Does anyone know if there's been a preview, either screenshot or video, of flying over a non-photogrammetry city center?

We all know photogrammetry covered cities are going to look great.
Non-photogrammetry residential areas look good as machine learning is picking up roof colour, roof style, house style and footprint and creating some highly plausible autogen.

I don't recall seeing any previews of a a non-photogrammetry city center though. I'm interested to know how they look.

There's surely a limit to what ML autogen can do for the highly bespoke buildings you see in a city center.
There's also a limit to how many hand modelled POIs they can add.

Wasn't there a city and airport featured in that huge storm over the ocean screenshot?

1 hour ago, ryanbatcund said:

Wasn't there a city and airport featured in that huge storm over the ocean screenshot?

I think that was Nassau, and true,  I dont think that was photogrametry . But it was pretty much at a distance too

Edited October 9, 20196 yr by Casualcas

1 hour ago, nickhod said:

Does anyone know if there's been a preview, either screenshot or video, of flying over a non-photogrammetry city center?

We all know photogrammetry covered cities are going to look great.
Non-photogrammetry residential areas look good as machine learning is picking up roof colour, roof style, house style and footprint and creating some highly plausible autogen.

I don't recall seeing any previews of a a non-photogrammetry city center though. I'm interested to know how they look.

There's surely a limit to what ML autogen can do for the highly bespoke buildings you see in a city center.
There's also a limit to how many hand modelled POIs they can add.

This is how Paris looks:
 

You can also look on the video they sent to the content creators, FSElite channel on youtube published the full video, some cities shown there aren't covered by photogrammetry like: São Paulo - Brazil, London and Lisbon - Portugal.

 

1 hour ago, ca_metal said:

This is how Paris looks:

Looks about equivalent in details to Orbx Netherlands for Aerofly FS 2 (but the building textures seem quite low-res) Blowing up the image also shows several areas with no buildings.

A tentative conclusion is that Orbx and others could probably compete well in high quality city and airport creation for this sim....

Especially as they would not be paying for orthos, which is a lot of the cost.

20 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Looks about equivalent in details to Orbx Netherlands for Aerofly FS 2 (but the building textures seem quite low-res) Blowing up the image also shows several areas with no buildings.

A tentative conclusion is that Orbx and others could probably compete well in high quality city and airport creation for this sim....

Especially as they would not be paying for orthos, which is a lot of the cost.

I totally agree, coincidently I was just thinking the same thing! Equivalent in detail to Orbx, but with all of my Orbx products, plus FSDT, Fly Tampa...etc. Weather addons, and so on, I'd say equivalent or less in some areas.

Mike.     

What about restricted areas that are not displayed in google maps and bing like Military bases etc....

 

Will there be black voids in restricted areas?

15 minutes ago, Kilo60 said:

What about restricted areas that are not displayed in google maps and bing like Military bases etc....

 

Will there be black voids in restricted areas?

somebody from ign asked the devs about that.

“In general, whenever an area is blurred in Bing, or is otherwise restricted, we will use procedural techniques to fill in the blanks. Those areas won’t be fully authentic, but we will have something that generally fits into the area.”

article here: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/08/how-will-microsoft-flight-simulator-deal-with-what-governments-dont-want-you-to-see

 

cheers,

-andy crosby

London:

On the left you can see parts of central London. There are some hand modelled buildings such as Tower Bridge, Tower of London and the O2, the rest is autogen. In the City there are some generic high-rise buildings instead of iconic buildings such as the Gherkin, in Canary Wharf there are no skyscrapers at all. All in all I think the autogen looks okay from that altitude, although those bright tower blocks seem to be a bit too dominant and not very typical for London. Also, there seems to be an issue with autogen draw distance (although that could be due to the poor quality of the image). To make it look more realistic they should at least add the skyscraper clusters in the City and Canary Wharf, otherwise approaching ‎EGLC will only be half the fun. I’m sure they will.

Lisbon:The city centre is obscured by the clouds but we still get a thorough impression. Here the autogen seems to fit much better than in the London footage. This looks fantastic, almost as if it was photogrammetry. The higher altitude might also add to this impression.

I think non-photogrammetry scenery looks awesome, especially in rural areas. The challenge will be adapting the various architectural styles, especially in such diverse regions as Europe, in city centres in particular.

This could be something for 3^rd party devs. The only problem I see is that Bing regularly update their imagery and 3d data. Imagine some 3^rd party company invests a lot of time and money in modelling a city and then 2 weeks after the release Bing come up with a photogrammetry version😅. Quite risky.   

All in all I think non-photogrammetry cities generally look great compared to what we’re used to, especially for a default scenery, still they come nowhere near photogrammetric cities. Let’s hope Bing pushes on with updating their data.

Edited October 9, 20196 yr by Shack95

Thanks for the screenshots. 👍

No doubt lots of hand placed scenery in Paris and London (and they look good because of it).

Lisbon is probably more representative of an average city, and it still looks good, so well done to Asobo 😀

I agree that scenery developers will have to look at far flung places that wont realistically have photogrammetry any time soon.
The photogrammetry coverage of Google is pretty formidable now and I would expect that, given time, MS will throw money at catching up.

Pilots here may know, what is the minimum altitude  an aircraft is authorized to fly over a city ? Several thousands feet I would guess.  I mean we need convincing views at some altitude not total realism at ground level, except in the last mile of an approach maybe l. This is not a walking simulator, a driving simulator  but a flight simulator after all !

26 minutes ago, domkle said:

Pilots here may know, what is the minimum altitude  an aircraft is authorized to fly over a city ? Several thousands feet I would guess.  I mean we need convincing views at some altitude not total realism at ground level, except in the last mile of an approach maybe l. This is not a walking simulator, a driving simulator  but a flight simulator after all !

Agreed, but on some approaches you fly relatively low over a city. On the EGLC Rwy 9 approach for instance you can clearly see many of London's landmarks and on final you pass the Canary Wharf skyline cluster rather closely. Without these landmars this particular approach wouldn't be that much fun. I'm sure there are similar other examples. But as I said, I'm sure they'll polish the scenery up over the coming months, especially in popular cities such as London and Paris.

2 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

 

Totally agree. Some details are a must on the lines of approach. Now, I lived for some years in the heart of Paris (7th district), do I need to see the lovely facade of my building ?  

There is of course an exception (every rule has one !), If I take off with an emergency heli from  downtown Paris. But do we need the whole shebang from this particular case ? 

 

1 hour ago, domkle said:

Pilots here may know, what is the minimum altitude  an aircraft is authorized to fly over a city ? Several thousands feet I would guess.  I mean we need convincing views at some altitude not total realism at ground level, except in the last mile of an approach maybe l. This is not a walking simulator, a driving simulator  but a flight simulator after all !

Unless you are simulating an air-ambulance or police helicopter.

Just now, Grindathotte said:

Unless you are simulating an air-ambulance or police helicopter.

Coincidentally, I believe Microsoft said no copters will be included for a while.