They seemed to have un-blurred the coral water  mask around the island of Nassau and the islands west of Nassau. (Discovered on a flight from MYNN-KMIA. If anyone wants to fly out there.

Edited December 26, 20205 yr by Maxis

Huge comparisons incoming, this time with... interesting results.

North America first, two showcased spots. Portland is missing as usual, but Xcalak is looking good!

It might look like Glacier Park has proper water masks too, but this is due to the river being tight and automatically retaining some data. Otherwise, there is plenty of water detail missing from the Bing Maps imagery, but the trailer is honest regarding the in-game representation.

Finally moving on to the South America trailer which has plenty of showcases with tropical water, it was great to see that several locations have the proper water masks! Not a big surprise personally because I remember the Nassau water masks which were discovered by @Alvega I believe, and that probably means that the 685KB update was mostly focused on the South America water masks. However, notable exceptions include St John's, Hewanorra, Tabago Cays and Brownsweg. Rosario Islands are looking fairly good, but they could use some work I think. Not really sure about Galapagos, I will have to investigate more.

The areas with the proper water masks looked hauntingly beautiful, and it's just a shame that the majority of the advertised locations do not feature them yet. In my opinion, updating the water masks should take precedence over the World Updates. Right now the Oceania trailer is the biggest offender, being the oldest trailer, featuring eight locations with prominent tropical water that does not exist in-game, and with the misleading Moorea shot appearing in the Xbox trailer. It's weird that they're not focusing on that one first.

Unfortunately I think it will be a while until the water masks are addressed, considering that the team are now probably working on the UK World Update and fixing some of the unsightly issues that the last two patches introduced, like the terrain spikes, morphing mountains and coastline glitch. But once those are done, I expect them to deliver, and if not I will renew my Zendesk report with my recent screenshots and we really should have this addressed in the next Developer Q&A.

As always, I will be keeping an eye on the WaterBlurMasks.cgl file, and will check all of these locations again if it is updated. Hopefully I will not run into the nasty surprise of existing water masks getting removed again.

Punta Cana was missing the water masks but from your image looks like they added that already. That's good.

Has this one been posted?

 

 

9 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

Has this one been posted?

Sort of, I compared Culebrita above which is a small island nearby. It appears that with the 685KB patch they worked mostly on South America water masks, considering that Nassau and Punta Cana were also added with that one.

Unfortunately it seems that the example you posted was kind of a rush job though, there are a few cloud artifacts that are also part of the Bing Maps imagery, and could have easily been avoided in that case. Meanwhile Culebrita seems to have been manually corrected to a degree. The point of the proper water masks being delayed is so that they can manually work on them and avoid this sort of errors. Hopefully they will be able to clarify the situation sometime this month.

they need to fix the sim instead of making it worse get the sdk working so we can have proper aircraft and ai traffic then they should fix stuff like water masks 

36 minutes ago, ashepherd316 said:

they need to fix the sim instead of making it worse get the sdk working so we can have proper aircraft and ai traffic then they should fix stuff like water masks 

The SDK team is separate from the scenery team, and the former is quite large according to what Asobo have been saying in their Q&A sessions.

Fixing the water masks should be quite a priority for the scenery team considering that they have released trailers featuring proper tropical water several months ago, and especially since they claimed that these water masks should be added in the game no later than a month after each trailer's release. The Oceania trailer was released on 18 August and yet none of the showcased water masks are working yet. They either need to deliver or correct that false statement, because right now that's blatant false advertising. Most of these trailer shots are not showcasing scenery that happens to feature tropical water around, but rather the tropical water itself.

Either way, working on the water masks will likely not slow down progress on the SDK at all. Even more than both of those, they need to fix the terrain spikes, mountain morphing and coastline glitch that have been ruining the look of the scenery for several weeks now.

2 hours ago, ashepherd316 said:

they need to fix the sim instead of making it worse get the sdk working so we can have proper aircraft and ai traffic then they should fix stuff like water masks 

As Chaotic said, the people working on the masks are not the same people working on those other projects. That's not how development works.

People working on masks are not taking manpower away from the SDK, the AI or aircraft.

Edited January 1, 20215 yr by Tuskin38

I flew out of Nassau and saw these today. How are these updates taking place? Are they doing stealth downloads of the background? Or did the latest water masks arrive with the last update on the 23rd?

8 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

I flew out of Nassau and saw these today. How are these updates taking place? Are they doing stealth downloads of the background? Or did the latest water masks arrive with the last update on the 23rd?

I posted my pictures on the 26th so the assumption is that they were put in on the 23rd.

2 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

As Chaotic said, the people working on the masks are not the same people working on those other projects. That's not how development works.

People working on masks are not taking manpower away from the SDK, the AI or aircraft.

ah ok i see but i would still rather have the sdk fixed

21 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

I flew out of Nassau and saw these today. How are these updates taking place? Are they doing stealth downloads of the background? Or did the latest water masks arrive with the last update on the 23rd?

They arrived with the 9th December update, which was only 685KB. Just the WaterBlurMasks.cgl file was updated, which seems to be the one dictating which water textures are allowed to show and which are blurred. The same update caused some existing water masks to disappear though. You can check out page 5 and onward in this thread to see some of the new findings by Alvega and BijanStudio.

The WaterBlurMasks.cgl file was not updated with Sim Update 2, which means the water masks are in the same state as they were then.

Asobo claimed in their latest Developer Q&A that water mask updates would be delivered via streaming Bing data. Clearly this is not the case.

3 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

As Chaotic said, the people working on the masks are not the same people working on those other projects. That's not how development works.

People working on masks are not taking manpower away from the SDK, the AI or aircraft.

The mesh department consists of one guy that shows up once a month to incorrectly generate data and then to use the bad files instead of the good ones.

 

Edited January 1, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

I forgot to mention. The Japan Update has an airport called Kerama. Flew around there last night. Absolutely beautiful water masks in the area. White sand beaches and emerald water abound. A nice spot for a little island hopping and sightseeing.

1 hour ago, Maxis said:

I forgot to mention. The Japan Update has an airport called Kerama. Flew around there last night. Absolutely beautiful water masks in the area. White sand beaches and emerald water abound. A nice spot for a little island hopping and sightseeing.

Yes, Kerama Island has some of the best water mask I've seen in MSFS!