24 minutes ago, domkle said:

Now, I lived for some years in the heart of Paris (7th district), do I need to see the lovely facade of my building ? 

Of course not. Would still be nice if the facades resembled at least vaguely the Parisian Haussmann style architecture and not look like the walls of 20th century industrial warehouse. But I’m sure they’ll do it right.

Just for the heck of it I Google Earth Paris to see how it would look.  I've used Google Earth Pro sometime ago and it looked ok but now I don't know how they do this much detail and at 700ft. Even the trees are starting to look more like... trees!  This looks very close to a photo.

Maybe in 10+yrs we would be able stream such visuals? 

 

 

I wonder, how Hong Kong will look like in MSFS. And I hope that Fly Tampa will come up with a new version of Kai Tak for this sim 😉

46 minutes ago, TuFun said:

Maybe in 10+yrs we would be able stream such visuals? 

 

By then I expect to see things in their real life state: imagine this cathedral to look a bit burned and without that right tower if you flew over it in your sim today!

Edited October 9, 20196 yr by Reader

2 hours ago, TuFun said:

Just for the heck of it I Google Earth Paris to see how it would look.  I've used Google Earth Pro sometime ago and it looked ok but now I don't know how they do this much detail and at 700ft. Even the trees are starting to look more like... trees!  This looks very close to a photo.

Maybe in 10+yrs we would be able stream such visuals? 

 

In a year or so we will be able to stream it, but not Paris (yet) as it's not available on the Bing maps, but it probably will at some point and the dev team already pointed out that updates on Bing would directly update the sim scenery.

3 hours 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 !

1000 ft AGL over densely populated areas, 500 ft otherwise (with the obvious exception when it is required for landing or taking off).

14 hours 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.

We've seen a some pictures and video from areas not covered in photogrammetry. There were at least two in the release trailer (Dubai and the Bahamas).

I suspect they'll be some limitations here and it won't be perfect. We should get a good look tomorrow because the preview we are getting has been said to show all the differences, including what the non-streamed scenery will look like (some content creators said they showed a 3 picture side by side by side comparison).

Edited October 9, 20196 yr by bonchie

5 hours ago, TuFun said:

Just for the heck of it I Google Earth Paris to see how it would look.  I've used Google Earth Pro sometime ago and it looked ok but now I don't know how they do this much detail and at 700ft. Even the trees are starting to look more like... trees!  This looks very close to a photo.

Maybe in 10+yrs we would be able stream such visuals? 

 

 

This Technique is called photogrammetry, say said in the interview some citys have 3cm per pixel resolution. I do Photogrammetry myself, scanning stuff (Landscape ect.) to watch them in VR, it looks incredible, lifelike.

7 hours ago, Shack95 said:

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.

They should make an in-game feature just like Google Maps has, where you can report something that is wrong. This will allow us to pick a building and specify how tall it should actually be (great for reporting things that are too tall and thus blocking an approach). It could also be used to report clouds in satellite photos, falsely recognized trees (sand dunes), missing trees and buildings, etc. Azure AI should be able to adapt based on the user feedback it gets, so that it can get better at removing clouds and recognizing trees and buildings. 

 

7 hours ago, bashope said:

1000 ft AGL over densely populated areas, 500 ft otherwise (with the obvious exception when it is required for landing or taking off).

And sometime, the quality of Bing will be under pressure. I can't wait to visit Los Angeles area. Even starting at 4'500 ft on the VFR Corridor (Special Flight Rules), the landing at Santa Monica with the Sunset on LA will be awesome... or not : https://youtu.be/1pJMHCZOpok?t=343 

And Manhattan at 1'500 ft VFR, will be fun : https://youtu.be/uCNhIftv2rc?t=52

 

19 hours 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.

You are assuming they are done. They said they've got passes left to make. From what I've gathered, there won't be any areas left building-less on release.

But on specific custom city centers, there may be some room. I think the main thing Orbx will do is go back to making far more airports than they do now.

Edited October 9, 20196 yr by bonchie

18 hours 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?

No. They addressed this. The AI will create a plausible overlay for areas like that.

1 hour ago, bonchie said:

You are assuming they are done. They said they've got passes left to make. From what I've gathered, there won't be any areas left building-less on release.

But on specific custom city centers, there may be some room. I think the main thing Orbx will do is go back to making far more airports than they do now.

That's what I think would be the best approach to devs like Orbx, they have very talented devs there to make impressive custom buildings, POIs and airports. 

Handmade sceneries with custom buildings will always be better than the ones built with the A.I., but handmade sceneries can't have large areas, so focusing on airports + very reallistic surrounding scenery would be the better approach for the new sim.

10 hours ago, bonchie said:

But on specific custom city centers, there may be some room. I think the main thing Orbx will do is go back to making far more airports than they do now.

I agree with you on airports. But for city centers ,3rd parties as Orbx just can't make realistic hand-made city centers and take the risk the same city will be covered by photogrametry just weeks or months later...

 

51 minutes ago, Noooch said:

3rd parties as Orbx just can't make realistic hand-made city centers and take the risk the same city will be covered by photogrametry just weeks or months later...

I see a problem here as well. This would only be possible if Bing had a sort of long-term roadmap showing the devs exactly when they planned to cover what area, which I doubt they have – at least they told me that they didn’t have such a schedule.

Edited October 10, 20196 yr by Shack95