During my Cannibal Queen flights in MSFS, I've been amusing myself by trying to pick out the Wal*Mart Supercenters in medium size towns.  After seeing the one in my home town of Bonham, Texas I realized they had a distinctive footprint and should be easy to recognize from the air at 2500 feet AGL.

And it turns out they are!  I recently flew over Checotah, Oklahoma and saw a likely candidate.  I just brought up Google maps to check and there it was, along with all the stuff on the roof which looked odd in the sim but turns out it was accurate.  I'd seen other candidates but this was the first one I checked out on the map.

Finding the local high school sports stadium is pretty cool too.  Race tracks and proving grounds are interesting as well but they're usually marked on the charts.  I've seen a couple of interesting drag strips.  I lost count of the number of trains I've seen, and switch yards were pretty cool even in earlier flight sims but phenomenal in MSFS.  I even saw a train parked at a passenger station once, and it was obvious what it was.  Trailer parks are obvious as well.

 Keep in mind that this is all stock scenery flying in areas that will never be covered by photogrammetry or third party scenery, and it's every medium town in the US.  Try *that* with any other flight simulator! 😄  Could we have imagined doing this in any given random town in a flight sim as little as two years ago?  It's a good time to be a flight simmer.

Hook

The accuracy of the stock scenery is quite amazing!

There is a mall around the corner with a Billboard on its roof advertising some fitness studio in town. Coming close in the sim you can clearly see that same advertisement actually modeled.

 

 

You can see the one in Herkimer, NY, as well. 

In my home city, you can see the Wal-Marts, but will only know them if you know that's what they are.  But you can clearly read the sign on the giant IKEA.  My old high school had a track outside, and you can see it.

I'm with you Larry! The stock scenery in MSFS is simply amazing for me so far. Just the other day I was having a flight in Melbourne (where I live in), flying to one of the popular mountains further out from the Melbourne CBD, and while that looked stunning, it was what happened afterwards that was quite magical. It was getting late that night and I thought lets wrap up the flight and head back to Melbourne Airport, and thus I flew in the direction of the airport not following any roads in particular. But then I came across this stretch of road and shops that I thought looked very familiar. "It looks like the shopping strip that me and my dad used to browse at (pre covid)" I thought. Then I continued following that strip of road and sure enough, I came up on my local area! What a magical moment that was, given that I didn't plan to specifically go there. And what's even more amazing is that this is suburban Melbourne and something that hasn't been well represented in past and even current sims (not sure if the ORBX Australia V2 covers suburban Melbourne as I don't have that). Not to knock on X-Plane, but after that flight I took a similar flight in X-Plane 10 (I don't have X-Plane 11) for a quick comparison and Melbourne in X-Plane 10 doesn't look at all like the real thing and just looked bland and doesn't have any recognizable areas! Yes Melbourne CBD in MSFS doesn't contain any landmark buildings which is unfortunate and the whole of Melbourne is AI generated, but it is the most convincing Melbourne I have ever seen as a whole in a flight simulator! Not to hijack the thread but below is my local area (suburban Melbourne 15km out from the CBD) in MSFS compared to Google Earth (hope you don't mind Larry!). 😄

MSFS:

 Fun fact, the AI even got that tall apartment building in the center of the image in (which actually is there and just finished construction fairly recently) that isn't in Google Earth yet 🤣

Google Earth:

2 hours ago, ThomseN_inc said:

The accuracy of the stock scenery is quite amazing!

There is a mall around the corner with a Billboard on its roof advertising some fitness studio in town. Coming close in the sim you can clearly see that same advertisement actually modeled.

 

 

Well that is photogrammetry then. You won't see that with the AI generated buildings.

20 minutes ago, Honnli said:

Not to hijack the thread but below is my local area (suburban Melbourne 15km out from the CBD) in MSFS compared to Google Earth (hope you don't mind Larry!).

Heck no I don't mind!  That's what this tread is for.

Loved your post.

Hook