Bing Maps and FS2020 not matching

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

I do a lot of landmark bush flying. No compass, no GPS, just Bing maps and what I see in FS2020. This works really well 99% of the time using water bodies, roads, cities, settlements, shapes of fields/forests and so on. I noticed though that Bing maps and FS2020 does not match colors of fields sometimes. See the two images with typical orientation lines marked. In FS2020 the two fields are autumn-like brownish and in Bing maps they are green. I always thought FS2020 feeds images directly from Bing. Can anyone make sense of that? This has sent me off course two times now because in North England fields are your only friend :)

Flight Simulator

Bing Maps

 

 

[Nedo68 533]

to be honest, the upper pic looks so nice and beautiful compared to the one below with a complete wrong overall greenish tone 😁

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

1 minute ago, Nedo68 said:

to be honest, the upper pic looks so nice and beautiful compared to the one below with a complete wrong overall greenish tone 😁

Well, that does not help me with my flying style. 🙂

I had to touch down two times now in the middle of nowhere because I was lost and had to study the map for longer (I do not pause the game when looking for landmark features on Bing mps) 🙂

[molleh 451]

The date of imagery differs sometimes. It's really not more complicated than that.

[Nedo68 533]

1 minute ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

(I do not pause the game when looking for landmark features on Bing mps) 🙂

i like this doing the same, i allways try to land somewhere and survive 😁 No pause!

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

1 minute ago, molleh said:

The date of imagery differs sometimes. It's really not more complicated than that.

But is not the simulator drawing the images directly from Bing? So what I see in FS2020 should match what I see in Bing maps.

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

1 minute ago, Nedo68 said:

i like this doing the same, i allways try to land somewhere and survive 😁 No pause!

It's really immersive this way, right? You really get into the region where you fly.

[eslader 1,783]

I wonder if it's doing some interpretation. It is, after all, fall now and it might be in "let's make these fields look harvested" mode.  A guy can dream, right? It's also possible that MS is using imagery that they haven't put on Bing maps yet, but that is in their database and was taken at a different time.

It's not generally a good idea to navigate farm country from a color map and assume all the fields will match the colors on the map, either in sim or real-world. Or anything else for that matter - you never know when Farmer Brown will decide to repaint his barn in his favorite football team's colors. Look for natural landmarks that won't change (like that lake), town shapes, unique building shapes (skyscrapers probably won't change color, but they definitely won't change shape), visually obvious road configurations, etc. Real world you'd also look for various towers and other things marked on flight charts, but they aren't in the sim yet.

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by eslader

[DPSimulation 235]

16 minutes ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

This has sent me off course two times now because in North England fields are your only friend 🙂

To be clear, Loch Fitty is in Scotland not North England. You could cause an international incident here!  😁

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

Just now, eslader said:

I wonder if it's doing some interpretation. It is, after all, fall now and it might be in "let's make these fields look harvested" mode.  A guy can dream, right? 

It's not generally a good idea to navigate farm country from a color map and assume all the fields will match the colors on the map, either in sim or real-world. Or anything else for that matter - you never know when Farmer Brown will decide to repaint his barn in his favorite football team's colors. Look for natural landmarks that won't change (like that lake), town shapes, unique building shapes (skyscrapers probably won't change color, but they definitely won't change shape), visually obvious road configurations, etc. Real world you'd also look for various towers and other things marked on flight charts, but they aren't in the sim yet.

 

Yeah, that's what I was also thinking. Fields change color all the time due to seasons, so in sim or irl it is not a good idea to use the color of fields for navigation. Thing is, in northern England...good luck finding anything else 🙂

Maybe it has to due with the seasons line in Bing maps in this area. The seasons line runs just about throug the fields and maybe the simulator interpolates field colors to hide it.

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

I think its very unlikely that the sim is streaming directly from Bing's database.  The imagery has to be processed to work in the sim's internal file structure.

I would bet they (MS/Asobo) got a snapshot from Bing while setting up their fileservers and it could be that the brown fields reflect the imagery at the time of this capture.  Asobo has said that they will continue to update their database as Bing improves theirs, but it will be a region-by-region thing.

The other possibility is based on the satellite image resolution.  Having spent loads of time building ortho scenery in X-Plane, I know that different satellite captures are used for various resolutions.  Its not uncommon to look at a wide angle view and see something like the green (summertime?) image in your shot, but as you zoom in, the image changes to a higher res photo taken at a different time.  If Asobo used the higher res image, that could explain the discrepancy.

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

4 minutes ago, DPSimulation said:

To be clear, Loch Fitty is in Scotland not North England. You could cause an international incident here!  😁

I am just a chap from Germany in his Icon who made his way from Stuttgart, to Reutte (Alps), to Lake Garda, to Venice, to Innsbruck, to Stuttgart, to Offenburg (Black Forest), to Lake Neuchatel (Swiss), to Nancy, to Charlesville-Mezieres, to Calais, to Brighton, to Bournemouth, to Plymouth, to Llanbedr Airfield, to Derbyshire and Lancashire Gliding Club In The Heart Of The Peak District, to Edinburgh, to Inverness. All flown in the landmark-map navigation style. All I know is that I had to touch down twice during the last two legs to study the map for longer due to either endless brown stretches in the peak regions or endless fields with single houses 🙂

[RustyFlyer 182]

12 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

"... The other possibility is based on the satellite image resolution... different satellite captures are used for various resolutions.  Its not uncommon to look at a wide angle view and see something like the green (summertime?) image in your shot, but as you zoom in, the image changes to a higher res photo taken at a different time.  If Asobo used the higher res image, that could explain the discrepancy."

Totally agree. In both Bing imagery & Google imagery, it is not uncommon to see one set of visual characteristics at a certain altitude/eye level, and to see a completely different set and image, including content even, at a lower, more zoomed-in altitude/eye level.

[sd_flyer 6,041]

I really don't get what you are complaining about!

[M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd 50]

1 minute ago, RustyFlyer said:

Totally agree. In both Bing imagery & Google imagery, it is not uncommon to see one set of visual characteristics at a certain altitude/eye level, and to see a completely different set and image, including content even, at a lower, more zoomed-in altitude/eye level.

That's what I account for during my flying. The zoomed in imagery in Bing is what matches FS2020 99% of the time. Here the zoomed in imagery does not match field colors at any zoom level.

I am still thinking that maybe has to do with the Bing maps transition line that I marked below. Maybe they did some interpolations in field colors when the prepared their images for the simulator to hide those transitions.