I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the game refreshed monthly and is supposed to mirror Bing maps' most current aerial imagery. I remember in the past that Bing typically lagged behind Google, but ironically, Bing is actually much more current, like within the last year for the Orlando, FL area, where Google is still like maybe 2 years behind (I gauge this by buildings I have seen pop up in real life that are in bing but not in google). The Orlando area is like maybe 6 years old or so in game according to some similar maps of Google's history from 2014/2015 or so. I cleared my rolling and manual cache but it is still no where near as updated as Bing maps. Is this common for everyone if they look at places they know are more developed in real life as far as the imagery time? Or is there something I have set settings wise that prevents updates?

17 minutes ago, M3Stang said:

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the game refreshed monthly and is supposed to mirror Bing maps' most current aerial imagery. I remember in the past that Bing typically lagged behind Google, but ironically, Bing is actually much more current, like within the last year for the Orlando, FL area, where Google is still like maybe 2 years behind (I gauge this by buildings I have seen pop up in real life that are in bing but not in google). The Orlando area is like maybe 6 years old or so in game according to some similar maps of Google's history from 2014/2015 or so. I cleared my rolling and manual cache but it is still no where near as updated as Bing maps. Is this common for everyone if they look at places they know are more developed in real life as far as the imagery time? Or is there something I have set settings wise that prevents updates?

Photogrammetry is on? If so, it is a bit old and doesn't get updated as often as the photoimagery.

About the sim satellite imagery being the same and as updated as the bing imagery, I don't think that's the case. I've seen some discrepancies (Bing VS Sim). Actually that's one of the things I would like them to address on the Q&A streams, how often Black Shark reads the imagery and how often they update the imagery. To be clear, the imagery gets updated, but it takes some time.

Yep, the game clearly cannot directly access Bing maps, it must make a copy of the Database somehow and convert it to a format the game can use and access that. To copy the entire world every month sounds somewhat impractical that would be a huge amount of data to download and convert every 4 weeks.

It also seems likely that areas flown more often would be updated more regularly - but as  ca-metal points out, we do not know how often Black Shark do those updates or what priorities they have for updating,

Edited May 11, 20215 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

1 hour ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Yep, the game clearly cannot directly access Bing maps, it must make a copy of the Database somehow and convert it to a format the game can use and access that. To copy the entire world every month sounds somewhat impractical that would be a huge amount of data to download and convert every 4 weeks.

It also seems likely that areas flown more often would be updated more regularly - but as  ca-metal points out, we do not know how often Black Shark do those updates or what priorities they have for updating,

Interesting that makes sense. I am not sure where I read it, I can't remember it was a while back when I first noticed the difference.

2 hours ago, ca_metal said:

Photogrammetry is on? If so, it is a bit old and doesn't get updated as often as the photoimagery.

About the sim satellite imagery being the same and as updated as the bing imagery, I don't think that's the case. I've seen some discrepancies (Bing VS Sim). Actually that's one of the things I would like them to address on the Q&A streams, how often Black Shark reads the imagery and how often they update the imagery. To be clear, the imagery gets updated, but it takes some time.

Yes I meant the photoimagery. It would be cool if they addressed that.

Well, I can tell you that in my home town the Bing imagery is about 6 years old, so no, the maps do not get updated monthly.