On 8/6/2020 at 10:40 AM, MrStarhouse said:

I'm private pilot and has flown a few times IRL over Stockholm so I have few reflections on this. 

- Generally very good.

- Strange thing is that it looks like flat roofs on all the downtown buildings, that is not the case IRL.

- The beige color on a lot of fields outside city center I think is due to the Sat Photos taken during late summer or fall when crops are ready for harvest.

Generally in the beginning of MSFS I think it is a good idea not to fly "at home" as one is more sensitive for irregularities there.

 

Agreed that it generally looks "OK-ish", the problem is the green tint on the roads that is also visibile on the same Youtubers flight over Helsinki (the capital of Finland) that looks even worse.

I also agree that the beige tint of the fields is weird. I have mainly flown as a passenger over Stockholm but many hours in the air around Gothenburg with similar landscape and farmland. The beige tint almost looks like sand. Should be darker and then it's OK.

But it would be nice with a manual check of the Royal Palace and the Stockholm City Hall at least that is they are the most famous buildings (?) in central stockholm - and the AI has messed them up completely. A bit sad when peoples backyard sheds look good in the US 😉 

Look in the Youtube clip below when he flies over "Gamla Stan" (the old town). Its just the green copper roof "painted on the ground". And some love of the the Stockholm City hall where the Nobel prize dinner is held would be nice as well.

From the video (where the "sunken bridge" phenomenon seen in many other videos have ditched the large "Centralbron" bridge):

Google Maps 3D of the same area - as seen, the palace is a rather significant building as well as the City Hall:

Stockholm Royal Palace IRL (spent some time there during my military service as a royal guard 🙂)

 

The Stockholm City hall IRL - a rather significant building in the central Stockholm "skyline":

 

Edited August 7, 20205 yr by mazex

33 minutes ago, mazex said:

Agreed that it generally looks "OK-ish", the problem is the green tint on the roads that is also visibile on the same Youtubers flight over Helsinki (the capital of Finland) that looks even worse.

I also agree that the beige tint of the fields is weird. I have mainly flown as a passenger over Stockholm but many hours in the air around Gothenburg with similar landscape and farmland. The beige tint almost looks like sand. Should be darker and then it's OK.

But it would be nice with a manual check of the Royal Palace and the Stockholm City Hall at least that is they are the most famous buildings (?) in central stockholm - and the AI has messed them up completely. A bit sad when peoples backyard sheds look good in the US 😉 

Look in the Youtube clip below when he flies over "Gamla Stan" (the old town). Its just the green copper roof "painted on the ground". And some love of the the Stockholm City hall where the Nobel prize dinner is held would be nice as well.

 

Yes the green is weird. must somehow originate from the sat images.

Also The old Airport Barkarby which closed many years ago seem to still be there. Old database I guess.

We'll see how it develops over time.

When I look at Bing Maps over my home Airport, Örebro (ESOE) I can se that it is also very old. The runway there has had a large increase in length that has been there for a few years, but not at Bing, so it will be interesting to see that in the sim.

But as I said before, it might be best not flying at home. I will not be as sensible to irregularities in for example Asia.

Just wait and see 🙂

Interesting. The green roof of the royal palace seems to have tricked the AI into thinking it is grass (a fair conclusion looking at top-down imagery). It still looks pretty good though aside from the incorrect “white balance.”

Edited August 7, 20205 yr by Hyperfocal

32 minutes ago, Hyperfocal said:

Interesting. The green roof of the royal palace seems to have tricked the AI into thinking it is grass (a fair conclusion looking at top-down imagery). It still looks pretty good though aside from the incorrect “white balance.”

There's also the reverse in some places, swimming pools turning into blue-roofed buildings. 😊

1 hour ago, mazex said:

 

But it would be nice with a manual check of the Royal Palace and the Stockholm City Hall at least that is they are the most famous buildings (?) in central stockholm - and the AI has messed them up completely. A bit sad when peoples backyard sheds look good in the US 😉 

 

 

The problem is that all cities - small and large - have at least one building where the people say "surly they need to add THIS one". Suddenly you have 50.000 buildings you need to handcraft.

I don't see any other solution to this than to improve the AI and the Bing maps. This has to be an automated process or it will be just too much work.

They have already done some amazing works on this, and I am sure it will keep improving.

1 hour ago, espent said:

The problem is that all cities - small and large - have at least one building where the people say "surly they need to add THIS one". Suddenly you have 50.000 buildings you need to handcraft.

I don't see any other solution to this than to improve the AI and the Bing maps. This has to be an automated process or it will be just too much work.

They have already done some amazing works on this, and I am sure it will keep improving.

Well, even though I understand your thinking, how about just taking a quick look at the capitals of the top 50 countries based on GDP and check that all looks OK:ish with the job the AI has done? Should take a day or two for a junior resource taking 20-30 minutes looking in sim vs "map app of choice" and a quick check with Wikipedia / Tripadvisor to understand the "important buildings". Or why not use the "free" alpha tester team for it? Then if needed (like for Stockholm) - adjust the Bing AI algorithm so it works better if possible as that should help in other places as well. Maybe add the top 3 buildings of the capitals manually tweaked? No need for a high poly building - but making sure that the Royal Palace of Sweden is a "box building" of some sort resemling the outline / height at least. That's 150 buildings... Or maybe just the top 30 on the GDP list for <100 buildings. Sweden is no 23 on the GDP list.

I don't think that the White House in Washington is a blurry texture on the ground in the sim (the roughly equivalent US building). But I have not seen any in game footage of it so who knows? 😉

So - by adding 150 buildings you get the citizens of top 50 economies in the world more happy and it makes for better articles in local language reviews. It would be very surprising if a Swedish review don't mention that the Royal Palace is flat as they will fly over central Stockholm for sure. And they will probably include a screenshot of it that looks rather "cheesy"?

Edited August 7, 20205 yr by mazex

4 hours ago, LHookins said:

I've seen enough green roads for them to become annoying.  With any luck a future update to the AI will fix this.

Hook

As already said, it's the same green tint some roads in ORBX TE for P3D show. Thus, I am afraid it's not connected to streaming speed but rather source map material. Bing doesn't capture imagery themselves, maybe they even bought it from the same original source as ORBX (ORBX once stated the source but I don't recall from head).

I agree, there should be a chance AI might correct this, it should be discernable by a learning process.

Kind regards, Michael

1 hour ago, pmb said:

As already said, it's the same green tint some roads in ORBX TE for P3D show. Thus, I am afraid it's not connected to streaming speed but rather source map material. Bing doesn't capture imagery themselves, maybe they even bought it from the same original source as ORBX (ORBX once stated the source but I don't recall from head).

I agree, there should be a chance AI might correct this, it should be discernable by a learning process.

Kind regards, Michael

That might be true - but if you look at Stockholm in Bing maps there is no green tint? Overall the Bing maps satelite image quality of Sweden is pretty awful actually - kind of like Google maps 10 years ago when they started out. My home town of Lund that is one of the most famous university towns in Sweden (the Cambridge or Oxford of Sweden) has the satellite quality Google has in northern Greenland or similar 😉 Southern Sweden from some altitude is covered in 2/8 Cumulus (like in Google 10 years ago).  It looks like a nice day for flying gliders at least if they where included 😉 

1 hour ago, mazex said:

That might be true - but if you look at Stockholm in Bing maps there is no green tint?

The Bing imagery seems to have been taken in winter, so the green tint could be the result of AI colour correction to make if fit in with the rest of the sim. Just a guess. 

It would be interesting to see how, when and if Blackshark.ai will make another pass over Stockholm before the release date. Stockholm is a pretty important city historically and otherwise-ly.

I suspect each world update is going to include an AI and airport pass to fix issues. It apparently takes them about two weeks to do and we are getting a world update once a month through November. We may see some color correction fixed over time.

I would highly encourage people to not obsess over their local areas. There's just too much work to be done for 99% of them to be perfect. Even with FSX, yes, it had a bunch of hand-placed models in various major cities, but they were low quality and placed over a decade of various versions. Asobo can't thrown down a white box and call it a "landmark" like FSX could. There's real work to be done in the future and it has to be high quality or it won't fit the new graphics.

There's so much beauty to explore in MSFS. Don't limit yourself and drive yourself nuts because your home town is missing the court house or something.

Edited August 7, 20205 yr by bonchie

7 hours ago, espent said:

The problem is that all cities - small and large - have at least one building where the people say "surly they need to add THIS one". Suddenly you have 50.000 buildings you need to handcraft.

I don't see any other solution to this than to improve the AI and the Bing maps. This has to be an automated process or it will be just too much work.

They have already done some amazing works on this, and I am sure it will keep improving.

Agree.  I was complaining about major landmarks missing in Washington DC yesterday including Congress and White House.

So - I guess Microsoft realizing that Google won the Map war put little money on satellite imagery these days. Do the largest countries OK - sod the rest. But in the Cloud war they have certainly not lost and Azure fights well with AWS, GCP etc. And now AI/ML is a current battle in that war. So the investment in MSFS is certainly not to promote Bing but Azure that is extremely more important to Microsoft. 

And with the awful quality of the Bing source material in Sweden and the Nordic countries it is really impressive that the Azure AI can get something that looks rather OK for Sweden. In Bing maps, the farmland around Stockholm / Arlanda has three different weird tints - its hazy / fuzzy and generally bad. So making that having the same-ish tint without visible stitches is really a job well done by the AI. And the Royal Palace is so low res that missing it's actually building is forgivable...

If the AI would have the Google Satellite images for Sweden to work with, I am sure that the Nordic Countries would look just as awesome as other areas we have seen in MSFS. 

I noticed a line artifact in MFS20 in your Amman flight before you crossed the first major highway, see below I highlighted it). Definitely not in satellite photos.

 

If the focus is a hag, the portrait is bad. Just kidding of course. For a native Stockholmian (?), I bet you notice a lot more things that are off than people visiting for the first time. The scenery looked ok to me compared to some of the more spectacular places in msfs, and it looked amazing compared to any other sim I've seen to date.

Now, lets talk about Oslo Gardermoen ENGM airport. That thing is a mess and needs some serious wood chopping. There is a forest growing on the main taxiways connecting the east side of the airport to the west, basically making half the airport inop... 

With that said, I can live with it. I dont like it, but there is a whole world other than my little spot on the globe that I can go visit and explore 🙂