I made some Ortho scenery for a forest, using Bing as a source, and I'm noticing a lot of clouds are built-in to the ground textures. Any idea if MSFS-2020 will use the same source photos as Bing Maps uses? Will they do anything to correct the clouds in Bing's photos, so the ground isn't covered in cloud textures?

Edited September 13, 20196 yr by Coriolis

Yes and no:

Microsoft seems to be using Bing almost everywhere but in some cases (see the thread called "In-game VS Satellite") we can see differences between the two (the last Tekapo lake comparaison)

As for the clouds appearing on the ground, the orthophotos will be processed and cleaned so the clouds are removed and the colors match a lot better.

3 hours ago, Noooch said:

Yes and no:

Microsoft seems to be using Bing almost everywhere but in some cases (see the thread called "In-game VS Satellite") we can see differences between the two (the last Tekapo lake comparaison)

As for the clouds appearing on the ground, the orthophotos will be processed and cleaned so the clouds are removed and the colors match a lot better.

We think/hope they will be processed and cleaned, based on what Phill Spencer said back on the announcement. But some shots we've seen so far (sure it's alpha, thinks will improve a lot in the final version) have some clouds on them. 

So, maybe, we might see some of them in the first versions of the final release, that might be fixed with future updates. The AI can be trained to find and clean the distortions on the orthos, and with time it can be really fast doing it.

Well, you can actually see something that looks like clouds in the ground mesh in one of the videos. That would suggest that they were importing the Bing data raw at the time of making this video. I'm confident they will clean it up via Azure AI though.

https://imgur.com/a/3cI6nlj  (clouds on mesh)