8 minutes ago, Virtpilot said:

I have been flying this sim from the beginning and oh dear I miss those early days when they nailed it in almost every aspect.. The weather system was spot on, the clouds were a real joy to fly with, the LOD was great. Then something happened. Was it the XBOX?? Have no idea. But I can only imagine the joy having today the FBW 320 and the sim how it was in the beginning. Some things have maybe start to move to the right direction. That is, the beginning. 

The pre-alpha was particularly impressive... this was 4 years ago:

 

3 hours ago, MrFuzzy said:

The pre-alpha was particularly impressive... this was 4 years ago:

Be careful with those rose-tinted glasses.

While some aspects, like some of the live weather and ground texture definition were better than what we have now, that video shows some noticeable stutter, popping, and artefacts.
Also, don't forget that for a long time, the flight model wasn't too hot. Takeoffs and landings were very sketchy due to overpowered torque effect, no ground friction, underpowered rudder effect, and a very prominent delineation between being in contact with the ground or not.

There was some seriously good progress made afterwards. However, MSFS has clearly directed work towards MSFS2024 since SU12, and it shows.
The concern is just how much more breaks in MSFS2020 without receiving decent fixes before MSFS2024's release.

32 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

However, MSFS has clearly directed work towards MSFS2024 since SU12, and it shows.

While I hope MSFS2024 will tackle a number of base sim issues, I wouldn't  cultivate too many unfounded hopes. One of my pet peeves, the horizon line, has  already been identified in the original FS2024 trailer.

This doesn't necessarily mean it will transfer to the new sim as there's still time. But given it's "deeply hidden" in the code it's well possible. And to be sure, people would sight it on day 1.

And this might apply to more of our present-day core sim issues. Based on what I've seen so far, FS2024 will clearly focus on contents, contents, and contents.

Kind regards, Michael

5 hours ago, Virtpilot said:

I have been flying this sim from the beginning and oh dear I miss those early days when they nailed it in almost every aspect.

Some things may have been better, but others were clearly worse. Above all, the elevation data was terrible. The Alps or the Himalayas, for example, looked like melted ice cream.

Edited July 27, 20232 yr by Shack95

7 hours ago, F737MAX said:

Be careful with those rose-tinted glasses.

While some aspects, like some of the live weather and ground texture definition were better than what we have now, that video shows some noticeable stutter, popping, and artefacts.
Also, don't forget that for a long time, the flight model wasn't too hot. Takeoffs and landings were very sketchy due to overpowered torque effect, no ground friction, underpowered rudder effect, and a very prominent delineation between being in contact with the ground or not.

I agree with you, my considerations were limited to graphics quality only.

Performance, flight model and aircraft fidelity have improved a lot since release, graphics has deteriorated after the XBox version release.

It's worse now than ever.  Many places that didn't use to have it where I fly (upper central portion of the US) have it all over the place.  I think it's some sort of server issue trying to place new tiles.  Because the areas I see it are areas that used to have really old ugly green tinted tiles... and now sometimes the newer tiles pop in.

1 hour ago, MrFuzzy said:

I agree with you, my considerations were limited to graphics quality only.

Performance, flight model and aircraft fidelity have improved a lot since release, graphics has deteriorated after the XBox version release.

The degradation started, in my opinion, in 2021 when they crammed the code into the Xbox S. 

And its also interesting to note that Lionel « its a big and beautiful world out there » Fuentes, is no more to be seen anymore in their chat sessions. They seem to focus on improving the air dynamics and flight modeling (and they do a pretty good job at it !) , subcontract their WU to 3PD, their avionics to WT  and not work anymore on the global scenery. 

There might be other factors : insufficient server capacity if the number of players is now very large (beware of the holy rollers magnifying any bit of information to blindly praise the sim though), the obvious low quality of most of Bing image procurement.

8 hours ago, pmb said:

While I hope MSFS2024 will tackle a number of base sim issues, I wouldn't  cultivate too many unfounded hopes

Neither do I. Wait and see. 

Edited July 28, 20232 yr by Dominique_K

25 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

And its also interesting to note that Lionel « its a big and beautiful world out there » Fuentes, is no more to be seen anymore in their chat session. They seem to focus on improving the air dynamics and flight modeling (and they do a pretty good job at it !) , subcontract their WU to 3PD, their avionics to WT  and not work anymore on the global scenery. 

There might be other factors : insufficient server capacity if the number of players is now very large (beware of the holy rollers magnifying any bit of information to blindly praise the sim though), the obvious low quality of most of Bing image procurement.

Maybe a large part of the graphics development team is now working on FS2024?

As for server capacity I don't know... the issues are reproducible and come out in the same areas and to the same extent at different times. Look at my Guinea screenshots and the other user's video shot in May. In a route that should have been checked by Asobo because they made that bush trip!

Also the tile swapping in the Courchevel area is 100% reproducible and very evident in the corresponding landing challenge. This issue affects so many areas in Europe now...

And the tile progressive darkening at low altitude occurring basically everywhere? This is negligence: after 5 good sim updates (6-11) we are again seeing regressions.

54 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

Maybe a large part of the graphics development team is now working on FS2024?

 

Fs2024 : We can hope, can't we ?

I am not a software engineer so I limit myself to observations and deductions from what I would call circumstantial evidences 😁.  Concerning the servers, we have seen a degradation in the access, so there maybe an impact on image quality too.

Adding to the mix what they said about the offline texture replacing sat imagery  and wondering whether this does impact the tile swapping, popping etc. 

quote  This issue is well known by the team though we know it is a very disruptive one. When LOD is missing from the satellite imagery, the sim injects texture to prevent a white or empty tile on the grid. Unfortunately, this cause issues like your screenshot above and won’t be fixed until we are able to update the area with higher LOD from the imagery provided. unquote

 Asobo is at the mercy of Bing image procurement (Bing buys the images, MS has no satellite). Apparently Asobo doesn't always use the cream of the crop. And they don't intent to do anything, on the  software side, to correct  the LOD problem.

I just did a flight between Ferrara to Treviso (Venice backcountry). The ground scenery was terrible over Padua  but OK for the rest. No in-flight swapping. And this was a WU.  Bad vibes.

 

 

7 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

I just did a flight between Ferrara to Treviso (Venice backcountry). The ground scenery was terrible over Padua  but OK for the rest. No in-flight swapping. And this was a WU.  Bad vibes.

 

 

Exactly what I see when in that region.

To me it doesn’t always look like PR tiles are being replaced by generic tiles, but like PR tiles from one source are connected to PR tiles from another source.

 

Just now, GSalden said:

Exactly what I see when in that region.

To me it doesn’t always look like PR tiles are being replaced by generic tiles, but like PR tiles from one source are connected to PR tiles from another source.

 

In this particular case it is not offline textures, it seems to be the juxtaposition of satellite maps of different resolutions. What is worrying is that it becomes a trend. 

They should put some people on this. I would gladly skip all WU until FS24 to get the present scenery up to what it should be/was.

Its funny because early on, there was this idea that FS20 was kind of an advertising billboard for Azure and Bing .Well... is it ? People go to Google to get the imagery and everybody laments about how the servers deal with us, the clients.

2 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

Asobo is at the mercy of Bing image procurement (Bing buys the images, MS has no satellite). Apparently Asobo doesn't always use the cream of the crop. And they don't intent to do anything, on the  software side, to correct  the LOD problem.

Are you saying that Asobo do not always use the best quality Bing images? Since Microsoft own Bing, they word not allowed well should be. To be honest, stuff like this always makes me pause for thought when I consider my options for upgrading in the future. I absolutely detest mismatched quality/colouration of adjacent photoscenery tiles, and the less said about injecting default generic textures in certain locations the better. This is one of the reasons why I have stuck with ORBx TrueEarth Great Britain and Netherlands in P3Dv4.5HF2 as my flying environment. The terrain textures throughout these two scenery regions are beautifully consistent.

I really hope that issues like these are resolved with MSFS 2024.

43 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Exactly what I see when in that region.

Between Ferrara and Treviso there are at least 3 versions of Bing textures, depending on the altitude the photos were taken from... 

AI should prevent such artifacts...

https://streamable.com/f6ypap 

 

If they can't fix the issue in MSFS 2020, does anyone really believe it will suddenly get better with MSFS 2024? Since they're relying on the same Bing imagery, I don't. 2024 is a no-sale for me unless this is fixed.