One of the new scenery additions to WU10 was photogrammetry of Charleston, our capital city. Since I live nearby, I couldn't believe my good fortune when I saw Asobo's WU10 promotional-release video showcasing Charleston, whose photogrammetry is impressive. I'm intimately familiar with the terrain and architecture of the region, and the sim now boasts a truly lifelike model of Charleston.

HOWEVER, in implementing this improvement to the City of Charleston, there are now hundreds of thousands of square acres surrounding Charleston that somehow had their scenery completely stripped away by WU10. The underlying mesh is still there and accurate. But the previously lush forests and valleys now look like Death Valley, only not as good: brown and hideous and empty of all life and vegetation. We've all seen instances where server problems or slow internet speeds caused "melting" of scenery. In this instance -- i.e., West Virginia after WU10 -- this melting phenomenon takes on a previously-unseen level of distortion and chaos, and the problem is permanent. It doesn't disappear with a new day or a faster internet or server connection. Deleting the Rolling Cache solves nothing.

My knowledge of scenery design is very limited. But I do remember from years ago that certain scenery files cover entire chunks of area, rather than just a small downtown section into which photogrammetry may be dropped without contagion. There can be problems of transparency with already-existing, lower-priority scenery. I'm wondering therefore whether the area surrounding Charleston, WV, may have been mishandled in WU10 in that it's no longer transparent to already-existing tiles and vegetation. Again, my knowledge of scenery design is limited and antiquated. If you want to reproduce this issue for yourself, just takeoff from KCRW (Yeager Airport in Charleston) and fly west or south. Once you leave downtown Charleston's photogrammetry, something starts to look horribly awry.

Here is my question: Is this scenery issue something that may be user-solvable, perhaps by tweaking a scenery file? Or is this something that only Asobo can fix? To me this is really a shame. Most of my flights are between Huntington, where I live, and Charleston, about fifty miles away. This flight now looks horrendous, like flying over downtown Hiroshima in late 1945.

Seems to be a Bing issue? That's nothing neither you nor Asobo can fix, it's down to the Bing team at Microsoft.

Edited June 20, 20223 yr by gdjak

41 minutes ago, David Mills said:

Here is my question: Is this scenery issue something that may be user-solvable, perhaps by tweaking a scenery file? Or is this something that only Asobo can fix? To me this is really a shame. Most of my flights are between Huntington, where I live, and Charleston, about fifty miles away. This flight now looks horrendous, like flying over downtown Hiroshima in late 1945.

 

Try the MSFS2020 Map Enhancement.

https://flightsim.to/file/19345/msfs-2020-google-map-replacement

Really easy to use.

You posted the same thing a day or so ago and I flew over the area and could see nothing wrong or anything like the picture you postd

I just flew over the area again. Flew all up and down the river and on both sides and everything looked fine. I also took some low passes up and down the river and saw no melted trees or buildings.

Like I said before, I'm using Google maps and have all the Photogrammetry cities loaded and Photogrammetry turned on.

Wish I could help, but I don't know why you're getting this.

Roy

7 minutes ago, CFIJose said:

Try the MSFS2020 Map Enhancement.

https://flightsim.to/file/19345/msfs-2020-google-map-replacement

Really easy to use.

Thank you! I didn't even know there was such a thing. I'll give it a try.

By the way, we had previously talked about the ORBX KCRW Charleston airport add-on. I've done quite a lot of experimenting, and the ORBX add-on has nothing to do with the current scenery issue I discussed here. ORBX KCRW works perfectly and doesn't disturb any surrounding scenery at all.

5 minutes ago, Roy Warren said:

You posted the same thing a day or so ago and I flew over the area and could see nothing wrong or anything like the picture you postd

I just flew over the area again. Flew all up and down the river and on both sides and everything looked fine. I also took some low passes up and down the river and saw no melted trees or buildings.

Like I said before, I'm using Google maps and have all the Photogrammetry cities loaded and Photogrammetry turned on.

Wish I could help, but I don't know why you're getting this.

Roy

The obvious answer is that I'm using the default Bing imagery instead of Google maps like you.

 

6 minutes ago, David Mills said:

The obvious answer is that I'm using the default Bing imagery instead of Google maps like you.

I hope it works for you David.  After reading your post again I see you mentioned Huntington.  The area I flew over was Charleston which you mentioned in your first post.

Roy

when investigating issues like this that no one else seems to have, it's worth doing the following:

1) consider what addons you have installed (whether freeware or payware.) if you aren't 100% sure, take a look at your Community folder. there may be some scenery package or other mod in there that you've forgotten about but is still active, and could be creating issues.

2) try temporarily moving everything out of your Community folder and loading the sim, just to rule out any sort of incompatibility or other problem with things you have in the Community folder.

3) try deleting the content.xml from your (user\AppData\)roaming\microsoft flight simulator folder, and all the files in the SceneryIndexes folder there as well. these will be auto-generated by the sim on the next startup.

Edited June 20, 20223 yr by molleh

17 minutes ago, David Mills said:

Thank you! I didn't even know there was such a thing. I'll give it a try.

Just below:

 

Here's the same area with Google Maps

 

 

And with Photogrammetry disabled;

It looks like what I previously suggested is the only way to remedy the issue. Turn off PG when flying in Virginia, but again, that defeats the purpose of the WUs.

did you create a thread that we can vote on in the official forum?  

 

I think when MS/Asobo decide to do an area of photogrammetry it needs to be color adjusted to match surrounding terrain if they cannot get the satellite shot from the proper time of year. Since MSFS is basically summer textures all year-round it seems silly to create a photogrammetry area that consists of what appears to be a satellite photo from winter.  I do sometimes notice these abrupt changes around PG areas (just saw it near Chicago the other day)....but that shot looks horrific...

Edited June 21, 20223 yr by Flic1

3 hours ago, micstatic said:

did you create a thread that we can vote on in the official forum?  

 

I filed a bug report and also mentioned the issue in a separate thread. I really do hate to complain about this. Except for my own tiny area of local interest, everywhere else I've flown in WU10 looks amazingly good. 

I still can’t believe orbx screwed up and didn’t notice the approach lighting pier for Kcrw was inactive. I put a ticket in. Who knows if they fix it.