After watching this..(EGPH-EGPN)

[CaribbeanCLANK 134]

47 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I did that in the other direction!  It was fantastic.  Lava flows on Montserrat (which I knew about but weren't depicted in P3D) for example.  I was disappointed that there was no building on top of the "Kingdom of Redonda" but it doesn't appear to be there in real life any more either.

You're gonna love it.

Hook

Wait...the volcano is active in the sim???? 😄 That's pretty cool. 

I don't recall the island of Redonda having buildings but I could be wrong about that...it's tiny though. Not a very well know island unless you are from one of the surrounding islands. Most folks from the Caribbean have never heard that name. 

I am even more excited now. 

 

[LHookins 3,102]

I haven't seen any active volcanoes anywhere.  Doesn't mean there aren't any. 🙂 But the lava flows are visible although the nearby buildings all have a roof, unlike what you see in Google Earth.

Way back in the FSX days I selected Redonda as my personal island in the Caribbean.

Flying over an interesting area often ends up with researching it on the Internet.  I think there will be a lot more of that with MSFS.

Hook

[stewartforgie 44]

To be fair they did that with the help of 602 (City of Glasgow) squadron. 

[CaribbeanCLANK 134]

18 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I haven't seen any active volcanoes anywhere.  Doesn't mean there aren't any. 🙂 But the lava flows are visible although the nearby buildings all have a roof, unlike what you see in Google Earth.

Way back in the FSX days I selected Redonda as my personal island in the Caribbean.

Flying over an interesting area often ends up with researching it on the Internet.  I think there will be a lot more of that with MSFS.

Hook

I misunderstood you when you said lava flow...now I understand. You meant that the after effects of the recent eruptions are visible in the sim. My bad...I thought when you said "lava flow" that the volcano was "active" in the sim. Silly me. 🤣

[109Sqn 1,551]

Nice video.

Needs to get his pronunciation correct though! Kirkcaldy is "Kirrcawdy", Leuchars is "Lookers" and Burntisland is, unsurprisingly, "Burnt Island". I hope he doesn't show us a flight over Kirkcudbright in the future! Strangers always murder that name!😄

"There should be a very recognisable bridge..." There should be three - The Forth (rail) Bridge, The Forth Road Bridge and the newest: The Queensferry Crossing, which has taken all the major traffic strain off the original Road Bridge, now just taking busses, taxis, agricultural vehicles (those banned from the new bridge) and peds/cyclists (neither of whom have facilities to cross the new bridge).

Edinburgh needs a lot of work. The castle as apartments! Flat stadiums and Waverley Station. No sign of the Scott Monument etc. Hopefully Orbx can do for Scotland's capital what they are doing for England's. I'd buy that for sure. The airport is similarly in need of the Orbx touch, so I would hope and expect they'll port over their beautiful-looking effort to MSFS. It certainly looks nice on their website. The tower is a landmark for the airport and the autogen one is entirely inaccurate. As mentioned above, runway 12/30 is decommissioned (2018) and was last used by commercial aircraft in 2008 whilst the main runway was being resurface during the nights.

No sign of the zoo on Corstorphine Hill (which he more or less flew staight over, just before the golf course(s). 

In Fife, the autogen tower block outside Burntisland should actually be the Craigkelly TV Transmitter, so it's mistaken a tall pyramidal aerial tower for a tall building block.
I could certainly pick out St Clair Street in Kirkcaldy.

Tay Road Bridge is generic and sinking into the sea, and the Tay Rail Bridge is entirely missing.

But all that said, from altitude, it looks pretty good. Very impressed by the sunrays coming through the clouds. Green roads appearing again though. But considering that has all been produced automatically from aerial imagery, it's very impressive indeed.

 

Plenty of options for 3PD to produce not only city landmarks, but major bridges!😊

Edited August 10, 2020 by 109Sqn

[The Flight Level 2,112]

Let me take a shot at summarizing the essence of this thread:

Ecstatic flight simulation in ways that we never imagined.

Our commercial jet guys are going to get back to their roots for a while in GA aircraft and fly low and slow.

In the geographical areas that we are familiar with, yes there are errors but for the rest of the planet that we have never experienced, we have countless hours ahead of pure enjoyment exploring new terrain from the air.

Shadowplay gives a smoother playback than OBS - perhaps, but will depend on computer settings.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - We are all in for one sweet experience!

Edited August 10, 2020 by Doering

[FlyingInACessna 656]

8 hours ago, mazelda said:

Sadly the runway he used for the take off from egph no longer exsists and has not been operational  getting on for 2 years. So this begs the question on how up to date some default airports might be

Someone else did a flight out of Tromso, Norway and the runway numbers were outdated (even though they are up to date on Google Maps)

[Tuskin38 6,449]

10 minutes ago, FlyingInACessna said:

Someone else did a flight out of Tromso, Norway and the runway numbers were outdated (even though they are up to date on Google Maps)

Well that's because the sim doesn't use google maps...

[FlyingInACessna 656]

14 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

Well that's because the sim doesn't use google maps...

The point I was making is that satellite imagery is more up to date than the sim. This means the sim’s data is likely more than just a few AIRAC cycles old.

[Der Zeitgeist 1,575]

One of the most interesting things in the video for me was right at 16:00, when he passes the radio tower that got turned into a black office tower.

But there's something else much more accurate. See those two wind turbines straight ahead? They're really there, at those exact positions: 
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=9f7e7a2c-26a7-429f-bdda-f0b7de864af2&cp=56.072878~-3.212951&lvl=18&style=h&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027

It seems that the Blackshark AI is able to spot wind turbines in the satellite imagery by their distinctive shadows and place an appropriate autogen wind turbine at exactly the same spot. Quite impressive.

Edited August 10, 2020 by Der Zeitgeist

[Nyxx 6,993]

1 hour ago, 109Sqn said:

But considering that has all been produced automatically from aerial imagery, it's very impressive indeed.

 

Plenty of options for 3PD to produce not only city landmarks, but major bridges!😊

I think that’s the perfect point, and like Orbx is doing for London, bringing out small low cost add on to fill in missing things. I could foresee Orbx doing a England pack, Scotland pack etc for all the things you rightly point out, but for out of the box it’s like nothing we have seen or thought we would see.

Edited August 10, 2020 by Nyxx

[dfanucci 127]

Sandpoint Idaho to Castlegar BC in the cub was just about the greatest flight I've ever had with any sim dating back to the 80's...

[109Sqn 1,551]

Sadly, an awful lot of Bing data (at least what we can access on our devices as opposed to what may be sitting on their own equipment) is much older than Google's, certainly in the UK. In London and Edinburgh for example, most of Google's is 2019, whereas Bing's images are from... 2012! 

As an example, the Hub By Premier Inn in Brick Lane, London wasn't even built when Bing's Streetside image was taken - it's just the entrance to an open yard.

[Slides 1,552]

We gotta pump those numbers up for Bing Maps usage so that MS invests in more sat and aerial images. 

[touchdown84 34]

52 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

One of the most interesting things in the video for me was right at 16:00, when he passes the radio tower that got turned into a black office tower.

But there's something else much more accurate. See those two wind turbines straight ahead? They're really there, at those exact positions: 
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=9f7e7a2c-26a7-429f-bdda-f0b7de864af2&cp=56.072878~-3.212951&lvl=18&style=h&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027

It seems that the Blackshark AI is able to spot wind turbines in the satellite imagery by their distinctive shadows and place an appropriate autogen wind turbine at exactly the same spot. Quite impressive.

Could also be that they have a separate source for wind turbines. For example wind turbines are also included in the obstacle database for the GTN 750.
So probably somewhere is a database that contains the coordinates of wind turbines.

Edited August 10, 2020 by touchdown84