraffin 2,197]

9 hours ago, Baber20 said:

Thats not the point. When you market something with a specific feature set, you better deliver on it. We didn't ask them for photogrammetric cities. It was their decision to market their sim as such and are liable to criticism if they fail upon it. But still its far too early to judge anything. Lets atleast wait for the sim to enter the beta phase.

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out over time. MS/ASOBO has made the decision to use photogrammetry data to make stunningly realistic-looking cities, but only where the data is available. And it's not going to be available everywhere for years, I expect. Where it isn't available, you get flat orthophoto or landclass terrain with generic autogen buildings. Two very different scenery systems coexisting in one flight sim..

Will the flight sim community be able to adjust to seeing varying levels of realism like that?

Well, we do it already when we add something like Orbx TE scenery to the base sim. So it may not be a big deal once we adjust to it. I do think MS has to be careful how they market the sim. They need to avoid suggesting that the same level of detail is available worldwide, and not in just a few selected areas.
 

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

There is every reason to expect all major world cities ( exceptions such as Chinese ones are reasonable) to get the same treatment as US ones. Not to do so sends confusing messages about how good this new sim is going to be.

See my comments above. The US is going to get better city coverage because that's where the available data is.

I've heard from a non-MS source that the reason Spain has good photogrammetry cities is that an American company has been doing surveys there. It's not that anyone thinks Spain is better than the UK, it's just that the data sets are available for that area. 

MS/ASOBO may be sitting on data we haven't seen in the previews yet. We won't know that until the sim is released. But I suspect that anyone who thinks that all the major cities in the world are going to have the same highly detailed and realistic imagery, is going to be disappointed. That's an unrealistic expectation if you know how this scenery is generated. 

[highflyer2020 607]

I wonder how long before  MS realise they do the PG them selves and sell it to us as future updates?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

See my comments above. The US is going to get better city coverage because that's where the available data is.

I've heard from a non-MS source that the reason Spain has good photogrammetry cities is that an American company has been doing surveys there. It's not that anyone thinks Spain is better than the UK, it's just that the data sets are available for that area. 

MS/ASOBO may be sitting on data we haven't seen in the previews yet. We won't know that until the sim is released. But I suspect that anyone who thinks that all the major cities in the world are going to have the same highly detailed and realistic imagery, is going to be disappointed. That's an unrealistic expectation if you know how this scenery is generated. 

When something appears too good to be true you hope that you’re just being cynical. In all the videos published by Microsoft there was never any mention that the incredible detail would only be available for certain parts of the planet. Not unreasonably people thought they would be able to fly over their nearest big city and see the same as is depicted in the video.

I’ve just opened Google Maps and switched to satellite 3D view. I zoomed in to central London and saw the Shard, Parliament and the other buildings I mentioned yesterday. All visible. So the data is there but not in the hands of the people dealing with Microsoft. Why? That’s rhetorical by the way. 😉 Only a few will know the reason.

Maybe the situation will change by the time the beta is released. For now I’m afraid I shall hope for the best but expect something less wonderful. That way I won’t be too disappointed.

Still, if you’re living the States - whoopee! 

Edited December 27, 2019 by Ray Proudfoot

[Tuskin38 6,532]

There’s nothing saying that London won’t have photogrammetry by time of launch. It is all still WIP after all.

 

Also some landmarks are hand built, for example the space needle. I wouldn’t be surprised if the clock tower and the parliament buildings were one of them.

I’m hoping Ottawa gets some love personally. It’s lacking even in FSX.

Edited December 27, 2019 by Tuskin38

[jlund 380]

After all the WOWS and OMG's over the presentation and videos they have posted, people are getting more and more critical about it, and I can somehow understand why, cause it's highly unrealistic that the whole world will look as we have seen in the videos so far. Even though the Azure AI looks very effective, it is still making guesses to how ie. a city will look with different landmarks, buildings etc. To make a city without photogrammety look like it does in real life there has to be made lots and lots of custom buildings, bridges, etc etc.

But we have NEVER seen a sim as detailed as what MS/Asobo is making now, so let's just enjoy it when it comes out and eventually it will be better and better as they have said it's an ongoing project.

[jlund 380]

Speaking of landmarks and buildings. I watch Tour de France each year, not only for the race itself, but also for the beautiful landscape they come through, and one thing I notice is the many castles and churches they pass. I then took a look in Sketchup 3D warehouse with the keywords France and Castles, and wow there's a lot of them. How cool would it be to have some sort of scenery design program in MSFS that would make it possible to place 3D buildings and landmarks from ie. Sketchup or Blender in the places that doesn't have Photogrammetry scenery, I know there might be some copyright issues, but as I said, it's just a thought 🙂 

[HarvettBradford 1]

I once cried when I was sentence to be hung whit an old rope. So i know how they fell...

[Scottoest 1,561]

19 hours ago, jlund said:

After all the WOWS and OMG's over the presentation and videos they have posted, people are getting more and more critical about it, and I can somehow understand why, cause it's highly unrealistic that the whole world will look as we have seen in the videos so far. Even though the Azure AI looks very effective, it is still making guesses to how ie. a city will look with different landmarks, buildings etc. To make a city without photogrammety look like it does in real life there has to be made lots and lots of custom buildings, bridges, etc etc.

But we have NEVER seen a sim as detailed as what MS/Asobo is making now, so let's just enjoy it when it comes out and eventually it will be better and better as they have said it's an ongoing project.

This is what people have to keep in mind.  Will this probably look leaps and bounds better than virtually any other sim out-of-the-box?  Yes.  Will the areas with photogrammetry probably look better than paid add-ons in any other sim?  Yes, based on the advanced lighting effects and stuff alone.

Will the entire world, or even most cities, have this kind of detailed data?  NO! Of course not!  And it would be incredibly unreasonable to expect otherwise!

I'm sure the sim will still look beautiful overall, and I also expect that it'll continue to look even better as Bing satellite and photogrammetry data improves and they fold it into the sim.  But Asobo aren't working some sort of black magic here - they are constrained by the limits of the data for the planet, and trying to use Azure AI to extrapolate out a little bit more.

People need to keep all of this in mind, so they aren't disappointed by unrealistic expectations at launch.  Like the complaints about the "default" airport generation, which is still nonetheless better than how sims like X-Plane do it.  Asobo can't magically create 40,000 airports with correct modeling and details.  It would everyone at Asobo the rest of their natural lives to do that.

On the plus side, this leaves companies like OrbX plenty of "cracks" to fill in for an optional fee.

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

I don't think it's about picky people or extremely high expectations. It's about the fact that it is supposed to be a world simulator, not an american simulator, and that there are competitors which demonstrated how photogrammetry can be used for European (but not only) cities too.
And to be honest, if Bing didn't manage to cover them until today, i seriously doubt a reason to do it now will be the existance of a flight simulator linked to its data but we'll see.

[Paraffin 2,197]

11 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

I don't think it's about picky people or extremely high expectations. It's about the fact that it is supposed to be a world simulator, not an american simulator, and that there are competitors which demonstrated how photogrammetry can be used for European (but not only) cities too.

I don't think it can be called an "American simulator" as long as there are equally detailed cities available elsewhere, even if not in the same number.

MS/ASOBO is gambling that we'd rather have the photogrammetry cities where the data is available, or where they've made a decision to invest in it, instead of a more "egalitarian" flight sim where every city is treated equally with generic autogen buildings.

So far, it seems to be paying off with so many going ga-ga over the more detailed areas. They need that selling point with a sim that has very few aircraft to start with, compared with the competition. 
 

Quote

And to be honest, if Bing didn't manage to cover them until today, i seriously doubt a reason to do it now will be the existance of a flight simulator linked to its data but we'll see.

I agree, It seems that MSFS is leveraging data used for other Microsoft applications. They're not going to commission aerial surveys of someone's favorite city just to fill in the gaps.

The silver lining is that a scenery engine based on streaming from a remote database should be very easy to continually update, as new data becomes available. That must be a headache for anyone like Orbx considering scenery add-ons to fill in the gaps, but it's good news for the users if the default scenery is continually updated.

[RALF9636 1,974]

1 hour ago, Scottoest said:

 Like the complaints about the "default" airport generation, which is still nonetheless better than how sims like X-Plane do it.  Asobo can't magically create 40,000 airports with correct modeling and details. 

Complaints about default airports?

We haven't seen any default airports yet, have we?

 

 

[Scottoest 1,561]

2 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

Complaints about default airports?

We haven't seen any default airports yet, have we?

There's been some word leaked from the alpha, about how the non-modeled airports look.  And it's basically what you'd expect - basic textured modular building blocks, with the placement of said "blocks" extrapolated from the satellite imagery of the airport.

[RALF9636 1,974]

2 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

There's been some word leaked from the alpha, about how the non-modeled airports look.  And it's basically what you'd expect - basic textured modular building blocks, with the placement of said "blocks" extrapolated from the satellite imagery of the airport.

Okay.

Since they haven't shown any default airport to the public yet and the discovery series "Airports" is only announced for mid February I assume they are still working on default airports.

I agree that - as well as with photogrammetry coverage - we should not expect too much but I still hope for something a lot less immersion-breaking than P3D default airports.