Water Masks - Comparison

[bendead 1,085]

22 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

I think the main problem is not the lack of data but the lack of suitable imagery. Just go to Bing Maps and you‘ll see that many coastal water areas are a mess or inexistent. 

Ok i get it

I will go to check different islands on bing sat map. 

Really seems that Bing is way behind google. Abidjan the economic capital of Ivory Coast still got 6 years old data. 

But that would also mean, that getting water mask on MSFS, where bing sat data is present should be easy for Asobo

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

Maybe it depends on location this is a screenshot from 10 minutes ago in the Whitsunday Islands. Note there are issues where the sea meets some of the islands which was mentioned above,  but otherwise looks fine.

 

[peroni 541]

I setup a manual flight in the same area of the Alaska bush mission, the vicinity of PADU airport.

Whatever combination of weather or sun position can never get those blocky shadows in the water.

[RobF2 150]

If Ortho4XP was able to include water masks for the entire world, surely Asobo could pull off something similar.  Think everyone would put up with a more basic generic masking solution than nothing at all. 

Glenn, flying over Hill Inlet (estuary to the north of Whitehaven beach) is such a disappointment for the Whitsunday's right now.    Sigh....

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

15 minutes ago, RobF2 said:

 

Glenn, flying over Hill Inlet (estuary to the north of Whitehaven beach) is such a disappointment for the Whitsunday's right now.    Sigh....

 

yeah, some areas are just bad. Down near home the Coff's Harbour Jetty which I fly over a lot is rather a let down, most of the shops are submerged as are the yachts and fishing boats. I did mess about trying to fix it by importing google maps data but it was too time consuming to get it right.

That said there is a big difference between individual spots that need work and a generic sim wide issue like the blocky clouds/reflections someone was getting earlier.

 

 

[MrFuzzy 2,117]

1 hour ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

OK that is bad.

 

My game in ultra is nothing like that.

 

Peroni has the same issue. Try the Alaska bush trip or any similar condition (which I think is scattered clouds and no wind) and you'll see it.

[rgp54 0]

The problem of changing the water masks is related to the general performance of the PCs, certainly the accurate textures of the 'WM' cause certain slowdowns of 'fps', "80% of the PCs in circulation will never have stable fps, even knowing near the  'release of FS 2020 on xbox ".  If you notice, after the latest upgrades 'you see ground textures, shadows, water, clouds and light effects have suffered a decline'.  Their main reason for this is above all a question of marketing, they want to find the right measure to satisfy the highest number of buyers.

[jeansy 338]

i dont understand why there is no great barrier reef or other large scale sub surface imagery

[asnamara 15]

4 hours ago, Alvega said:

Sad thing is that instead of adding the missing water masks they removed the ones we had before, as in Turks and Caicos. I flew there last week and the water mask was great, now it's gone.

Go figure...

If they are planning to push watermarks as data in the coming week, it makes sense that they would have removed the ones that were in-game with the last update. So they don't interfere. Just a thought.

[Shack95 2,658]

1 hour ago, asnamara said:

If they are planning to push watermarks as data in the coming week, it makes sense that they would have removed the ones that were in-game with the last update. So they don't interfere. Just a thought.

That crossed my mind as well. They must have a good reason for this, knowing that it‘s such sensitive topic.

1 hour ago, jeansy said:

i dont understand why there is no great barrier reef or other large scale sub surface imagery

Regarding the Barrier Reef, the answer I think is that they don‘t have imagery for that area. This can be seen in Bing Maps. 

Edited November 30, 2020 by Shack95

[bendead 1,085]

9 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

the answer I think is that they don‘t have imagery for that are. This can be seen in Bing Maps. /

Well the resolution on Bing sat seems to be around 17m per pixel, is it not enough?

[MrFuzzy 2,117]

1 hour ago, rgp54 said:

The problem of changing the water masks is related to the general performance of the PCs, certainly the accurate textures of the 'WM' cause certain slowdowns of 'fps', "80% of the PCs in circulation will never have stable fps, even knowing near the  'release of FS 2020 on xbox ".  If you notice, after the latest upgrades 'you see ground textures, shadows, water, clouds and light effects have suffered a decline'.  Their main reason for this is above all a question of marketing, they want to find the right measure to satisfy the highest number of buyers.

They could have added another detail level beyond Ultra, with high fidelity clouds, watermask and increased LOD without popping in. They could have called it "Trailer" 🙂

I mean, there are people with powerful PCs and the RTX 3000 series were just about to be released when MSFS came out.

I believe there are other reasons why the game does not look like the trailers, did you see the "Ubisoft downgrades" video I posted before? 

[Shack95 2,658]

29 minutes ago, bendead said:

Well the resolution on Bing sat seems to be around 17m per pixel, is it not enough?

I've just checked the area in Bing Maps. You're right, some reefs are okay. Others, particularly the ones further out, are extremely blurry and hardly recognizable as reefs.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

Didn't spot any remarkable water masks in the Asia and The Middle East trailer, though I decided to check out Phi Phi Islands in the Bing Maps app out of curiosity, and as it turns out, the satellite imagery does have water masks which are missing from the game.

At least the trailer is honest this time.

I cannot check in-game right now though I don't think the result will be any different from the trailer. I will include it when I start checking the Africa trailer locations.

[Pastaiolo 1,686]

You are all focusing on little places but it's not just there that water masking would be relevant to the scenery. 
Most mediterranean countries for example would have decent waters to show as well but heh. For my country i could mention a lot of regions but let's take Sardinia as an example.

Anyway, let's see in a few weeks if new water masks starts to show up.. they mentioned in the Q/A that they might do a map showing the places where water masking have been improved also.

Edited November 30, 2020 by Pastaiolo