I have test and it works pretty well. I made my city without too many worries.
On the other hand, on non-flat scenery it is an horror, the mesh is completely different. it's impossible to have something clean.

This may be the beginning of the end for Bing in this FS.  I imagine the next step is tools to streamline this to the point where it's almost like manual cache... Select an area on your map and download the Google data and then fly it.

Edited October 8, 20205 yr by Virtual-Chris

That's amazingly easy,I wonder if you could just do landmarks eg missing vfr approach points that are in Google maps but not in Bing such as tv towers, buildings etc and if they would look out of place,I'll definently give that a go

There was recent discussions about Monaco scenery that looked great but was very poorly optimized due to the very high number of textures used to generate it. That made it more or less unusable. Does this tool and method circumvent that issue I wonder? If it does, it could make the generation of Googles Monaco and other large detailed cities and areas viable.

1 hour ago, RaptyrOne said:

There was recent discussions about Monaco scenery that looked great but was very poorly optimized due to the very high number of textures used to generate it. That made it more or less unusable. Does this tool and method circumvent that issue I wonder? If it does, it could make the generation of Googles Monaco and other large detailed cities and areas viable.

 

I guess it doesn't. I made a small town to test, it looks amazing but the FPS when flying over it went from 40 to 20, with lots of stutters.

My memory from the Tileproxy days was that the developer was asked to cease and desist politely by Google as the terms of Google using 3rd party data were exceeded.  Probably not Google's data or licence to have the final say - they likely pay to use it in a certain fashion.

 

Pretty sure 3rd party copy into MSFS won't meet those terms.  Maybe Google bought all the data providers in the intervening years in the end?  🙂

 

 

4 hours ago, Alvega said:

the FPS when flying over it went from 40 to 20, with lots of stutters

I have noticed this with some of the stuff I have downloaded from flightsim.to. Much of the freeware there is Google objects and placing multiple objects in a close proximity has a noticeable hit on FPS. Legalities aside, this means the whole Google import thing is not a great option unless the 'creators' are running proper optimisations. While it appears from the video to be relatively easy to extract Google scenery, I suspect optimising it is more complex. For me then, that makes this an unattractive option. I will take smooth flight above generic structures (which still look good) over stutters above a realistic town.

On 10/7/2020 at 11:46 PM, V1-Rotate said:

Surely it may help, but I'm afraid Google might rise copyright issues.

There would be a certain amount of fair use for private downloads and creating a freeware addon is probably outside fair use terms but could well be ignored.  A mass distributed commercial product on the other hand might attract a court case or the need to pay royalty.

The same apples to aircraft really. A freeware addon of an obscure aircraft from the '30s is likely to pass under the radar but f you are trying to sell 1000's of copies of your new "Pylon Racing Bearcat's and Mustang's at Reno" addon for FS2020 Xbox you are likely to get hit up for royalties.

If a free addon with content ripped from Google Maps is hosted on a site displaying ads, like flightsim.to does, then Google can quite likely come knocking with a cease and desist, because its property is generating traffic and revenue for the site host.

I wouldn't use the word "quickly." It took me all night and 100 GB of space to download Scranton.

41 minutes ago, dobee51 said:

I wouldn't use the word "quickly." It took me all night and 100 GB of space to download Scranton.

Interesting.

 

I had the impression Google banned you for 24 hours if you downloaded too much at once.

On 10/7/2020 at 6:28 PM, Keto Ketchup said:

We could if Microsoft would get off it's duff and start actually competing with Google and Apple Maps.

Sadly,  up to now, there has been no economic reason to do so.

Apple and Google are locked in a tight battle in the mobile phone market, which is where Google Maps and Apple Maps have the most impact.

Bing isn't on a lot of phones (maybe some old Windows phones, but their market saturation was always negligible).

 

That being said, I vote this thread to either be thumbtacked or moved to tips and tricks because it took awhile for me to find it again, and I am going to try this to add a particularly prominent hotel and landmark into a particularly shunned city.

Please upvote to pin this topic.

On 10/9/2020 at 1:03 PM, wthomas33065 said:

Sadly,  up to now, there has been no economic reason to do so.

Apple and Google are locked in a tight battle in the mobile phone market, which is where Google Maps and Apple Maps have the most impact.

Bing isn't on a lot of phones (maybe some old Windows phones, but their market saturation was always negligible).

 

That being said, I vote this thread to either be thumbtacked or moved to tips and tricks because it took awhile for me to find it again, and I am going to try this to add a particularly prominent hotel and landmark into a particularly shunned city.

I wonder what would be cheaper, for Microsoft to update Bing Maps with new aerial photography and photogrammetry, or to lease the data from either Google or Apple and either sunset Bing Maps entirely or just make BM a "reskin" of GM / AM (kinda like DuckDuckGo is for search). My fear is that Microsoft won't do anything, and the current quilt of mismatched quality that is today's Bing Maps will remain that way forever, meaning my home state will always be subpar in MFS.

On 10/8/2020 at 1:42 PM, RaptyrOne said:

I have noticed this with some of the stuff I have downloaded from flightsim.to. Much of the freeware there is Google objects and placing multiple objects in a close proximity has a noticeable hit on FPS. Legalities aside, this means the whole Google import thing is not a great option unless the 'creators' are running proper optimisations. While it appears from the video to be relatively easy to extract Google scenery, I suspect optimising it is more complex. For me then, that makes this an unattractive option. I will take smooth flight above generic structures (which still look good) over stutters above a realistic town.

Same here, i stay away from non vanilla photogrametry as they'r too taxing on the perfs.