A nice summary of the infrastructure types in MSFS

[Dominique_K 10,133]

I do not remember Asobo saying that they use OSM (GPS driven) data, I thought they were using only imagery (sat, aerial and ground) recognition. 

Landscape reconstruction by an artificial intelligence is a technology which has not yet reached its maturity and, as it was pointed out, Asobo cannot know and let alone check the whole planet. That calls for a cooperative effort with the community.  The Bangkok pic raises some questions about the algorithms that were used. Good questions that will help the sim to be even better. That will not necessarily delay the release as this is a long term project. 

[Shack95 2,658]

1 hour ago, Dominique_K said:

I do not remember Asobo saying that they use OSM (GPS driven) data, I thought they were using only imagery (sat, aerial and ground) recognition. 

As far as I know they haven‘t. We deduced it based on some of the screenshots, particularly the one of Tokyo. There it seems that those buildings that are in OSM are placed much more precisely than the others in the sim. But it‘s all speculation. 

Edited May 5, 2020 by Shack95

[Claviateur 789]

No they did not mention OSM at all.

Edit: However, they talked or hinted about different data sources in the Episode 1... 

It's when Shack95 and other users here started sharing links to the OSM location that I compared and saw that it is highly likely OSM data is involved.

OSM is not reliable as it relies on people to map the world... So the quality of our areas of interest depends on the quality of the footprints. Not all footprints are traced precisely and tagged properly. And not all regions let alone areas in a specific city have footprints.

Again, we saw a screenshot from one small portion of the virtual world and after some researches we found out that the infrastructure footprints are similar to OSM and unfortunately the OSM manually traced data in this area is not the best out there. 

North America theoretically, should be the most convincing continent in terms of footprint based infrastructure considering the already available (in-house) Azure AI database.

Edited May 5, 2020 by Claviateur

[Dominique_K 10,133]

I had another hard look at the Tokyo pic. It is convincing enough for me, for a dawn lighting at least. The reconstruction  may indeed come from another source than pure imagery because of some errors : Sumida Park by the river and the planetarium by the tower seem absent for instance.

 

 

[Claviateur 789]

I downloaded the OSM data for the Bangkok area we see in the screenshot and opened it in the OSM editor (JOSM). I placed Bing aerial imagery as a backdrop...

Overall, the tracing quality is rough and approximate, combining many infrastructure and the relevant tags are missing. No building types or heights in the footprints...

You can see in this case that as we thought, the person who traced the area combined many infrastructure... 

And below, it seems the long infrastructures are part of a Palace tag. But this tag does not do much for such a scenery generation process hence, the rules and filters in the scenery generation script produced long residential buildings for this area... Yet this is something to expect for a lot of areas on this planet where footprints are approximate... 

Unfortunately Asobo won't be able to do much with such a global scenery based on rough Data. 
 

Edited May 5, 2020 by Claviateur

[WarpD 824]

It's still light years better than anything else offered at this time.

[Shack95 2,658]

2 hours ago, Claviateur said:

I downloaded the OSM data for the Bangkok area we see in the screenshot and opened it in the OSM editor (JOSM). I placed Bing aerial imagery as a backdrop...

Thanks for this interesting post. I‘m not familiar with the OSM editor, would you say that your findings support the theory that OSM is one of the sources?

[Claviateur 789]

4 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

Thanks for this interesting post. I‘m not familiar with the OSM editor, would you say that your findings support the theory that OSM is one of the sources?

The generated infrastructure in the screenshot are very similar to the footprint shape and coverage in the OSM data. So I think it is highly likely OSM is one of the data source for this area and other areas we saw in other screenshots. 

Also,the lack of tags in the footprints resulted in the procedural height and building types (residential blocks) we saw in the screenshots.

Edited May 5, 2020 by Claviateur

[Darcanlos 89]

Does this mean that editing and improving that OSM area could mean an immediate improvement on the sim’s scenery?

[OHN767 82]

Expectations are way too high i think, a lot of people will be terribly dissapointed when this game is released later this year.

[Doug47 574]

5 minutes ago, OHN767 said:

Expectations are way too high i think, a lot of people will be terribly dissapointed when this game is released later this year.

Why? 

[Claviateur 789]

2 hours ago, Darcanlos said:

Does this mean that editing and improving that OSM area could mean an immediate improvement on the sim’s scenery?

No it's just an online data. If someone edits this area for example and it happens that the data goes into the updated OSM database of this region and let's say Asobo decided later to re-process the whole region or world using updated data, then yes.

But it does not update the scenery automatically at all, it is just an open source map data available online for multiple use. It's not basically done for flight sim scenery.  

But as we do for the other simulator, one needs to download this data and use it in a specific tool by writing an XML script with filters and rules to generate similar global scenery...

Other people use it for navigation or for architecture or urban modeling or previews... It's just an available public data...

If Asobo used OSM, I do not know if they had an agreement and had access to the global database because Open Street Map website does not allow the download of big areas. If someone like me for example wants to get a whole region or country to process in a scenery generator, I will need to grab the latest updated OSM data for the region or country from this link and then process it...:

https://www.geofabrik.de/data/download.html

Edit: Direct link to Thailand OSM data: https://download.geofabrik.de/asia/thailand.html

 

Edited May 5, 2020 by Claviateur

[Darcanlos 89]

Thank you very much for the explanation, Claviateur.

[Claviateur 789]

This discussion brings me to wonder, how many scenery developers used Arno G. SceneProc tool to generate from OSM scenery for FSX 🙂

He created the tool many years ago but then I moved to the other simulator and used its specific tool similar to Arno's generator but same concept.

Maybe Asobo are using SceneProc... 🙂...  Just kidding...

[Kopteeni 819]

2 hours ago, OHN767 said:

Expectations are way too high i think, a lot of people will be terribly dissapointed when this game is released later this year.

I have the same feeling but I don't think it's going to be the Avsim crowd. On Reddit and youtube there seems to be a number of people who are basically expecting a GTA 5 with planes at this point 😬