In your experience, are there countries (or US states) where the orthos look fantastic, aren’t covered with clouds or are largely puke green or way too early in Spring brownor partially covered in snow drifts (I’m looking at you northern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin)??

 

Like “Portugal” or “Australia” or “Texas” or whatever is where you love to fly because the orthos look like reality?

 

Without using Google maps add ons...(tried it and despite a fast connection got weird tile pop ins etc)

 

I’m in this silly rut of my own creation where I keep flying Seattle and SoCal legs in MSFS, get bored or frustrated with the orthos, so spend time flying XP11 default scenery, convince myself that’s fine, yet soon install XP11 Orbx ortho, then get frustrated about lack of smoothness despite high FPS, so try P3Dv5 again, buy ASFS2 and refund it, suspect that I should just go back to Model Railroading as my primary hobby, dream of XP12 and hope it has better landclass/autogen, then go back to Orcas Island to Friday Harbor or Burbank to Orange County hops in MSFS while wishing I could just go back to playing and enjoying “Jetfighter II” on my college roomate's PC or plotting a 10 FPS hop in the FS98 Cessna where I’d invoke the “land me” feature in our newlywed apartment because I didn’t have a joystick. 🙂

https://flightspots.co/

https://worldtour.flights/

There are bad spots in almost every place, but generally speaking, probably France and Austria and some of the other European countries have better Ortho. Norway is mixed (both good and bad).

Use a high cloud layer to get rid of the washed out look, sometimes that helps but sometimes it's too bad to even help that.

For the US, generally it is the Eastern US where you will find the best Ortho (Appalachian area - Blairsville GA to Knoxville to Roanoke)...

There are also sporadic areas where it is very high quality around Denver, and some other parts of Colorado like between Durango and Telluride (only a few places), certain parts of Alaska (some of Alaska is also awful), etc...

Generally speaking, for the Western US you have to stick near the coast (CA - Oregon - Washington), otherwise the ortho is definitely better in the Eastern US (especially West Virginia area and Roanoke).

New Zealand with the Orbx mesh looks great  .

Switzerland is one of the best places otho-wise: no baked-in clouds, no green tint, no weird tile transitions and high quality imagery in general. The only downer really is terrain morphing in the Alps which, sadly, seems to be a problem in all areas with a high-res DEM. 

Edited July 13, 20223 yr by Shack95

6 hours ago, Republic DC9 said:

I’m in this silly rut of my own creation where I keep flying Seattle and SoCal legs in MSFS, get bored or frustrated with the orthos, so spend time flying XP11 default scenery, convince myself that’s fine, yet soon install XP11 Orbx ortho, then get frustrated about lack of smoothness despite high FPS, so try P3Dv5 again, buy ASFS2 and refund it, suspect that I should just go back to Model Railroading as my primary hobby, dream of XP12 and hope it has better landclass/autogen, then go back to Orcas Island to Friday Harbor or Burbank to Orange County hops in MSFS while wishing I could just go back to playing and enjoying “Jetfighter II” on my college roomate's PC or plotting a 10 FPS hop in the FS98 Cessna where I’d invoke the “land me” feature in our newlywed apartment because I didn’t have a joystick. 🙂

Sentence of the month! 😉

But I hear you! I also don't like the scenery in places, specially that puke green! (Description of the month! 😉 ) i always seem to forget where the good looking places are but there are quite a few at least in Norway, Great Britain and Spain, three countries where I fly quite often. But it's a mixed bag... you can have awesome colors at one moment and a few minutes later you are reminded of the last time you were drunk again. It keeps on surprising me how bad large parts of the US still look: you'd expect Bing to do a proper job over there first! But well, hopefully over time MSFS (Bing) scenery will get better and better... until then there is more than enough great scenery to keep me entertained.

Edited July 13, 20223 yr by tup61

4 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

Switzerland is one of the best places otho-wise: no baked-in clouds, no green tint, no weird tile transitions and high quality imagery in general. The only downer really is terrain morphing in the Alps which, sadly, seems to be a problem in all areas with a high-res DEM. 

I second this. I highly recommend flying around Switzerland!

As already stated, New Zealand.  I particular like Utah in the States - absolutely beautiful, and definitely a place on my holiday list for the future.

Yes, New Zealand looks great too, especially with the Orbx mesh addon as it almost completely eliminates terrain morphing.

US southwest and northwest are among the best and most diverse regions.. they looked great even in XP11 ortho (like salt lake city etc).. love the variation in landclass, elevations, etc.. with MSFS its even better.. approach to KMYF is amazing.. 

I find the cold countries/northern europe to be boring.. just flat and green.. southern europe comes alive.. like Italy, Malta etc.. only time i enjoy northern europe is winter when the snow effects are amazing..

Swiss maybe good, but needs hi-def mesh.. else its just boring round edged alps that you get in P3D.. 

34 minutes ago, vin747 said:

Swiss maybe good, but needs hi-def mesh.. else its just boring round edged alps that you get in P3D.. 

It does have high-def mesh, as far as I know even the most detailed one there is in the sim. The problem is the way it’s processed (i.e. morphing and roundedness). The data is not the problem. 

1 hour ago, Shack95 said:

It does have high-def mesh, as far as I know even the most detailed one there is in the sim. The problem is the way it’s processed (i.e. morphing and roundedness). The data is not the problem. 

That's right.  It was included in a world update, and it is at least 10m as far as I know (that's what was quoted on an Asobo Twitch session at least).  Anybody know how to check?
As you say, it is the morphing that is the issue, and it is possible that higher detailed DEM can actually make the morphing appear worse with the current algorithm of projecting the data.

Back to the topic: Spain is very good.
Perhaps because the weather there is so often like this:

10 hours ago, Republic DC9 said:

 dream of XP12 and hope it has better landclass/autogen, . 🙂

I do wonder if traditional ortho and photogrammetry is the future of flight sims. I too am keeping an eye on XP12, but I'm not getting my hopes up too much since the CEO seems less interested in scenery and more focused on the planes themselves (not necessarily a bad thing, but not promising for realistic scenery nuts like myself). The problems with ortho all stem to freezing a single moment in time and trying to make that represent all times of day and seasons.

So for example, I prefer flying around my state in the morning, because that's when the ortho was photographed, and thus that's when the baked in shadows best align with the dynamic shadows. When I fly the late afternoon, I get very obvious double-shadowing, and it breaks my immersion on some level. This is even worse in places like Arizona, New Mexico, etc where you have high and radical geography that really amplifies those baked-in shadows.

Then there's the fact that summer ortho does not really work for winter in my state, no matter how much snow you throw on the ground (and much worse is winter ortho in summer, which I had to deal with in the early days of the sim, hence the "puke green"). You also have the clouds baked into the scenery along with cars on highways, etc. Asobo or Bing is using some AI to remove things like cars from highways, but it's pretty primitive and very obvious (blotches where the cars used to be).

There are two solutions I'm aware of. One is using differential "noise reduction" techniques to completely remove shadows, cars, and clouds. Basically this means taking two pictures at different times of day and merging them in a way to remove the things that change (cars, shadows, clouds). I do this by hand when making my own building scenery - for example, to remove shrubs from a building texture, you take two pictures with a horizontal offset, and then you can use parallax to remove the shrubs. AI should be able to do this pretty easily as well. Of course this means at least two flights over the same area for each of the four seasons, which probably is pretty expensive, though maybe someday these mapping companies will have automated drones that do nothing but this.

The other solution is to use ortho photos to generate much more realistic dynamic "land class and autogen" scenery like XPlane uses. AI could create very realistic metadata maps to recreate the land classes using a large set of sample textures that have no shadows, cars, etc baked in. As Austin himself says, you can put fields where fields are, trees where trees are, and roads where roads are, and it should in theory look pretty good. The downside is you wouldn't be able to fly over your house and see the image of your tent in the back yard or your garden, and even with a large set of textures, you are bound to see repetition after awhile.

Anyway, I know this doesn't answer your question, but I do think part of your frustration is based on inherent flaws in ortho itself, so it's an interesting discussion IMO.

35 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

it is at least 10m as far as I know (that's what was quoted on an Asobo Twitch session at least).  Anybody know how to check?

The original data seems to have a resolution of 0.5m but I’m pretty sure it’s not that detailed in MSFS. No idea what resolution. 

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/geodata/height/alti3d.html