1 minute ago, bobcat999 said:

Yes, with Steves DX10 fixer they were great.  Cloud shadows seemed more natural as well.  He put a lot of work into the DX10 fixer an it worked really well in the end - very atmospheric, if you excuse the pun! 😁

Indeed, and apparently Steve's fixer is still going strong after all these years, which is a testament to his skills.

Here we are with more comparisons and, unfortunately, more disappointment.

Tungbukan Island was the only location with prominent tropical water I could find in the Asia trailer. I also checked Phi Phi Islands today, which I detailed in an earlier post, and as expected the proper water masks are not there but at least the trailer was honest with that one.

Moving on to the Africa trailer and unfortunately no improvement in here either.

Now with the Europe trailer, Faro was a pleasant surprise. The water textures look exactly like the trailer and the Bing Maps imagery, and so far it's the only trailer shot that matches the in-game representation. It may have been added with the latest 685KB update. Unfortunately Lackenakea is missing.

It's good to see that they added some water masks recently, but at the same time disappointing because some existing ones were removed, and I feel they really need to focus on improving the spots showcased in the trailers because they've been out for several months now and at this point it's just false advertising. All of these misleading trailer shots as well as some of the spots that had their water masks removed have been reported to Zendesk.

That's all for now. If Tuesday's patch updates the WaterBlurMasks.cgl file I will check all of the Oceania, Asia, Africa and Europe spots again. Otherwise, I will continue with the America trailer comparisons.

Faaaallllse advertising

I really hope this is addressed in the Sim Update 2, else I guess we’ll have to make a lot of noise again. 

15 minutes ago, FAZZ3 said:

I really hope this is addressed in the Sim Update 2, else I guess we’ll have to make a lot of noise again. 

If you try to bring this up on the official forums now, the mods close the thread and point to the answer from the last Q&A.

I doubt we'll be able to get them to comment on it again.

Total gaslighting/.

On 12/19/2020 at 2:32 AM, ChaoticBeauty said:

If Tuesday's patch updates the WaterBlurMasks.cgl file I will check all of the Oceania, Asia, Africa and Europe spots again. Otherwise, I will continue with the America trailer comparisons.

Finally got the fs-base-cgl section downloaded, no changes to this file, and as such I expect there won't be any differences with the water masks. America trailers it is.

All I can say is don't go on the MSFS official forums and say you feel the developers are gaslighting the community with these answers and that it's stupid to be told we need to go create another Dev Q&A ticket so we can get a 3rd nonsense gaslighting answer.  (I don't think this is even an unreasonable opinion given the situation, so say, great, thanks for the suggestion so we can go get yet another gas-lighting answer)

Because the mods there will threaten you into deleting the post, by saying you'll get a "formal warning" (which could result in loss of access to the online features of the sim, if enough "warnings" are accumulated, per the Code of Conduct)

This is Microsoft's strategy, deny, and when they can't deny, delete.  And your comments on the official forum can be used to take away the product you paid for.

Edited December 23, 20205 yr by marsman2020

A big site like kotaku should make this public. You would see how quickly those masks were implemented afterwards. 

Pretty incredible this is in fact illegal marketing and could easily be class action.

5 minutes ago, DaWu said:

A big site like kotaku should make this public. You would see how quickly those masks were implemented afterwards. 

Wouldn't that be nice.  Unfortunately everyone has nothing but praise to heap on MSFS. 

On 12/18/2020 at 9:53 PM, marsman2020 said:

If you try to bring this up on the official forums now, the mods close the thread and point to the answer from the last Q&A.

I doubt we'll be able to get them to comment on it again.

Total gaslighting/.

Sorry to be pedantic, but thats not an example of gaslighting.  

 

Gaslighting would be if they told you the water masking was perfect all along and you can't tell because your eyes don't work or you're just crazy.  

 

 

37 minutes ago, JughedJones said:

Gaslighting would be if they told you the water masking was perfect all along and you can't tell because your eyes don't work or you're just crazy. 

Yeah, they've even admitted that the stuff in the trailers is made on an internal dev build that has things the live one doesn't.

So it isn't gaslighting.

7 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

Yeah, they've even admitted that the stuff in the trailers is made on an internal dev build that has things the live one doesn't.

So it isn't gaslighting.

In one Q&A they said that they had a marketing build that had all of the opaque water turned off, which was used to make the trailers, but that creates visual artifacts at other places in the ocean and can't be released publicly.  So there were no water masks for the areas shown in the trailers.

In another Q&A three months later they said that the masks exist, and would be pushed to the servers a week to a month after the trailer videos were released.  This was the answer 3 months after some videos came out.

Every time they say "oh the devs have answered the question here's the answer why don't you accept our answer".

Now we're told to go make another Dev Q&A topic next month (wasting valuable dev Q&A time)

I guess I was looking for a word that sounded less harsh then just straight up lying, which is what really seems to be going on.

We need some pressure from popular MSFS YouTubers like Jeff Favignano, Obsidian Ant, Max737fly, Captain Canada, among others.

It would be better if this got coverage from sim news organizations like fselite too, but I doubt they would want to pick up this story since then they’d be black listed from exclusive dev access to interviews.

Obsidian Ant did a video about the but he was pretty nice about it and didn't go into too much detail on the various promised the devs have made or the inconsistent explainations