2 hours ago, fscottee said:

Folks, its quite obvious that seasons will have to depend upon whether Bing satellites have taken seasonal photos.

 

If you browse google earth as an example, most of the satellite imagery is of summer textures, with many exceptions however.  Sometimes you come across an older texture that shows trees without leaves (obviously these satellite images were taken during autumn or winter).  But rarely if ever do you see imagery of snow on the ground unless its an area where there is... always snow on the ground...

 

 

So, its very safe to say that Bing has textures of say, New York state, with snow on the ground, roads, trees.  The difficulty will be in transforming the imagery from say brown leafless tree imagery, to snow cover, utilizing the atmospheric engine, (simulating gradual snow cover accumulation).

 

I think if you just want winter snow covered imagery, yup its easy peasy because Bing has those images.

Where is this coming from? They don't just dump raw Bing satellite imagery in to sim, but probably use it as a base layer for vector data. Just about everything else can be procedurally placed on top of it, like buildings, trees, and also seasonal color pallets and snow which are not hard to generate. In modern practices, you don't need a huge set of different pre loaded textures, but you are able to manipulate the base set with algorithms.

This is just an approximation based on my knowledge of the industry, but it makes a lot more sense and is actually an established practice.

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by Evros

10 hours ago, siggy said:

Thank you, I guess you mean the landing at Toronto Island Airport? The runway looks dark but it is dark anyway, so I am not sure whether it looks any different than a dry runway.

The safest thing to assume is that they aren't going to do everything they've done to make this sim so pretty only to forget wet runways, something every other sim already has and that is exceptionally easy to do by today's graphics standards.

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by bonchie

 

23 hours ago, domkle said:

We've actually seen very little regarding airports. I wish, as I said in another thread, that an ep#5 would be dedicated to them.

Same here.  More specifically, I'd just like to understand what their "solution" is regarding rendering them.  They've said you'll be able to take-off from over 40,000 airports in the world, but obviously it's not remotely feasible to model 40,000 airports manually, and I doubt Bing/Azure is going to able to extrapolate enough data to make them look good and detailed from the close distances you'll be seeing them at.

My guess is maybe they'll "hand model" a bunch of popular airports, and just use generic building block models for the others (while maybe opening it up to third parties to add their own).

We've also seen pushback tugs and actual hangars in that first E3 trailer, which makes me wonder how all of that will be implemented too.

So strange that MSFS2020 accurately models correct star locations and sun and moon positions depending on the seasons but does not model the weather or foliage on the terrain at all during the various seasons....

 

 

 

.

Edited November 2, 20196 yr by Kilo60

22 minutes ago, Kilo60 said:

So strange that MSFS2020 accurately models correct star locations and sun and moon positions depending on the seasons but does not model the weather or foliage on the terrain at all during the various seasons...

The simple explanation is that modeling the former is a looooooooooooooooooooooooot easier and less work than modeling the latter, particularly in an orthophoto based sim.

28 minutes ago, Kilo60 said:

 

These are two issues which are totally unconnected. Displaying sun, moon and stars is a well known computational problem, displaying seasons is a rendering problem, changing textures with the greatest geographical accuracy possible and, hopefully, the accumulation of snow. Passing from LC polygons to ortho maps is a whole new ballgame.

Edited November 2, 20196 yr by domkle

6 hours ago, Scottoest said:

 

Passing from LC maps poorly synchronized with vector data to aerial/sat maps on one hand and allowing for a better insertion in the relief (sloped runways) on the other should be an immense step forward for tens of thousand of airports. 

I am also curious to see how their AI will interpret these maps to inject localized buildings.