Hi, everyone,

After Update XVII I visited some places in Scotland and was surprised by the amount of trees I saw (for example in Shetland and Fair Isles).

Precisely these last few days I have been watching the first season of the TV series "Shetland" and what I saw on MFSF 2020 contrasted greatly with what I saw on television.

So later, I inspected the surroundings of Fair Isle and Shetland Island with Google Maps, including Tingwall airport, and the difference from reality is enormous: there are almost no trees.

Why that difference?

Regards.

 

It's the first thing I noticed also. Connemara has been absolutely destroyed after the update! The west of Ireland is famous for not having trees, thousands of years of wind and rain have erroded all but an inch of topsoil. It's all rock and bog. But now when I fly over the region is like flying over Redwood national park!

This has been a bugbear since FSX. For instance - all the National Trust sites are well documented (and have been for decades). Many of these have very few (or no) trees. You'd have thought exclusion zones based on NT boundaries would be quite easy to use.

There is actually data for almost every single tree in the United Kingdom, there was an addon called Treescapes for FSX that used this.

The over abundance of trees is the AI misidentifying the bushes, shrubs, heather and bracken (fern) in aerial imagery as trees. There are some addons on flightsim.to that remove some of the excessive trees for areas such as the Peak District, Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, Dartmoor and Snowdonia.

 

Edited July 24, 20241 yr by ckyliu

That is something that irked me since the very first World Update dropped. My expectations were probably too high from the start, but I come from the ORBX and their meticulously cleaned up landclass sceneries Regions for FSX and P3D which would get accurate hydrological data, landclass touched up by hand, and all airports in the area updated to better match real world layouts.

 

What Asobo does is simply update their areas with new aerials, better DEM, and up until World Update Scandinavia also with some new Autogen Descriptions to get localized building variety (something they oddly stopped since then). Then they add POI's and a few bespoke Airports.

Then they let their AI tech run over it all and leave it as is. No touched up airport layouts, no better hydrological data, no correction by hand of wrong set vegetation.

Maybe it's asking too much when you consider these are all free updates, but part of me still doesn't understand why they never at least fix the AI's knack to put trees in regions where they absolutely should not be. Like Western Ireland, Northern Scotland or entire subpolar climate where they simply can't grow.

Why do they always rely on the community to fix this later? These are basics of an accurate representation of the world.

Edited July 24, 20241 yr by Farlis

On the subject of trees, I spent several hours expunging my local area of the amazonian forests that don't exist in reality only to find that they've all returned with this update.  Does this mean I have to do it all again?