12 hours ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

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) 🙂

i use plan g, in the background, as an online paper map. never got lost sofar, all the roads are there.

plan g has a fantastic topographic map overlay too.

3 minutes ago, wim123 said:

i use plan g, in the background, as an online paper map. never got lost sofar, all the roads are there.

plan g has a fantastic topographic map overlay too.

And unless you have a FSX/P3D installed and do some tomfoolery is completely incompatible with FS20..  

Although looks like a native compatible version of some sorts is only days away..

12 hours ago, Shack95 said:

Interesting. To me it looks like two different aerial images. There are other details as well that seem to be different, e.g. the baked-in cars.

The only time I noticed such a difference was a few months ago in one of the official Alpha screenshots (Leeds). Some fields were yellow in the sim but green in Bing Maps. Also the baked-in cars didn't match. Might have something to do with Bing updates, i.e. new imagery.

The Bing maps seems to be newer. There are several features in Bing maps that are not in FS2020, ie were built later in that village. Makes sense, so Asobo basically took bing maps from maybe 6months ago, ran Blackshark.ai on it and put everything in a huge database. This is what we have now. Their 'world updates' might just update this, ie run everything again on the newest Bing version. They said it took only 72h to run the AI over the full Bing maps. I notices such differences in building sites before when flying. Still extremely cool that we can fly using landmarks like this. Will definitely check this place after the next 'world update' is released.

Edited September 2, 20205 yr by M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd

13 hours ago, molleh said:

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

Well, the thing to check was if FS2020 actually streams directly from bing maps or not. Looks like not.

14 hours ago, M-Air Bush Deliveries Ltd said:

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

 

 

I think once things settle down and we have those annoying little bugs squashed Asobo and Blackshark  intend to update bing on a regular basis. In the Blackshark vid I think they said it took about 18 miutes to update the whole World with new info. Watch the vid it tells you all you need to know.

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

so Asobo basically took bing maps from maybe 6months ago, ran Blackshark.ai on it and put everything in a huge database. This is what we have now.

That would be my guess as well.

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

Their 'world updates' might just update this, ie run everything again on the newest Bing version.

I'm very curious about these udates too. Neumann said in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun that Bing gets updated quite randomly. Since it wouldn’t make sense to update the world in the sim after every small Bing update, they decided to do the regions and update them in a more comprehensive manner. He said that these updates may include new hight fields (is that the mesh/DEM? Let's hope!), satellite imagery, airports, POIs etc. What caught my attention was the phrase “maybe we acquire a bunch of new satellite imagery”. This sounds like external satellite imagery to me and not Bing Maps’.

Link to the interview (21:55): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSRnshNpwMw

Edited September 2, 20205 yr by Shack95

thats the problem using photoreal, with no word of a lie i did a flight from 4s2 to kmso and i came across ground images in variations of tones and saturation as a result of the quality and dates of bing mapping, and i even saw a number of textures where the clouds where in the ground textures. when I fly around my local city which is a state capital and they dont even have the suburb i live in thats over 7 yrs old mapped in msfs.

Doesn't Bing Maps allow you to "go back in time" to see earlier versions of their aerial photography? This would let you test the theory that MSFS is using older images. Perhaps it's Google Maps that has this feature, not Bing. I just know that _some_ map services provide this service.

3 hours ago, Keto Ketchup said:

Doesn't Bing Maps allow you to "go back in time" to see earlier versions of their aerial photography? This would let you test the theory that MSFS is using older images. Perhaps it's Google Maps that has this feature, not Bing. I just know that _some_ map services provide this service.

Google Earth does that.

6 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

Google Earth does that.

Google Earth/Maps is vastly superior to Bing maps in so many things. I wanted to fly over Russia, some remote region, and Bing maps does not even have close-up satellite photos of it. On Google, the imagery is perfect. 

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

Google Earth/Maps is vastly superior to Bing maps in so many things. I wanted to fly over Russia, some remote region, and Bing maps does not even have close-up satellite photos of it. On Google, the imagery is perfect. 

Tell that to King Friday who insists Bing is much better at representing the world than Google.

I've been studying my "backyard" in Bing Maps to get an idea of what the source material is for MSFS. One thing I see is that Bing Maps itself uses false colors. For example, it's clear the aerial photography of my area was taken in Spring - there is still piles of snow on the ground in places, and the trees have no leaves. IRL spring is very "brown" here, yet Bing has everything colored green as if it were the middle of summer. The side-effect is that my roads are also green! Shifting the image green (it feels like they modified tint / hue) did nothing to get rid of the white snow, either. Long story short, fake coloration is happening on Bing Maps rather than in MSFS.

Now this does make me wonder if MSFS has access to the raw "uncorrected" photography and applying that to random fields. Unfortunately my roads in MSFS are still green, and snow is still on the ground during the hottest summer in history, but the fields do look better like the OP's image.