4 minutes ago, eslader said:

I mean, unless you're running a supercomputer, there's almost no way to do full autogen all the way to the horizon. Hopefully it handles things better than 2020, where sometimes the runway lines 50 feet in front of the plane blur out, but I have no expectation that it's going to be ultra sharp 20+ miles away.

 

Ive mostly been able to run at such stupid settings up to now in 2020 that it hasnt been a problem.  Hopefully 2024 will be the same, we shall see!

6 hours ago, Fielder said:

The pleasant walks in the countryside and hills we see in the previews are at selected sites. The idea that MSFS has carefully groomed the whole world in such a manner is not one that I can entertain as very plausible.

Outside of airports and man-made POIs all the countryside does not receive *any* manual or careful hand-grooming AFAIK. It's all AI placing 3D objects where it detects them in the 2D analysis, tessellation, 2D-to-3D AI conversion (i.e. Mt Kilimanjaro), 3D flora/trees/etc, 3D objects like rocks/boulders/etc along with the new highly detailed 3D terrain which I'm assuming is procedurally generated based on the DEM in the area. So very definitely it's not plausible that they'd have hand groomed the whole world, but they don't have to. It's the areas with poor DEM and/or poor satellite coverage that would not look as good as some of the shown areas. But ground level detail wise I believe it's the world over since that's all automation/procedural.
 

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by lwt1971

7 hours ago, Fielder said:

No sarcasm. The truth. The pleasant walks in the countryside and hills we see in the previews are at selected sites. The idea that MSFS has carefully groomed the whole world in such a manner is not one that I can entertain as very plausible.

The Grand Canyon is photogrammetry yes, but they've never hidden this fact, and have never implied the entire world will look like that.

None of the other comparison images (other than the airports obviously) are hand crafted.

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

8 hours ago, Fielder said:

No sarcasm. The truth. The pleasant walks in the countryside and hills we see in the previews are at selected sites. The idea that MSFS has carefully groomed the whole world in such a manner is not one that I can entertain as very plausible.

Well that's a load of nonsense since attendees of the event were allowed to fly anywhere they wanted and we have plenty of footage of that and it all looks explorable by foot. Blu's amazing ground physics video was not done at the Grand Canyon and we could see realistic terrain, grass, shrubs etc. AI makes it happen.

9 hours ago, Fielder said:

No sarcasm. The truth. The pleasant walks in the countryside and hills we see in the previews are at selected sites. The idea that MSFS has carefully groomed the whole world in such a manner is not one that I can entertain as very plausible.

No, they explicitly were not. The screenshots they put out as part of their standardized media materials were surely selected to show the improvements off, but there were no such restrictions at the actual preview event for attendees. Squirrel mentioned he was just picking random places, weathers, and times of day, and even landed in a random snow field at one point because he thought it looked interesting.

The whole planet has not (and never will be) hand authored to any large extent, because that's just not possible. But the world can be 'groomed' by their automated tools, algorithms, libraries of textures, creatures, plants, AI-assisted asset generation, etc.

I expect some places will look better than others, and there will still probably be myriad locations where the automated process breaks down - those are just problems you'll always be contending with when you're trying to render the planet at-scale.  But their new tools and features can certainly make most of the world a lot nicer looking and more pleasant to wander around in.  And the fact that they're creating 'missions' to explicitly get you on the ground taking pictures and stuff, suggests a level of confidence in the visual fidelity.

It'd be one thing if the preview event only let people buzz around the Grand Canyon area or something - some skepticism about why these tight guardrails were put on the experience would be fully warranted, and wondering if maybe they're cordoning things off to ensure you're in a place they know looks great.  But they didn't do that. At all.

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by Scottoest

4 hours ago, eslader said:

I mean, unless you're running a supercomputer, there's almost no way to do full autogen all the way to the horizon. Hopefully it handles things better than 2020, where sometimes the runway lines 50 feet in front of the plane blur out, but I have no expectation that it's going to be ultra sharp 20+ miles away.

 

Doesn't need a supercomputer. I can run TLOD at 400 and everything is sharp to the horizon.

Yeah and even the images Microsoft provided are not handcrafted areas. They’re just places that look very nice with the new scenery tech

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

21 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

The whole planet has not (and never will be) hand authored to any large extent, because that's just not possible. But the world can be 'groomed' by their automated tools, algorithms, libraries of textures, creatures, plants, AI-assisted asset generation, etc.

I expect some places will look better than others, and there will still probably be myriad locations where the automated process breaks down - those are just problems you'll always be contending with when you're trying to render the planet at-scale.  But their new tools and features can certainly make most of the world a lot nicer looking and more pleasant to wander around in.  And the fact that they're creating 'missions' to explicitly get you on the ground taking pictures and stuff, suggests a level of confidence in the visual fidelity.

Indeed, we cannot expect hand treatment for large areas. It will be a result of automatic processing on large scale by AI tools and such, a bit like what they did for the autogen and the trees in MSFS 2020.

As a consequence, I think we can expect big variations in the quality of the results, based on the quality of the ground textures available for a given area. If the textures are crisp enough to recognize stones and boulders, then we might get stones and boulders in there. If not, then we'll probably get sand or grass, I suppose.

4 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

But ground level detail wise I believe it's the world over since that's all automation/procedural.

That’s my guess as well. Would be awesome to land on a riverbank somewhere in Nepal and get the 4000x ground detail. 

4 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

It's all AI placing 3D objects where it detects them in the 2D analysis, tessellation, 2D-to-3D AI conversion (i.e. Mt Kilimanjaro), 3D flora/trees/etc, 3D objects like rocks/boulders/etc along with the new highly detailed 3D terrain which I'm assuming is procedurally generated based on the DEM in the area.

Does this mean that the vegetation and trees seen in screenshots (like the one below) are custom 3D objects, whereas in the rest of the world we’ll get more low-res trees? 

28 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Does this mean that the vegetation and trees seen in screenshots (like the one below) are custom 3D objects, whereas in the rest of the world we’ll get more low-res trees? 

Those are all part of a library of custom made 3D models of flora (treest/bushes/grass/plants/etc) for different biomes etc I'm assuming. But the placement of and size of are controlled by procedural automation with AI assistance (I assume they mark off areas on the globe with the right biome, and that combined with other factors such as AI analysis of 2D globe textures, photogrammetry, etc all combine to place the right 3D objects in the right places in the right size). There is definitely no hand placement going on in the countryside I'd think, save for the custom airports' flora.
 

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by lwt1971

40 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Does this mean that the vegetation and trees seen in screenshots (like the one below) are custom 3D objects, whereas in the rest of the world we’ll get more low-res trees? 

All the trees in the world will be 3D

1 hour ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Does this mean that the vegetation and trees seen in screenshots (like the one below) are custom 3D objects, whereas in the rest of the world we’ll get more low-res trees? 

 

They've said they have something like a dozen or two different biomes defined. And coastal mangrove swamps like that are certainly common enough to be one of them.

2 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Doesn't need a supercomputer. I can run TLOD at 400 and everything is sharp to the horizon.

I guarantee you are not seeing full-fidelity autogen out to the horizon. It would be silly to even make that possible. You can't even see full detail out to the horizon in real life. After a certain distance, trees don't look like they have individual leaves on them, signs aren't legible, etc. Why would they waste cycles fully rendering something you would need a telescope to discern in the real world?

 

6 hours ago, mistolip said:

The fact that you can't entertain something as very plausible doesn't necessarily make it the truth. 😉 

I find it implausible that the whole Earth is bespoken in MSFS2024.

MS demonstrated the Grand Canyon biome and we see the videos on Youtube, it looks very bespoken indeed when getting out of the plane a hiking up a cliff.

And we have featured activities with things to do in very nice areas, set apart for our enjoyment. They look very nice in the videos.  The rest of the world will not appear anywhere near so nice. That is my confident prediction. It is based on reason and I hope on common sense.

7 minutes ago, Fielder said:

I find it implausible that the whole Earth is bespoken in MSFS2024.

MS demonstrated the Grand Canyon biome and we see the videos on Youtube, it looks very bespoken indeed when getting out of the plane a hiking up a cliff.

And we have featured activities with things to do in very nice areas, set apart for our enjoyment. They look very nice in the videos.  The rest of the world will not appear anywhere near so nice. That is my confident prediction. It is based on reason and I hope on common sense.

And nobody including MS/Asobo are saying that the whole earth is bespoken in MSFS 20204.

Sorry, if after reading all the answers, and all what MS/Asobo have actually shown about their using AI and automated procedural techniques to populate the ground in the countryside specific to different biomes, after all what the preview event attendees have shown... after all this if you still think it is bespoken and hand-crafted, well then not sure what to say 🙂 

And as already evidenced multiple times by the videos/articles shown by those who were there, and what folks above in this thread also reiterated, no it was not just the Grand Canyon biome that was available, and not the only area that looked good with the new terrain rendering/processing.
 

Edited September 23, 20241 yr by lwt1971