All the good lines do nothing (because they all start with #)

The mod adds 2 lines at the very bottom which don't start with #.

The mod erases those 2 lines after you: 1 exit MSFS properly 2 and then exit the mod app properly.

You can erase them in notepad yourself when MSFS refuses to boot up.

If you ever lose the default hosts file and forgot what lines are in it, then you can just make a blank empty hosts file and drop it in that same 'etc' folder. MSFS will run fine. Because lines that start with # are read being as blank by Windows.

The only reason the hosts file has those # lines in it is to serve as examples to app makers.

I have found some places in my State where the roads are proper gray, and boy does it look so much better than this green tint! An interesting observation is that these places had recent summer satellite imagery when the sim released, whereas my neck of the woods was photographed in early Spring with everything brown and even white (snow) in spots. This tells me that Asobo must have metadata telling it which zones to artificially turn green and which to leave as-is. When Bing updated their imagery (my town is now full summer with beautiful proper colors on Bing), Asobo never updated this metadata.

I wonder if I contact support and request that they update this metadata file for my area, would they? Hmmm.

I'm beginning to think Asobo used the old Bing data and altered it with AI extensively. Which took lots and lots of time and effort. And now they don't want to do that long process all over again with the new Bing data. 

On 7/5/2022 at 1:25 AM, Keto Ketchup said:

I don't understand this line, as what's currently in my sim is exactly the same as the updated Bing imagery, the only exception is being the added green tint. At least in my home state (which is what I'm most interested in).

As for this mod, I'm just not comfortable running an administrator-mode uncertified .exe on my computer. It also feels overkill to me for solely removing green tint. I'm completely happy with the default scenery otherwise.

I'm quite annoyed that this awful green tint is still a thing in MSFS a year later (I took a bit of a hiatus while waiting for a bucket list of issues to be fixed), especially when the source material now looks so great.

Late returning to this; looks like Fielder answered most of it. I agree that the very latest version of the mod seems to have a couple oddities in it now that I've read about them, but I'm on an older version (and staying there, for now ;). )

Which imagery is best (or even different) is extremely location dependent; that's what makes having multiple choices of imagery source so great.  For instance, in the sim, a local private grass strip I fly into in real life is a nondescript blurred green in default imagery. Google imagery is much more detailed; you can see the small footbridge over a creek, the mower marks in the grass etc.  Only downsides are a visible row of trees that's since been cut down, and the slightly bluish cast that Google seems to put on things (which is purely personal preference as some people like a cooler tint to the world.)  The latest Bing imagery is as detailed (bridge, mower marks etc) but also has the trees missing so it's newer yet, and the warmer color temp that I prefer. 

Choices are good! 

1 hour ago, Fielder said:

I'm beginning to think Asobo used the old Bing data and altered it with AI extensively. Which took lots and lots of time and effort. And now they don't want to do that long process all over again with the new Bing data. 

This makes sense if the zones to alter are stored in metadata (make grid X-7 green). I say this because the actual satellite imagery IS the new Bing data (it's a pixel-per-pixel match), except for this coloration. It definitely has changed since when I first bought the sim, in regards to being much more recent photography taking in summer rather than Spring, but the green tint remains.

I can picture a low level Asobo guy walk into Sebastian Wloch's office on Saint Patrick's Day ..

"Hey, boss, lets shade all the tiles green".

Seb: "yeah sure, ha ha, right, LOL....."

And so it gets done.

I went ahead, throwing caution to the wind, and installed the 5.0.9 version of the map replacer, setting it to Bing maps. HOLY FLYING COW - it looks SO MUCH BETTER! It almost brings a tear to my eye, no joke! My only complaint now is that many roofs of autogen buildings retain that terrible green tint, but I might be able to fix that problem myself.

I'm going to do some experiments with the sims cache to see if preload all this new "gray road" data and not have to run the proxy software every time I fly.

UPDATE - I've been flying a bit today with the map replacer, and while it does an amazing jobs at "removing" the green tint the satellite imagery and looks amazing at low altitude, it apparently doesn't do so well at higher altitudes and at further distances. Mountains in the distance look pretty bad, like it's using Bing's very low resolution satellite vs aerial views. It also removes any of Asobo's "good" processing, like cloud removal, so I've got random clouds baked into the scenery.

One possible fix would be to fly over my state at high altitude with the addon turned off, loading Asobo's default "from a distance" textures into my cache high up, and then switch the addon on for low altitude flying... That's a mighty lot of work to remove a green tint. I can only hope someday Asobo themselves remove the tint from their own processed satellite imagery, either that or I figure a way to remove the tint myself from the default images.

While working on updating my local airfield (TN87) which also uses the runway as a road, I noticed that prior to displaying the runway textures, MSFS had overlaid a transparent green "road" which is not exactly lined up with the runway and blocks vegetation where it is visible. I then checked surrounding road locations and found that the transparent green overlay was also present. If Asobo could make these overlays completely transparent or at least a transparent shade of gray, it would help immensely.  These green overlays appear to be added on top of the base aerial, and not simply recolored portions of the aerials.

14 minutes ago, Keto Ketchup said:

either that or I figure a way to remove the tint myself from the default images.

If you have the Steam version you could try some colour correction with ReShade - maybe a LUT filter that tries to target the road colour range and map it to a more neutral colour.  You might not achieve dramatic results, but probably at least something "less green". If you have the Windows Store version then ReShade won't work as far as I know.

1 hour ago, GolfMikeBravo said:

While working on updating my local airfield (TN87) which also uses the runway as a road, I noticed that prior to displaying the runway textures, MSFS had overlaid a transparent green "road" which is not exactly lined up with the runway and blocks vegetation where it is visible. I then checked surrounding road locations and found that the transparent green overlay was also present. If Asobo could make these overlays completely transparent or at least a transparent shade of gray, it would help immensely.  These green overlays appear to be added on top of the base aerial, and not simply recolored portions of the aerials.

I've seen this road overlay, but I think it just takes the color of what's underneath it. It's not just the roads that are green in my satellite imagery, but gravel pits, cliff faces, mountain tops, various parking lots, etc. It's radically different than when I use that map replacer app, where everything that should be gray is beautiful gray, and everything looks "better" in general, because it's less saturated.

Unfortunately, that app isn't going to work, because it falls apart at altitude. There is a VERY noticeable tiling effect, along with poor distant textures (using Bing maps), and that is way worse than green roads. 😞

1 hour ago, JacquesBrel said:

If you have the Steam version you could try some colour correction with ReShade - maybe a LUT filter that tries to target the road colour range and map it to a more neutral colour.  You might not achieve dramatic results, but probably at least something "less green". If you have the Windows Store version then ReShade won't work as far as I know.

I'm doing something like that already, and it does help, but it only can do so much. The problem is any screen-based reshade is limited due to changes being applied to everything, so for example I can't dial back the green without adversely effecting the sky. There's an app I use for other games called 3DMigoto that lets me adjust colors of individual shaders, so I could dial back the green, and even apply logic (code to detect roads and totally remove green tint), to the specific shader responsible for drawing terrain, without touching the sky. Sadly I've not had any luck getting 3DMigoto to run with MSFS, but I've not given up hope yet.

It's really too bad the map replacer didn't work for me. It looks so amazing down at low level, which shows Asobo could give us these amazing color-correct terrain textures if they put their mind to it. Now to Asobo's credit, it's obvious they are doing some serious behind-the-scenes LOD blending to give a wonderful and smooth transition from near terrain to far terrain, because that effect is removed when using this replacer app, and boy does it make a difference (as in, it looks awful when you remove Asobo's "magic").

Edited July 12, 20223 yr by Keto Ketchup

I have a plan! After studying the code for the map replacer app, I have figured out how to intercept map tile images coming from Asobo's own servers, de-tint the green, and then pass the fixed image to MSFS. This is different from what the map replacer is doing, since I would be using Asobo's own ortho images, which should solve the "tiling at a distance" problem I have with this app.

My project now (someday when time allows) is to write my own "proxy" server from scratch to do this work. I will likely take a different approach from the map replacer app that has inspired me, in that I'll write this to run on a separate computer so that I'm not stealing CPU from my flight sim. For me that's a Linux laptop. That computer can also act as local LAN cache. I'll be doing this for myself for now, but if it works, and there's a demand for it (I suspect most people would rather just use the map replacer), I can always throw it on Github someday.

Another advantage of this project is that it should allow me to hand-edit ground scenery, allowing me to clean up parking lots in my home town, for example. I just need to figure out how to convert tile ID numbers to a grid.

Anyway, I'm excited about the possibilities! Once I get something up and running (it may be awhile), I'll update this thread.

Edited July 13, 20223 yr by Keto Ketchup

UPDATE - I've written a very rudimentary proxy server that allows me to intercept and examine the aerial ground images coming from Asobo. I was expecting these to be tinted green, with the plan to detint them and then pass the corrected images to MSFS. The thing is, they are not tinted to begin with!

I'm a bit baffled now, since this implies my original theory is true, that the sim itself is adding the tint. But if this is the case, why doesn't it tint the images from Bing and Google? I'm going to check the exif data, in case there is metadata encoded that tells Asobo to apply tinting. There may also be some sort of side-channel metadata doing something similar. There is definitely more going on here than meets the eye!

UPDATE 2 - To see if tinting is encoded into the images, I used my proxy inject images directly from Bing (verified by editing one of those images), and the tinting and saturation are still there! This means there is definitely a metadata source separate from the image itself. How interesting.. I'm going to study the original map replacement app some more to see if I can discover where this metadata is coming from.

Edited July 14, 20223 yr by Keto Ketchup
new information

I found my metadata!! I have verified that there is a separate metadata stream that tells MSFS how to color-correct satellite imagery, and that even Asobo's raw images look as you would expect - gray roads and not over saturated. HOWEVER, the color correction plays a critical role in blending closer scenery with scenery that is further away, so just blocking that color correction entirely (which is what the map replacement software does) creates that bad tiling effect at altitude.

So, now I need to figure out if there is a way around this. I might be able to intercept the metadata and edit it on-the-fly to reduce green tinting while maintaining the blending effect at a distance. It really depends on how this metadata is encoded - if it's in a nice JSON or XML format, then it could be easy. If it's some binary blob, on the other hand..

A second option is to desaturate the green channel on the raw satellite imagery, knowing the sim will shift it back to green again. I have a feeling this won't look so great, but I'll at least give it a try.

BTW - the big takeaway is that this green tint should be an easy fix for Asobo, if they were so inclined. It's not like they need to fly planes over and take new photography or anything.