what improved, what got worse since launch

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

For me the simulator is in a much worse place right now, and it's mostly due to the mesh issues (coastline glitches, terrain morphing, mountain seams, popping landmarks). They stand to negate many of the improvements that the World Updates bring, which I would have otherwise really enjoyed. For example, Japan looked great after its update, then was almost immediately ruined. Nowadays I limit myself to flat terrain, like African deserts and water-masked areas, but my interest is continuing to decline significantly.

Performance has remained about the same, and so have the loading times (actually the 1.8.3.0 patch gave me a nice boost in the initial menu load, but over time it faded away). I like the incremental bug fixes and improvements to the UI, aerodynamics and avionics, but as someone who prefers to just fly and enjoy the scenery rather than pressing buttons, they don't really do much for my experience (the only major complaints I have in that regard are the twitchy control surfaces and the autopilot occasionally going crazy). And to echo another comment above, there hasn't been a single addition so far that made me go "wow".

I'm sincerely hoping that once the engine team are done porting the simulator to the Xbox and implementing DirectX 12 and ray-tracing, they will tackle these visual regressions, but so far it's not very encouraging that they don't seem to be aware of most of them. I'm very excited for the future, and for me the wait is somewhat easier now that I've started to use good old Flight Simulator X in a different way, but as the months go by, I'm growing more and more afraid that they're not really going to look into these mesh issues.

24 minutes ago, Maxis said:

Different source different results. Definitely lower quality and on top of that some of the Buildings in the london financial district really require some cleanup. using way too many polygons to render some of the buildings. Asobo themselves have admitted this. I hope they revert to the previous source going forward but i assume they will stick to this stuff since for some reason they think this is acceptable.

Their source for the London and Paris photogrammetry is Bluesky, and the way they've talked about their implementation seemed to suggest that they didn't have much choice. I'm wondering if licencing issues prevented them from using the same source that Google have acquired. Their renditions in Google Earth look far, far cleaner.

Edited May 10, 2021 by ChaoticBeauty

[pmb 5,137]

As several others noted, quality of Photogrammetry varies considerably. Tokyo PG is pretty good while London (notably it's many cranes etc.) is pretty ugly (e.g. when landing at EGLC).

Now, Japan was the 1st World Update and most users where flying there afterwards for quite some time. Later,  the MSFS epicenter shifted to London and anyone was under the impression quality of PG deteriorated in general, which I can't confirm. It's just London is worse than Tokyo.

Otherwise, I agree to @ChaoticBeauty: Terrain issues are nasty.  I was fighting them for years on the Prepar3d forum (gave up now) and I feel pretty disturbed to see terrain morphing returning to MSFS. 

Actually, there might be a similar effect as with PG. Terrain morphing is known to be much enhanced with high-resolution mesh (like Pilot's mesh under Prepar3d). Now, recent MSFS World updates come with enhanced elevation data which may trigger more morphing in the enhanced regions where everyone is flying right now.

Obviously, terrain morphing  is very deeply buried in the FSX/ESP engine, and while many aspects like the display engine and Autogen/AI objects got a complete rework from FSX, the terrain engine seems to have been carried over largely unmodified. In any case I feel Asobo MUST tackle this at a point. X-Plane and AeroflyFS show it can be done.

Kind regards, Michael

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

10 minutes ago, pmb said:

Terrain issues are nasty.  I was fighting them for years on the Prepar3d forum (gave up now) and I feel pretty disturbed to see terrain morphing returning to MSFS. 

I feel exactly the same. The morphing in FSX/P3D was awful, and even though MSFS at launch was better in that regard, it was horrifying to see that not only the constant morphing, but also the sawtooth pattern in steep coastlines and the mountain seams made their return in a much worse form. Feels like we're going backwards in that regard.

14 minutes ago, pmb said:

Now, recent MSFS World updates come with enhanced elevation data which may trigger more morphing in the enhanced regions where everyone is flying right now.

If it was just the enhanced regions suffering from these issues it wouldn't be nearly as bad, but they've carried over to the entire world. Japan looked literally amazing for about two months before the USA World Update arrived, and since then flying in Switzerland, New Zealand, the Norwegian fjords, the Aegean islands and more feels absolutely awful.

Maybe when I have a better system (hopefully soon) and a faster connection (I guess next decade at this rate) I'll be able to crank up the Terrain LOD slider and reduce the extent of these issues, but I'm almost starting to forget the times where I could set it to 50-75 and still enjoy the terrain.

[cobalt 798]

7 hours ago, Mike S KPDX said:

Why?

Simply to keep the drive MSFS is on as free of other stuff as possible. Since each new MSFS update loads new mandatory files onto that drive, why have anything on there that can be placed elsewhere?

[fppilot 4,335]

41 minutes ago, cobalt said:

Simply to keep the drive MSFS is on as free of other stuff as possible. Since each new MSFS update loads new mandatory files onto that drive, why have anything on there that can be placed elsewhere?

And understand that you can manage World Updates onto and off of  your storage based on when and where you are flying.

[omarsmak30 4,061]

14 hours ago, cianpars said:

We didn't have melted buildings at launch

Melted buildings have been there since the very first day of the launch, it was the first thing I noticed and reported in Zendesk 😅

[mrueedi 702]

12 hours ago, fgiraudo said:

No need for something fancy, copy paste from fsx and it should work

Proper replay is immensely complex. All sorts of tricky questions. Do you rewind the weather too? The AI? Car traffic? Jetways? Fuel trucks? The user entries in the cockpit (say the selection of an approach in the FMS)? Also the new flight model and the active pause feature considerably changed how the replay can be implemented. For sure the FSX code is of nearly zero use for that.

But, have you tried the simple freeware tool from flightsim.to which at least allows playing back the aircraft movements via simconnect very nicely?

 

11 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

but also the sawtooth pattern in steep coastlines and the mountain seams made their return in a much worse form

These patterns were there since the beginning. The issue is, that this topic is also extremely complex. To the degree that no options ticks all the boxes, so in one way or another, there will always be compromises. The big risk is also, that changes in this area are going to break a large number of scenery add ons (those, that worked around the terrain issues).

[scotchegg 4,157]

12 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

For me the simulator is in a much worse place right now, and it's mostly due to the mesh issues (coastline glitches, terrain morphing, mountain seams, popping landmarks).

The mesh issues are a bugbear of mine too. Interestingly Orbx seem to be developing some mesh which they claim will eliminate the morphing and tears:

https://orbxdirect.com/product/nz-mesh-msfs
 

Not sure I’ll be an early adopter though as I have a feeling Asobo will get round to sorting it it their end, and NZ will probably get an update at some stage. But good to know devs are finding ways to fill gaps that Asobo can’t or won’t.

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

6 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

But good to know devs are finding ways to fill gaps that Asobo can’t or won’t.

Too bad they're being prevented from doing so in a lot of core areas of the sim, like weather, flight model, traffic, aircraft systems, etc.

[pmb 5,137]

5 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

The mesh issues are a bugbear of mine too. Interestingly Orbx seem to be developing some mesh which they claim will eliminate the morphing and tears:

Quite interesting. It this is true - which has to be shown yet - this would prove there is a possibility to get rid of terrain morphing in a FSX/ESP-based simulator.

Kind regards, Michael

[Moria15 950]

LOD has always been a bugbear in games...  The more you increase the detail (or mesh quality), the more you affect the LOD of the terrain and unless the terrain is identical in the various LOD's then you will almost always get popping...  the less detailed the terrain and the more consistent it is between LOD's, then the less popping...  it's a well known issue with all graphics on all games..  This is probably why more are now noticing it because of areas that have been improved visually with a more detailed mesh, but the next LOD down is still as it was when the sim was delivered.

The only way I can see that this will be "cured"  is either..

1)  Having the same detail for the terrain at all LOD's  (in which case there is no LOD) but performance will suffer a huge hit  or

2)  Disguise it,  by merging the LOD's through the graphics card so that it doesn't change from one to the other, but at a certain range actually shows both LOD's for a period so that when the less detailed one dissapears, it's not as obvious...    again.. performance hit and you would still see some popping at range.

I think the trick is to move the LOD's so that if popping occurs, it's further away and less noticable with some merging.. but who here who is complaining about the popping would take the performance degradation for this solution to work?

This is the sort of thing that those currently on ULTRA would probably have to switch to HIGH to achieve similar frame rates and be a killer for those operating at the lowest spec,  unless it was set so you could choose  existing LOD's versus smothed LOD's in the settings.

As with everything..  this is trade off country and it would be interesting to know who, out of those with this issue, who would be prepared to have a fix that may seriously affect frame rate but improve visuals.  You can't have both 🙂

Me, I'd take the fix and reduction of framerate any day.. but I am lucky in that regard with my machine specs.

Regards

Graham

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

46 minutes ago, mrueedi said:

These patterns were there since the beginning. The issue is, that this topic is also extremely complex. To the degree that no options ticks all the boxes, so in one way or another, there will always be compromises. The big risk is also, that changes in this area are going to break a large number of scenery add ons (those, that worked around the terrain issues).

Before the USA World Update I spotted the sawtooth pattern in just a handful of places (now it's pretty much global), and it didn't look as unsightly then.

I understand that changing the LOD algorithms could break add-ons and I appreciate that point of view, however as the simulator is constantly evolving it is to be expected that incompatibilities will continue to occur, and honestly I wouldn't want to have the entire globe filled with add-ons to fix those issues. Asobo will apply significant changes to the rendering engine in the next few months and the World Updates will continue, which means that inevitably lots of things will break again. I think they should absolutely work on fixing those terrain regressions.

35 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

The mesh issues are a bugbear of mine too. Interestingly Orbx seem to be developing some mesh which they claim will eliminate the morphing and tears:

Oh wow. 10m mesh, no morphing, and only 523MB? Sounds way too good to be true. Thanks for the heads-up!

"Proprietary approach" they say, hopefully there is an opportunity for Asobo to license this tech and apply it to the entire globe.

14 minutes ago, Moria15 said:

As with everything..  this is trade off country and it would be interesting to know who, out of those with this issue, who would be prepared to have a fix that may seriously affect frame rate but improve visuals.

Personally I didn't see any noticeable performance improvement after the USA World Update changed the frequency of the LOD rings. What they had before worked fairly well, and in order to help hide the new issues you have to turn up the Terrain LOD slider even higher now, which in turn reduces performance and puts a lot more strain on the connection (and in the end, does not fix the issues completely). If they did this to improve performance, they couldn't have found a worse way.

Edited May 11, 2021 by ChaoticBeauty

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

16 hours ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

Is it simple, though? You not only need to record the state of all possible controls and forces at any moment and then replaying them ending with what hopefully still is the current state, but you have to do it for all possible aircraft, default, third party, and a mix of the two. Sounds pretty complicated to me, especially if you want to freeze it half way and resume flight from that point onwards.

It doesn't have to be perfect on the first version, there is already a free replay tool that runs externally and works fine, so not very difficult for Asobo to add. You don't need to record the weather, that is not so important on a replay to get exact, mainly you use replays for landing. 

 

https://flightsim.to/file/8163/flight-recorder
 

 

 

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

3 hours ago, Cristi_Neagu said:

Too bad they're being prevented from doing so in a lot of core areas of the sim, like weather, flight model, traffic, aircraft systems, etc.

Your statement is partly true.  3pds cant currently takeover the weather engine and car traffic.  As for things like flight model, however, one need only consider the helicopter offerings in a sim that supposedly "doesnt support them" to realize that there isn't an obstacle on that front.  Both of the helicopters are using their own bespoke flight models in fact ... a path open to any developers of fixed wing aircraft as well if they felt it necessary.

[Cristi_Neagu 134]

1 minute ago, VFXSimmer said:

As for things like flight model, however, one need only consider the helicopter offerings in a sim that supposedly "doesnt support them" to realize that there isn't an obstacle on that front.

That doesn't mean Microsobo are ok with it, and it doesn't mean that this will be the status quo going forward. I can totally see a future in which Asobo patch the workarounds used by developers to override the default flight model, breaking all of these addons. And they can simply say: "That is not supported. We fixed a security vulnerability in the code."