Actually if this is true worldwide, I don't think we can expect much from any sim, now or in the future!

35 minutes ago, Noooch said:

Actually if this is true worldwide, I don't think we can expect much from any sim, now or in the future!

Well of course it's true worldwide if we're talking about photogrammetry, OSM data, or even high-res orthophotos. That just isn't available everywhere. Or even where you might expect it.

I've mentioned before that I live 50 miles as the crow flies from Seattle, one of the major tech hubs in the USA. But my small town has no 3D photogrammetry data on Google Earth. Zoom in on my house, or the small downtown area, and it's just a flat photo. 

It doesn't mean we can't expect much from any sim now or in the future. Eventually everything will be mapped in 3 dimensions at high resolution, because the data's just too darned useful to all sorts of business, industry, and governments worldwide. It will just take longer in developing countries.

What we may get in the new MSFS is at least an incremental improvement in realism for areas that do have the data. That would be progress, if not worldwide sim nirvana.

9 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Well of course it's true worldwide if we're talking about photogrammetry, OSM data, or even high-res orthophotos. That just isn't available everywhere. Or even where you might expect it.

I've mentioned before that I live 50 miles as the crow flies from Seattle, one of the major tech hubs in the USA. But my small town has no 3D photogrammetry data on Google Earth. Zoom in on my house, or the small downtown area, and it's just a flat photo. 

It doesn't mean we can't expect much from any sim now or in the future. Eventually everything will be mapped in 3 dimensions at high resolution, because the data's just too darned useful to all sorts of business, industry, and governments worldwide. It will just take longer in developing countries.

What we may get in the new MSFS is at least an incremental improvement in realism for areas that do have the data. That would be progress, if not worldwide sim nirvana.

I think I expressed myself poorly. What I meant was just the opposite. My town is also flat, like yours, but with OSM we can see all the buildings heights and shapes so I think this will be represented very well in Msfs. If I am not mistaken we already have this in XP with simheaven free addons (XEurope...) The only area where Microsoft can make a step forward is how the autogen actually looks. That's why it will be very realistic to have different autogen styles matching each part of the world (like I recently posted in "What we want")

Edited August 8, 20196 yr by Noooch

Actually, Google Maps has got ALL cities covered by photogrametry in Europe, even in Eastern Europe, at least where I checked.

I know MS and Google are competitors but in a perfect world, MS would buy that data to make us happy and let us have the best sim ever!

Edited August 8, 20196 yr by Noooch

On 8/2/2019 at 6:52 PM, F737NG said:

Dominique will probably recall my post over on Orbx's forums regarding autogen size.



As an example, the maximum permitted height of a two-storey residential building in NSW is 8.5m, which is 28ft per this U.S. 'mean roof elevation' shown in the image immediately above.

Unscientifically, I measured some two storey buildings around the world in P3D and got an average of 12.2m (40 ft) which is a substantial 43% taller than 8.5m. Single storey bungalows measured 10m (33 ft).

While noting that you can get Redwoods and Giant Sequoias reaching 107m (350 ft), they are tall and thin (relative in dimension to their height). Certainly not the oversized bushes we see in FSX and P3D. It appears that our trees all over the sim world are often far too wide and 'bushy' in appearance.

Oversized autogen gives the wrong impression of altitude and speed.

I think Azure AI will get it right for autogen proportions in the new sim. But as Heli points out, they need to ensure that we get region appropriate buildings and vegetation. That would be good progress.

 

Brilliant post!   House and tree autogen in FSX (and P3D) is an absolute joke!  Absolutely creates a false sense of altitude (you feel you're flying lower than you really are).

I think 3rd party developers will do most of the lighting work. I would pay a lot to make the nights more realistic and to see many different lights. The lights in msfs today just appear to be white or yellow.

 

I mentioned this in another post, after all the previews showing the strength of Asobo's new gen world engine, as well as their attention to details and the use they make of MS AI / technology I feel the Procedural infrastructure and vegetation worldwide will be the best to date in any out of the box flight sim. Simply because MS is not relying on the mixed bag OSM data (that is useful only for North America and most Europe, not the rest of the world). 

We heard Asobo mentioning the AI analyzing aerial imagery and this is not just for trees.

In fact, as I also mentioned in a previous post, MS released a couple of years ago, millions of footprints for the US and Canada, for free. These were produced by their AI (that analyses the Bing aerial imagery). This initiative was way before MS announced MSFS at E3. But it could be related and surely, the same process can be applied to generate footprints for the other continents... For MSFS procedural autogen... 

Also, the tech videos we saw from Asobo, explain and show the two layers in the scenery, one being Photogrammetry where available, the other procedural. In the procedural one, we saw clearly infrastructure based on footprints, featuring the right roofing type mostly and being pretty accurate in terms of height, rich and dense considering it's generic and automated infrastructure.

So I think they have the technology and the skills to easily create customized procedural "autogen" that has nothing to do with FSX random autogen but rather matching the aerial imagery just like what OSM data can produce when processe.... Then with rules, they can customize the autogen per type of architecture vs region/urban areas/town sections etc etc. 

I used the procedural technique (minus AI scanning) in one of my projects using a 3rd party tool. And I know at least France VFR had, as far as I remember, in-house tools for procedural autogen independent from the default FSX autogen techniques...

All in all, Asobo's engine + tech videos + attention to details show that the procedural world, in my opinion, will be pretty dense, customized and the most accurate in a flight sim (before any addon is involved).

 

On ‎8‎/‎2‎/‎2019 at 2:25 PM, domkle said:

LM has worked that out for trees so we can have dnow enser and larger forests with a minimal impact. Maybe the buildings will be optimized in V5 the same way, or I should say, in FS20 😉 ...

 

Interesting, I don't find that.  With the new style trees of P3Dv4, my sim turns to a slideshow flying into places where there are many trees.  I made the flight all the way to Easter Island, for example, for everything to go to pot on final.

8 hours ago, andyjohnston.net said:

Interesting, I don't find that.  With the new style trees of P3Dv4, my sim turns to a slideshow flying into places where there are many trees.  I made the flight all the way to Easter Island, for example, for everything to go to pot on final.

I was talking of the standard autogen trees not the new speedtrees. The comparison is easy, try flying above the LA basin in Orbx SoCal and over a dense forest in Alaska or PNG with a weaker computer.

The  Easter Island is not overgrown with trees,  Are you sure it is not the moai models which ruin your flight ?

Have we got any information on or indication of elevation data/mesh accuracy yet? As I often fly over the alps and happen to know the area rather well it’s quite important to me that the mountains are depicted realistically. In the latest trailer they showed Lake Geneva with the surrounding mountains and although all in all the scenery looks amazing the mountains appear to be a bit too “hilly” and not jagged enough. I know it’s still alpha and it’s an early snow image (some rocks could be covered with snow) but still.

18 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

Have we got any information on or indication of elevation data/mesh accuracy yet? As I often fly over the alps and happen to know the area rather well it’s quite important to me that the mountains are depicted realistically. In the latest trailer they showed Lake Geneva with the surrounding mountains and although all in all the scenery looks amazing the mountains appear to be a bit too “hilly” and not jagged enough. I know it’s still alpha and it’s an early snow image (some rocks could be covered with snow) but still.

A capital point. I don't want to see the 38 m look back to the sim.Now it is funny that you said that, as I was looking closely your post on Argelès-Gazost with the GE rendition exactly for that and didn’t feel it too bad.

I agree, Argelès-Gazost looks pretty good in that respect. I looked at some photos of that area and it looks pretty accurate. What’s slightly worrying me though is this screenshot:

Would be interesting to see this area without snow. Also lower details due to the relatively great distance could be a reason, but I hope that’s not the reason.

5 hours ago, domkle said:

The  Easter Island is not overgrown with trees,  Are you sure it is not the moai models which ruin your flight ?

I was surprised too, but it's not just there.  Lots of places in Africa, for example, do the same.  Though I don't see it much in North America, even landing at out-of-the-way places.

6 hours ago, Shack95 said:

Have we got any information on or indication of elevation data/mesh accuracy yet? As I often fly over the alps and happen to know the area rather well it’s quite important to me that the mountains are depicted realistically. In the latest trailer they showed Lake Geneva with the surrounding mountains and although all in all the scenery looks amazing the mountains appear to be a bit too “hilly” and not jagged enough. I know it’s still alpha and it’s an early snow image (some rocks could be covered with snow) but still.

Unless I missed it there has been no word yet on the mesh resolution.

I also noticed a seemingly relative low mesh resolution in many of their videos and images. To me that stood out from the beginning, the mesh resolution is a little disappointing compared to all other aspects of the scenery so far.

 

Edited January 6, 20206 yr by RALF9636

5 hours ago, Shack95 said:

I agree, Argelès-Gazost looks pretty good in that respect. I looked at some photos of that area and it looks pretty accurate. What’s slightly worrying me though is this screenshot:

Would be interesting to see this area without snow. Also lower details due to the relatively great distance could be a reason, but I hope that’s not the reason.

As it was the case with the trees post discussing what seemed to many like "oversized" and "wrong type"  of trees in central park (snow video), I suppose, here too, the implementation of dynamic snow, just like the procedural trees (that replaced the photogrammetry ones), could be a first draft.

Asobo's powerful engine as well as their attention to details is impressive as far as the technical videos they released tell us, so I suppose the dynamic snow is just a first implementation and I suppose the snow coverage will be eventually refined and improved (ex: based on altitude, temperature, region, season and weather forecast).

I know from my work experience that Marketing teams sometimes ask developer teams to quickly provide previews of their work for special occasions. This is when the devs have no choice but to show what they have done so far in a specific feature... Sometimes it reveals imperfections in other features not completed either... Yet this could give the outside world an impression that the previews show 100% done feature(s). Usually, this is not the case....

Edited January 6, 20206 yr by Claviateur