It's not easy being green...

[Keto Ketchup 240]

Why are so many roads green? At first I thought it was just my home town and surrounding area, but now that I've flown coast-to-coast (USA), green-tinted roads is a reoccurring theme I see over and over again from dense northern forests to southern deserts. It's very ugly and off-putting IMO. I don't understand why more people aren't complaining about this, unless you are all just sticking to photogrammetry cities and avoiding rural areas..

Related to this, I'm noticing semi-transparent "fake" roads overlayed on top of the "real" roads, though sometimes it doesn't follow the real roads very well. I don't remember this fake road being so obvious before the last update, but maybe I'm just looking harder at things these days, having placed the rose-colored glasses aside. This too doesn't look very good, and like the green roads (even at altitude), this seems primarily a feature of autogen rather than photogrammetry.

So am I the only one who is a bit upset that the Grinch stole my nice gray roads?

 

ps - the real irony is that many of the dirt roads in my home town are paved with really nice gray fake roads in the flight sim. Go figure!

Edited September 23, 2020 by Keto Ketchup

[marsman2020 1,310]

Lots of the ground textures have a green tint.  All of the Utah desert for instance.  Perhaps they are green like this for a handful of days every year when there is rain, but it's certainty not representative of what the areas have looked like when I have been there.

[pmb 5,137]

We had the same issue with some ORBX sceneries under Prepar3d, i.e. several roads around London (and not only there) in TrueEarth GB South are green. It's indeed said this is inherent to the aerials. 

The green roads have been corected in the X-Plane couterparts by overlays, a technique which doesn't seem to work under Prepar3d.

And yes, I've seen green roads in MSFS, too, and I agree it's annnoying, but I doubt there is a simple solution

Kind regards, Michael

[Keto Ketchup 240]

12 hours ago, marsman2020 said:

Lots of the ground textures have a green tint.  All of the Utah desert for instance.  Perhaps they are green like this for a handful of days every year when there is rain, but it's certainty not representative of what the areas have looked like when I have been there.

Yes this is one of the areas I've visited in MSFS to only end up feeling disappointed... I understand the artificial green tint in my home town, since Bing took the photos in early spring when everything is dead and brown, so they had to apply fake green to make it look like summer. Maybe Bing isn't smart enough to realize that Utah is supposed to be brown / tan (the desert part) and thus is applying the same "make spring into summer" color algorithm..

I love the new flight simulator (bugs notwithstanding), but I really don't have much good to say about Bing Maps ATM.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Keto Ketchup
2nd pass

[Rudiii 257]

I have noticed many areas swathed with a green tint. My personal opinion is that it's simply a limitation of the satellite images.

You'd probably find similar results if you were to zoom in far enough on an image taken with a standard low spec camera. 

Zoom into an individual road on Bing maps in Utah and it's clear that the digital imagery is prone to as much guesswork to produce the colour for an individual pixel as any other kind of digital camera.

[Christopher Low 5,353]

I suspect that this is because there is a lot of over saturated red colouration in lots of photoscenery images, and that the colour correction applied during development results in some areas (including roads) becoming a bit too green. At least, that's what I think with respect to the ORBx TrueEarth GB scenery in P3D. Users of the older PlayHorizon UK VFR Photographic Scenery will know that excessive red colouration was a significant problem in many areas of England and Wales.

For the record, I much prefer the green roads to that awful abundance of red.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Christopher Low

[Keto Ketchup 240]

When I used the manual cache today to load in Flagstaff Arizona, it showed up too green in the cache manager satellite view. However, the photogrammetry area of Flagstaff rendered wonderfully in MFS - not only were roads the proper color, but they had very detailed traffic lines in their proper paint color. As soon as I crossed over into non-photogrammetry, I was back to that green tint again. This makes me long for the day when all populated areas (including smaller towns in rural America) are available in photogrammetry, though I know that's probably still a long time away.

All that said, I have flown over procgen cities and towns that have perfect color, so it can't just be an issue of photogrammetry vs flat, nor can it be a limitation of all aerial cameras.  Bing Maps seems to be a literal quilt of varying quality, so perhaps it has to do with the type of cameras used and the altitudes they were used at for a given patch in this quilt.

[Keto Ketchup 240]

Here's another data point, I just checked a couple different areas using Apple Maps that are plagued with green roads (and fake tint in general) in Bing. In Apple Maps, these areas look perfect. So this seems to be a Bing thing.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Keto Ketchup

[YVRLHRDXB 321]

Flew out of YYC and all the texture surrounding YYC is green. What's worst is the city of Calgary is a ugly brown texture so you basically have a brown title surrounded by green titles. 

[Keto Ketchup 240]

12 hours ago, B787Pilot3222 said:

Flew out of YYC and all the texture surrounding YYC is green. What's worst is the city of Calgary is a ugly brown texture so you basically have a brown title surrounded by green titles. 

Out of curiosity, does this mirror Bing maps? How does that area hold up in Google and Apple Maps? I'm personally baffled at just how bad Bing is compared to Apple, a new player in the mapping business which everyone mocked when they first broke away from Google, but now Apple has some of the best satellite and aerial photography available (at least in all the areas I fly).

How far you have fallen, Microsoft. 😞

[YVRLHRDXB 321]

7 hours ago, Keto Ketchup said:

Out of curiosity, does this mirror Bing maps? How does that area hold up in Google and Apple Maps? I'm personally baffled at just how bad Bing is compared to Apple, a new player in the mapping business which everyone mocked when they first broke away from Google, but now Apple has some of the best satellite and aerial photography available (at least in all the areas I fly).

How far you have fallen, Microsoft. 😞

Nope, no green textures on Bing and I remember during testing the textures weren't green.

[Cayenne 14]

indiscriminate color correction of satellite images.....

[andyjohnston.net 617]

In my area, where there is photogrammetry there is more colour, and it gets greenish where it switches to generic scenery.

[chuckyb 4]

The area where I live (northwest Indiana) is very green looking.  I noticed that, the first time I loaded the sim.  If I fly over Chicago, it seems to have much more color.

[Sphynnx 91]

will they ever correct this issue?