As I could see from the videos, rooftops are the same shape and colour, but with license to put in there some extras like aircondicion, pipes..

The facades also have the same pattern for windows and doors across buildings. So when no aerial photos (from airplane) are available they fill the gaps with autogen textures for facades, as far I have seen.

 

2 hours ago, Noooch said:

All the buildings of the entire planet are made by photogrametry (1000 places,400 among those being cities), or by other sources (bing satellite images, OSM etc...)

You can even see in the "In-game vs Satellite" thread a comparaison between a rural area in Africa being very well modelled in MSFS by Azure.

The hole world will be VFR and will look great. And most importantly, developers said the sim will be updated like Bing, which means the sim will look more and more accurate as time pass.

But in the London clip there are a lot of tall buildings missing... 

6 minutes ago, aleex said:

But in the London clip there are a lot of tall buildings missing... 

The sim will be updated as Bing is updated (devs)

6 minutes ago, Noooch said:

The sim will be updated as Bing is updated (devs)

The problem is, when will that be? Google says the last major 3d city update was in 2014. MS doesn‘t seem to be very eager in that respect.

A generic 3d autogen building is still better than a flat image. And combining with the correct vector layout and the right trees, etc.. it still beats anything we have now (even with addons) . 

I think the upcoming first preview World will tell us a lot more about all this!

The London footage gives us an impression of what we can expect from cities without photogrammetry. I think all in all it looks good, however, there are clearly some limitations as far as authentic representation’s concerned. Here are some things I noticed:

Non-photogrammetry autogen buildings (or whatever it's called): Placement, colour and layout seem to be very accurate, which is great. It adds to a sense of place (e.g. the reddish terraced houses in London).

While Azure appears to extrapolate colour, layout and placement correctly from the sat images, it apparently is not (yet?) capable of determining the style and materials of the buildings. E.g. instead of the magnificent neoclassical Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich we get something that looks like a modern industrial building.

Also the AI seems to struggle with determining the correct height of the buildings at the moment, at least of some of them, hence there are no skyscrapers in Canary Wharf.

Bridges: Some bridges are missing at the moment. I’m sure these will be added.

Landmarks: The Shard, the O2 and probably other landmarks appear to be handcrafted. I hope and I’m sure there will be a lot more in the release version, especially in places such as London. If not, this would be something for 3^rd party devs. From what we've seen so far it looks good, but it doesn't really feel like London yet.

Airport: For a default airport Heathrow looks fantastic. There are some baked-in aircrafts at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll clean that up.

Rivers: The rivers on the left side carry slightly too much water. On the sat images you can hardly make out that there’s a river, so I guess this means that Azure doesn't extrapolate them from the image (or not only) but has access to some other sources (OSM?). The same could be the case with roads.

This is by no means meant as criticism. The game’s in pre-alpha and I’m sure they are going to polish it up quite a bit, especially cities such as London. Still it's a shame that Bing doesn't have more photogrammetry cities. 

 

12 hours ago, AyserKalypzo said:

Are 

Are you able to see if there is autogen being used or if the buildings in that part of the video are made by using Bing combined with Azure? 

I can't tell for sure as I barely know that specific region, but if you take a careful look you'll notice that there are some buildings that have an identical or similar look. So it seems to me that autogen or whatever it's called is being implemented there.

Like a said in another thread, there's a brazilian Youtube Vlogger who attended at the event in Renton, and he said that he did a flight over São Paulo and the buldings are not authentic.

Edited October 7, 20196 yr by Daniel_Santoro

As we know the scenery in MSFS will be updated as Bing update their imagery and 3d data. I was wondering at what intervals this is going to be and what areas. I’m curious about photogrammetric 3d cities in particular, of which we “only” have 460 to date (sounds like a lot but compare that to Google). So I wrote to Bing Maps and asked. They said they cannot give me specific details and that it depends on when and where their supplier can fly and collect the imagery required. Apparently they receive such imagery all the time, so I guess this means that we can expect regular updates.