It is great to see how well the tech within MSFS depicts buildings and houses. Quite impressive. I think it would be good for the development team to let the FS community know how updates to scenery will take place and how often they might see this happening.

Specifically, it would be great to know how often they might update existing satellite and aerial scenery, as well as how often they would add or update photogrammetry scenery. Also, how might the user community be made aware of additions or updates.

12 hours ago, bonchie said:

You might as well be asking them to work with the devil. They are direct competitors.

And yet Microsoft is going to use Google's Android OS on the upcoming Surface Duo device (aka, phone). Real life is rather complicated these days. 😊

11 hours ago, guenseli said:

There is no real "rivalry" between Google and Microsoft. They are both big, mature companies and work both for money.

They are absolutely rivals on every single front. Artificial intelligence, cloud services, programming platforms, office software, operating systems, and things we don't even know about yet. 

For reference, these locations (and many others) have already been compared in the thread below:
 

 

Edited October 23, 20196 yr by viz

3 hours ago, viz said:

For reference, these locations (and many others) have already been compared in the thread below:
 

 

True, but those are missing the comparison with the photogrammetry scenes from Google. The images in this thread specifically allow us to compare the auto generated buildings and objects with their real life counterparts. 

As others have said, Europe seems to be quite old in terms of map data. The satellite imagery of my (second) home city Ostend is over 7 years old! Actual buildings and piers have since been build.

10 hours ago, simtom said:

As others have said, Europe seems to be quite old in terms of map data. The satellite imagery of my (second) home city Ostend is over 7 years old! Actual buildings and piers have since been build.

Fortunately 7 year old satellite imagery still beats landclass any day of the week. Whew!

3 minutes ago, suncoastflyer said:

Fortunately 7 year old satellite imagery still beats landclass any day of the week. Whew!

Haha yes, for sure! I guess those will be the new things to complain about 😅

It was more meant to show the difference between Bing and Google. Fact is that the latter just has more up-to-date imagery. Fortunately, when Bing receives updates so will we.

In my hometown the imagery in both Bing and Google is only about a year behind, so I guess this varies from region to region (mine’s in Europe as well). Unfortunately, the quality difference is painfully big as seems to be the case in most places. I really wonder how their AI will cope with this. Somewhere they talked about procedural ground textures. I hope I they can balance the poor imagery quality with those at lower altitudes. They’ve got to have something up their sleeves. 

Excellent comparisons but even in pre alpha it looks fantastic and I’m sure it will improve even more. If you look closely of the clips that have been released of EGLL you can see the Concorde on the ground texture.

I know we are looking at the flaws here, but it's still just unbelievable to me that they can take flat ortho photos and use AI to give us even a reasonably accurate, 3D portrayal of what's actually there, including building heights and facade colors.

This is the kind of stuff we thought was science fiction 6 months ago. I remember dreaming about someone being able to do this in X-Plane but it basically being written off as not possible. 

Edited October 24, 20196 yr by bonchie