3 hours ago, Keto Ketchup said:

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.

When you are able to do the fix, maybe you can post a thread in the official MSFS forum, and explain how you fixed the problem. Then maybe one of the Asobo devs can examine your solution.

Asobo is aware of the problem, as they acknowledged in one of their past Q&A, but I think they are just swamped by too much work.  But if you manage to figure out the solution, and you post an example of your solution  in the official MSFS forum, that may convince Asobo that the fix is easy and not too time consuming to fix it. This would encourage Asobo to insert this task in one of the upcoming Sim Updates, if they think it’s an easy fix that doesn’t cost too much time (my guess is, they are so busy with work, they haven’t even looked deeply into this issue - hence if you show them how easy your fix is, it goes a long way to show Asobo how easy it is to fix the problem).

Edited July 14, 20223 yr by abrams_tank

13 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

hence if you show them how easy your fix is, it goes a long way to show Asobo how easy it is to fix the problem

Well, "easy fix" will totally depend on if I can modify this color metadata in any meaningful way. I'm attempting to look at that data now, maybe "poke it a bit", and see what happens. It's super easy to get rid of the green tint over my home state by just totally throwing away that data, but then the long distance blending falls apart. That color correction is necessary to blend the different map levels together, I just hope I can inject a "hey, tone down the puke green!" into the data flow.

So the color correction data is wrapped in a .cgl file, which I don't know how to read. But I've been thinking - the reason there is such an obvious line between the good looking ground closer to my plane and the further away ground on the horizon when Asobo's color correction is disabled (bye bye green tint) is likely tied to how Bing maps itself works. When you're on the map website and you zoom out, there comes a point when the view changes, as if it were taken by satellite rather than plane. I've been studying documents on how Bing map tiles work, and in theory I could prefetch all the high-resolution tiles for my state, and use those tiles to generate my own "parent" tiles (the tiles that would normally be from that ugly satellite view). This would be done by combining X^2 high res tiles into a single image and then just scaling that image to a new, much better looking "off in the distance" tiles, which would produce much better looking scenery and no transition line.

The catch is that I would need to prefetch a LOT of data - basically the high res tiles for my entire state. I would also lose any color correction that Asobo has done to blend different survey sections, though technically I could do that myself. In fact, one advantage of having this data on my own server in an accessible format is that I could go in and manually clean up areas that I care about, like removing prebaked shadows from my home town.

Anyway, it would be a big project, but I think this is my best bet for now. It's definitely not something I can knock out in a day or two. It kinda reminds me of mining bitcoin, except I'll be mining high-quality scenery instead, LOL.