Exploring the vast Earth Microsoft has created for Flight Simulator 2020

1 hour ago, Gulfstream said:

Exploring the vast Earth Microsoft has created for Flight Simulator 2020

Regrettably it appears as though it may require [at least] a $65 quarterly subscription to view the entire article; but the first, available, free part was great!

Wow wow wow, looking at some of the other videos on Youtube-  It's going to be hard to jump back into X-plane after this.  I ditched P3D months ago, after 3 years, because I couldn't take the lousy environment in the sim- even with all of the addons and tweaks.  X-plane is also a disappointment considering what the community wants and what developers create.  FS2020 is going to break through many of those limitations.  I'm lickin' my chops.  Can't wait for this release... What a fundamental game changer this will be.

10 minutes ago, dal330200 said:

Wow wow wow, looking at some of the other videos on Youtube-  It's going to be hard to jump back into X-plane after this.  I ditched P3D months ago, after 3 years, because I couldn't take the lousy environment in the sim- even with all of the addons and tweaks.  X-plane is also a disappointment considering what the community wants and what developers create.  FS2020 is going to break through many of those limitations.  I'm lickin' my chops.  Can't wait for this release... What a fundamental game changer this will be.

It looks as if MSFS is set to blow everything else out of the water. More the pity that a lot of the community (myself included) has been led astray with things which may have little promise of matching such a revolutionary step forward in the genre. What could have been if the original flight simulator had not been allowed to fall by the wayside (and just perhaps we would be at the MSFS stage now)!

That said, we have little while to go before we can all try it out and it is too early to say whether or not it will attract widespread adoption in preference to anything else.

3 hours ago, RustyFlyer said:

Regrettably it appears as though it may require [at least] a $65 quarterly subscription to view the entire article; but the first, available, free part was great!

Apologies, I actually didn't mean to post this article, but another one ... but that has now been posted in the main thread.  This is a great article, but as you mentioned, it needs a sub.  Never noticed that as I have one.

I tried to delete the post but I guess that is restricted to mods on AVSIM.

Edited September 30, 20196 yr by Gulfstream

From the Polygon article ... this is a concern of mine (but might not often be relevant), the "sides" of things.  Yes, they do buildings in cities because they are aerial photogs captured at angles from aircraft ... but the sides of cliffs, where planes haven't mapped and satellites can't see .... well ...

Maybe this is where 3rd parties step in to clean up specific areas of interest.  OR, it just automatically improves itself as the Azure data/algos improve.

Quote

Later, I dropped in over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, doing my best impersonation of Will Smith in Independence Day. Under the direct sunlight of a blue sky the turbulence was astonishing. So too was the scenery. But as I banked left and drew up alongside a near-vertical cliff face the textures turned to mush. Captured from orbit, Bing’s satellite images simply don’t have any visual information for certain sections of that landscape. The result is a weird, banded smear along a rock face hundreds of feet tall.

 

Edited September 30, 20196 yr by Gulfstream

4 hours ago, Gulfstream said:

From the Polygon article ... this is a concern of mine (but might not often be relevant), the "sides" of things.  Yes, they do buildings in cities because they are aerial photogs captured at angles from aircraft ... but the sides of cliffs, where planes haven't mapped and satellites can't see .... well ...

Maybe this is where 3rd parties step in to clean up specific areas of interest.  OR, it just automatically improves itself as the Azure data/algos improve.

  

If MS doesn't have the imagery for that within Bing, I'm pretty sure no other sim devs will have neither. You can see a lot of those black spots (shadows) in any payware using orthophotos. We just can't get too demanding. The technology has it's limitations.

But there's still a hope with the A.I. learning how to correct those inconsistencies in future updates.

It would be nice if that Azure AI could generate realistic high resolution textures for those vertical cliff faces, even if these were selected as a "closest match to surrounding terrain" from a limited generic texture set. Those stretched textures are a problem that needs to be addressed.

5 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

It would be nice if that Azure AI could generate realistic high resolution textures for those vertical cliff faces, even if these were selected as a "closest match to surrounding terrain" from a limited generic texture set. Those stretched textures are a problem that needs to be addressed.

One of the streamers talked about how the MSFS team said Azure can read "blurred out" parts of satellite images (i.e. blurred out because foreign governments requested it) and put generic objects on top of them. 

I see no reason they can't get that going for blurred out portions of cliff faces etc. and just have color matched textures there.