Ha yeah that was the first thing I did, a short jaunt from Shearwater in the H145 and I landed in the ball field near my house.

My house is now PG and looks decent, even my cars in the driveway are there.

The been having a closer look at Halifax, and the Photogrammetry is newer than Google's. The stuff in MSFS is 1-2 years old, there's buildings here that didn't exist or were under construction in google's imagery.

Now google has newer 2D imagery for the area if you open Google Earth and load historic imagery instead of the default, some from last month.

Edited October 20, 20223 yr by Tuskin38

On 10/3/2022 at 8:53 PM, bobcat999 said:

I know this is a 'free' update, but for heavens sake.  Some of the roads around the Horse Shoe Falls are falling into the water and look ridiculous.
And the American falls do that horrible terrain morphing thing as you approach.

Has there been any talk of allowing users to submit world terrain improvements to the upcoming scenery gateway, or is it just airports?

There are so many freeware elevation / water fixes available, it seems like a good way outsource some of the fiddlier quality control.

27 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

The stuff in MSFS is 1-2 years old

That’s the time frame I figured out too based on some observable “time markers” in the area.  Nice that it’s pretty recent.

26 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

Has there been any talk of allowing users to submit world terrain improvements to the upcoming scenery gateway, or is it just airports?

There are so many freeware elevation / water fixes available, it seems like a good way outsource some of the fiddlier quality control.

I totally agree.  There are some great enhancements on flightsim.to.  Some quality authors.  It amazes me every day how much time and effort people put in to the sim.

As for the gateway, I don't think the answer to your question is clear yet.  I hope it is airports and scenery, and apparently they have outsourced the design of the gateway so that MS / Asobo can concentrate on the core sim.

I really like flightsim.to, which seems to do it better than the MS marketplace currently (assuming the gateway would be similar), as it is a bit clunky; so slow and unresponsive.  Hopefully the third party can get the gateway running better.

Personally, I would have preferred a formal link up with flightsim.to so that they don't duplicate or reinvent the wheel, but it is a bit of a legal minefield.

What would be great for a scenery gateway would be to allow submissions of fixes and updates that can be vetted and  become part of the default world for everyone. 

On 10/21/2022 at 5:25 AM, scotchegg said:

Has there been any talk of allowing users to submit world terrain improvements to the upcoming scenery gateway, or is it just airports?

There are so many freeware elevation / water fixes available, it seems like a good way outsource some of the fiddlier quality control.

The problem with submitting terrain improvements, or any 3D objects, is that Microsoft has to prove there is no copyright on them.

The Gateway system for taxiway signs is much more legal friendly, since users are just fixing the taxiway numbering, which doesn't have a copyright.  But if users are allowed to upload 3D objects to fix the terrain, it's hard to check if the users are uploading copyrighted work. For example, users could upload terrain or other 3D objects taken from Google earth, and Microsoft wouldn't even know it was taken from Google earth. Once those copyrighted objects made it into MSFS, Microsoft can be sued.

For this reason, I doubt that there will ever be a gateway system to upload 3D objects.  A gateway system to fix taxiway markings and taxiway numbering is one thing, but a gateway system to allow the upload of 3D objects is entirely different from a legal perspective.

On 10/20/2022 at 11:49 PM, bobcat999 said:

I totally agree.  There are some great enhancements on flightsim.to.  Some quality authors.  It amazes me every day how much time and effort people put in to the sim.

As for the gateway, I don't think the answer to your question is clear yet.  I hope it is airports and scenery, and apparently they have outsourced the design of the gateway so that MS / Asobo can concentrate on the core sim.

I really like flightsim.to, which seems to do it better than the MS marketplace currently (assuming the gateway would be similar), as it is a bit clunky; so slow and unresponsive.  Hopefully the third party can get the gateway running better.

Personally, I would have preferred a formal link up with flightsim.to so that they don't duplicate or reinvent the wheel, but it is a bit of a legal minefield.

Stuff on Flightsim.to has the advantage of being able to have objects imported from Google Earth. That's something Microsoft can never allow.
Apart from the licensing issues, if these imported objects have not been optimised properly a collection of them would bring MSFS to a standstill.

What we need is an environment where the community can correct or improve the scenery in the sim and automatically can share that in the Bing cloud. A voting system and/or check by professionals could have these corrections incorporated in the Bing scenery or in an addon. On Flightsim.to, there are already too many addons that are incompatible with others or break things entirely; not a problem when manually manaing addons but an issue if the sim starts adding fixes from such a system automatically.

Hello fellow Vancouverites and BCers!  The de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver was released yesterday for the 40th Anniversary Edition of MSFS.  If you are a fan of Harbour Air from BC, please vote here to make a request for somebody to do the Harbour Air livery for the DHC-2 Beaver: https://flightsim.to/request/livery/20502/harbour-air-dhc-2-beaver