I wonder if Google or Microsoft would stop this indirect way of copying through Google Maps. I think Google would claim copyright on the 3d scanned data that is available through Google Maps. Without this the Open Source community wouldn't be able to as easily shovel this over through programs into MSFS.
Though I think Microsoft would be out of harms way for as long as they don't blatantly paste back the user improved buildings. However, obviously not all improvements are gathered from Google Maps and dependent on the scale this might become an issue in detecting these.
Reminds me of the Bing IE toolbar 'copying' Google search results 10 years ago [1]. It turned out it wasn't that Bing was actively copying Google search results, but rather it was learning what search terms entered into the toolbar correlated with what page users went to after the query was executed.
They listened to users searching anywhere in any search engine, and just storing the correlation (search term → clicked website).
Google actually does the same, through their own analytics.
It's just that so many more people visit Google than Bing or Yahoo that automatically 90% of the (search term → clicked website) mappings are recorded on google.com
I don't understand copyright law particularly well, but I'd expect it does matter here.
The TOS only applies to the person extracting the data. So if person A extracts the data, violating TOS, then puts it up on a website where it is downloaded by person B (who did not necessarily ever agree to Google Maps' TOS), then only A has broken TOS, B hasn't. But B may have violated Google's copyright.
The argument is that a photograph is a creative work (there are lots of decisions that go into it) whereas a scan is a mechanical reproduction, and therefore isn't creative, and so can't be copyrighted at all.
I don't know what the state of the law on this is.
It seems like it comes down to the content, not the form. If I arrange a scene with a bowl of fruit on my dog's head and take a photograph of it, or a 3D scan of it, I can call it a creative work either way.
If a photographer operating a photo booth at a party can claim copyright on the photos, then someone making 3D scans of party guests as they pose should be able to claim copyright also.
Taking a 3D scan of a random building should be just as copyrightable as taking a photo of the same building. One could argue that neither should be copyrightable, but all the photographers I know would say any photo they take is "creative work", even if it was done with a smartphone camera in auto mode. If simply framing or cropping a photograph is what makes a photo creative, the same concept scales to 3 dimensions just as easily. You have to decide how much of the building to capture, whether to include the parking lot, the nearby power lines, etc.
With a bulk capture of geography, I suppose the photographic equivalent of a 3D scan would be aerial photography or Google's street view or something. Is that copyrightable? I assume Google and other companies act like it is. Someone had to decide the resolution and precision to capture at, at least.
How does that make sense for a taxpayer-funded resource? I'm sure that some projects that rent time on Hubble have private funding, but does that apply to all of them?
That images taken by hubble aren't used commercially without paying a license fee to NASA? I imagine the tax payer is okay with getting some money back.
NASA stuff isn’t copyrighted, and only the logo is even trademarked.
> NASA content - images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format - generally are not copyrighted.
I believe the reasoning is that everything paid for by your tax money should be free for everyone. I think some state-level governments prefer your argument.
It depends on how much original creative effort went into it. Copyright is fuzzy on purpose.
Copyright vests automatically and immediately in the creator of a creative work. This can be assigned or licensed to another party in part or in whole, at the discretion of the copyright holder.
Whether a work is creative, and therefore protected, by copyright is open to interpretation.
Facts cannot be protected through copyright. A creative representation of facts may be protected. E.g. a specific map might be protected, but this wouldn't prevent someone from making another map representing the same places
This is interesting. I thought they use aerial/satellite data to generate 3D models, didn't know they rely on things like floor number. But isn't floor height vary a lot? Also I guess it's not the only info they use either?
The problem comes from a typo by an OSM editor, as they also import OSM data for some areas (this is a 2 way relationship, they allow OSM to trace their satellite images to build out OSM's database)
I'm pretty sure it's a mixture, as not all cities will have LIDAR/3D scan data available. The Melbourne CBD is accurately modeled, but the outskirts look like procedural generation.
While I see FS2020 as a monumental achievement and a great version 1, my main gripes with it are mostly related to the 3D elevation data handling, simplification and rendering:
- steep surfaces are both too rounded and textures look like a stretched pixel strip across the whole surface; most mountains look very underwhelming when nearby and flying inside Grand Canyon/Marble Canyon looks weird
- some 3D tiles aren't linked properly, leading to sudden discontinuities in the surface; try to e.g. fly through the Remarkables mountains north to Queenstown, NZ
- some water bodies are upside down, instead of being in a valley they were processed as "aqueducts"; see Victoria Falls in Africa for a very long "aqueduct"
- certain geographic locations have invisible borders one can crash into; try to land in the Badwater basin in Death Valley
- when cities switch from procedural to photogrammetry, the detailed city doesn't match its surroundings color-wise and usually ends up very dark
- many bridges include water underneath as a wall; SF Bay is full of them
- satellite imagery is not consistent (usually corresponds to Bing Maps one) and in many places one can see sharp borders between tiles coming from different satellite scans
- some interesting parts of the world don't have consistently high resolution like Maldives or Kamchatka
- roads are often projected as textures onto a steep terrain and no effort was made to carve them out
- certain type of green is sometimes misidentified as a forest, leading to obscuring some great views like Kalalau lookout on Kauai etc.
- some taller buildings end up looking like pyramids from a distance due to the used shape simplification algorithm; I saw German pyramids near Mannheim that way
The quantity of trees in the game is a bit insane. My hometown in the Sonoran desert looks like a rainforest.
The most common tree there is a palm tree, which the game usually represents as a sort of bizarre obelisk. What they've done with the game is super impressive, but it's really put them into the uncanny valley when there's goofy inconsistencies with reality. I've noticed similar height issues with streetlights, freeway overpasses, etc
Yeah, who would have thought that there are (dry) locations on Earth that are below sea level? Apparently you can't expect software developers / testers nowadays to be aware of that...
If I'm not assuming people wake up in order to do a bad job, the more likely explanation to me is that
a) these instances are (seen as a percentage of dry land coverage) rather rare and
b) The test of being in water is simplified to `if height <= 0` instead of `if height <= 0 OR location.inside(some_super_complex_polygon_that_needs_to_be_looked_up_every_millisecond)`.
When you're flying over dry land, they already have to do a collision test to check if you have flown into terrain - so the solution would be to simply not check if you are above sea level when you are flying over land...
But at the same time, go back and look at the older flight sims and its pretty obvious how dated they are. FSX for example looks like a complete joke with all the faked autogen and really low resolution maps. Yes it can look good but you have to spend a lot of time (and money) on add ons.
I'm pretty hopeful with time they'll iron out at least the most obvious cases.
There's also the case of the rendering completely missing that things are cliffs (even small ones). If you jump to Barbados' airport and go to the north of the island, the rendering is of gentle sloping land (and static wave imagery crashing on to the shore) - the north end of Barbados is an old reef, and it sure as heck doesn't slope gently to the sea (see [0]). Alas, I have no idea how to give feedback about this to the developers so that it can join the long list of "stuff to fix, some day".
Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) has some roads that go under runways and taxiways. In the game, those roads are rendered at surface level, and the vehicles simply disappear when they get to a runway or taxiway.
I think the best solution would be for Microsoft to allow the public to submit models for review to be included in Bing maps. I don’t think they want FS to become the sort of “game” where you install it, and then you have to also install hundreds of mods to get the proper experience from it (like Cities: Skylines). It would also have the knock-on benefit to MS of having lots of motivated people to crowdsource Bing maps improvements from.
> I don’t think they want FS to become the sort of “game” where you install it, and then you have to also install hundreds of mods to get the proper experience from it
This has been the case for Flight Simulator scenery since at least Flight Simulator 4 (1989), so although it's nice to have good scenery out of the box, it's not really anything new. You don't really need "hundreds" though because you just get scenery for the areas you want to fly.
I’m aware of the history of modding. But it will kill the value prop of this product if you have to install mods to get high quality scenery. The most significant innovation of this product isn’t that you get to fly the routes you want to fly. It’s that it maps literally the entire world. You can fire it up and fly from anywhere to anywhere. If you have to fire it up, and then spend a couple of hours finding and installing mods every time you get the urge to fly a new route, you may as well not bother.
> You don't really need "hundreds"
You’re right about this. If one mod = one model, you’ll need hundreds of thousands.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has had the entire world since at least version 5 (1993). But if you mean that it's the first time it has real satellite data for the whole world then yeah, it's a huge leap in out-of-the-box quality and it's nice that for once, you don't necessarily need to download scenery mods.
Sure you wouldn’t have to. But then you’d end up with a product where the canonical experience is hidden behind hours of tedious 3rd party mod management.
Plenty of games (and other software products, I’m looking at you Atlassian) end up in this purgatory, where the existence of good enough 3rd party mods remove the incentive for the devs to implement the features themselves, and the user just ends up having to navigate the maze of mod management to get the experience they want. The example I mentioned, Cities: Skylines, is a perfect example of this. There’s a number of 3rd party mods you have to install to get that game working properly. On top of that updates break the mods every so often. The reason I no longer play that game is that one day I logged in and a mod wasn’t working, I couldn’t be bothered trying to fix it, so I just never logged in again.
FS2020 is a game that would obviously be very easy to continually improve over time. If a majority of those improvements end up hidden behind a tedious mod management system I’d be very disappointed.
Ah sorry, I see what you mean now. Yeah absolutely it would be an improvement on previous releases if there's a method for community content to be added to the base game, getting the improvements out to everyone automatically.
I don't know of any custom specific building models in the game right now, not even ones by the dev team. It's all either the photogrammetry 3D that's in a few hundred cities, or the AI generic models (which are a mix of pre-made generic buildings, and generated meshes for custom shapes).
Flight Sim modding was a thing long before modding for other games...
FS engines are basically mod hosts.
High-end aircraft addons use it for little more than a graphics engine - they have their own code to run instruments, systems, engines, and even the actual flight model.
Maybe regurgitating physical properties of real world objects is a bit like ripping song lyrics from other providers. Would be enjoyable to see Google get some of their own medicine.
I was curious as to what the impact would be on Bing's map product. The flight sim community is fixing these landmarks and creating files that players then have to import locally, this doesn't bring improvements over into Bing. Microsoft doesn't gain anything from this.
I’d rather see X-Plane improve graphics instead. Feels better to support a small shop rather than give my money to one behemoth of a corporation.
X-Plane dev team are chill and host live video Q&A sometimes, I think they have been porting graphics from OpenGL to Vulcan & Metal lately so there’s hope.
Apparently the person you responded to? I also care, at least somewhat, who makes the games I play. If I know or like the team who made the game, I tend to get a bit more into the game / community.
As an extreme example, I made a (really bad) Quidditch game in Flash when I was in high school that I played for dozens of hours... pretty much only because I made it. (It was kind of surreal at the time having simple AIs that I coded outplay me.)
Meta: I can't reply to the parent comment by johnghanks, but this is what I don't like about moderation here.
I disagree strictly with their assertion, and the way they said it, but the comment is useful and opens a conversation I'm interested in.
Do people here really not want to talk about how/why origin of games might be pertinent, whether games are fungible?
Isn't it at least interesting that this viewpoint exists? Mind you I'm also interested that it's disliked; but I don't want to discourage such comments.
Strictly I'm against the site rules (discussing downvotes) but hey ...
I played many bad Quidditch flash games back in the day, and I enjoyed each and every one tremendously. Before the WB branding juggernaut took over, there was precious little interactive Harry Potter content online outside of the news sites, so I took whatever I could get.
Did you ever publish your game? What was it called? Tell us more!
Not OP but I find I’d easily get a game because I empathize with its creator in some way. It’s more likely what they make may align with me, though even the act of choosing to acquire a game makes it more likely I would enjoy it (mere-exposure and you can’t enjoy a game you wouldn’t buy). I’m hardly a gamer at all, but that’s how I ended up getting Disco Elysium—and it didn’t disappoint.
I think Patreon takes it to the extreme—you can literally support a game developer, and get whatever they make without knowing what it will be.
(Related: buying merch of your favorite band, even if you don’t really need those T-shirts and rarely wear them.)
With X-Plane it’s different; I got it for state-of-the-art flight model simulation (surprisingly low price point pushed me) and only recently started paying attention to who makes it. It’s really cool: I reckon they must make most profit from selling FAA-certified version for professional pilot training, but they still choose to offer pretty much the same program (sans some really specialized hardware support) for peanuts to enthusiasts. Supporting non-enterprise consumers must cost them, though I suppose they get bug reports in return.
Liking the creator doesn’t only cause one to buy a product, but significantly increases the chances they will champion it to support the creator further.
@johnghanks
I can't tell if you're trolling, but I'll take it in seriousness. Because you may not want to financially support a company that you disagree with ideologically? (cough) blizzard (cough)
Aside: I wish FS2020 had more indepth tutorials, more focus towards learning how to fly properly and a ground school with missions. The built-in tutorial is so lacking, it doesn't even teach you how to use a VOR for navigation. I think they've done simulation/realism of the physics right and the way the airplane feels is very real - just the education part should be more of a focus than the pure entertainment bits.
Flight Sim 2004 probably was the peak of tutorials - they effectively had a full "ground school" of how to fly, with content by an actual flight instructor (Rod Machodo).
That content had written lessons (something also makes me think video lessons, but I may be remembering wrongly) that took you through the theory and practice of things like VOR navigation.
I'm not too optimistic for it appearing on Flight Sim 2020, (it probably required too much attention span and understanding of geography/navigation), but I imagine that the community will step up.
Already the community is doing a great job "fixing" the default A320 and implementing bits of the avionics systems that Asobo left "inop". There's a mission editor that should enable setting up interactive "lessons", and with the number of youtube videos on how to fly VORs and similar (some with flight sim footage and explanations), I imagine the content is all there for curating together.
Why make it yourself, when there's a ton of creators who would do it for you, and for free? Just let the best ones get the ad revenue and Patreon profits. I call it passive outsourcing.
I was doing the takeoff tutorial and was wondering why 10 minutes in it still seemed impossible to get to the desired altitude and speed. Turns out they never mentioned that you need to eventually move the flaps back. Once I figured it out by myself I pretty much instantly made it. What kind of tutorial is it where you need to already know how a plane works to learn how a plane works?
The current training "missions" seem to be straightforward "ports" of the old training missions from FSX/FS 2004, but without the ground school written material to match.
I'm hopeful with the advent of YouTube and high quality video capture and streaming, we'll see video-based ground school lessons emerge that can partner with lessons.
Who knows, perhaps there's a mini business model here for creators to sell (via Patreon or even the built-in store?) curated mission lessons that go along with their YouTube content? I believe MS has confirmed you'll be able to make mission packs and distribute them via the store. And given how fast the modding is taking off, you probably already can drag a folder into your Community packages folder and have it work.
Honestly having to pay to buy the game and then pay a separate creator to teach me how to play the game feels a bit silly.
I personally played FS2020 and gave up after completing the tutorials because I didn't know what I was doing still. I feel like I could enjoy the game a lot, but a good tutorial makes or breaks a game for me. If I have to do a lot of work outside of a game just to enjoy the game it seems pointless to me.
This is good feedback that hopefully the devs will take onboard. I know they were hiring mission designers recently. Hopefully they'll improve the training, because you're missing out on a lot of you didn't really get past the tutorials.
Unfortunately they missed quite a few important things in the missions (another commenter mentioned not being told to retract flaps after takeoff).
I do wonder if part of the interesting aspect of this being a sim is that you can actually go online and watch or read a real flying lesson. Perhaps that's the direction they're trying to go in? So far, the community has been doing really well in fixing up scenery, perhaps Asobo are hoping for others to fill the gap with mods.
Re needing to pay, I'm sure there would be excellent free content on learning it (in fact there already is online), but with value added structured lessons as a potential mini product.
With sims, and particularly when you're new to sims, I recommend turning on assists and just going for it. IRL we have rigorous flight training because planes are expensive and there's no reset button, but in sims there's nothing wrong with just taking something up and crashing a few dozen times while you figure things out.
Many of us who are playing today also got our start with very simple and forgiving sims. When I got into them, there was no mixture, no prop pitch, no spins, no torque, and no p-factor (which was good, because I didn't bother binding rudder controls). It's a lot easier if you enable that stuff a few at a time, once you get the hang of the basics.
I think this could well happen, especially given the current unfortunate levels of lay-offs in commercial aviation. There's a load of qualified ATPs and others out there starting YouTube channels, and I think online flight schools would make sense.
A "shared cockpit" remotely controlled plane mod to facilitate training in flight school would probably be helpful, but then if you start going down that route, you'd likely want a force feedback stick/yoke (and something like FS Force) to give you the ability to see and feel what's happening.
The only part I'm unsure of is if it's difficult enough to fly solo without AI assists to merit all this? Very hard to gauge when you can do it already. But still will be interesting to see what happens.
In a real plane you can fairly easily exceed the maximum extended speed for flaps, and break them. Don't know exactly how fs2020 handles this, but xplane displays a warning and then simulates the effects of asymmetric lift caused by one set of of flaps failing.
You wouldn’t be the first, I swear I’ve seen an episode or 2 of Air Crash Investigations where some unsuspecting pilot forgets to retract the flaps, causing something disastrous.
I want the opposite. I don't really want to control a plane - I want "dream flight" - just basically a 6-axis controller that lets me move however I want - but in the gorgeous FS2020 world.
I think MS should make that available on the web as part of Bing Maps.
I've not installed FS2020 yet, but from what I've seen in reviews, I believe "drone mode" can be untethered from your plane and allows you to do just that.
DCS is quite like that, in that if you want to learn the systems there are some decent lessons for some planes but none of them cover things like BFM or (server!) etiquette. Luckily there is a thriving online community to help you learn the ropes, although it is rather annoying sometimes to be just fumbling around.
The F-14's AI RIO "Jester" can actually guide you through startup, which is very cool
DCS has put some great training tutorials that come with it. That combined with Chuck's super detailed and colorful PDFs guides for each aircraft as amazing.
Or I wouldn't be opposed to a printed manual. I remember the first flight sim I bought, one of the Jane's series, had a huge binded manual with it that I used to read during study hall at school. Just reading it and learning about the basics and physics of flight I found more interesting than the game itself. I miss those huge manuals from big box PC games.
I love old PC games that include printed manuals, but flight sims often were the best. Falcon 4.0 shipped with a nearly 600-page manual that dug deep into basic operations of the airplane.
I haven't found it that bad, I started with most assists on, then figured out one thing at a time by googling or YouTube or watching a stream.
Like, flaps, what are they? Oh, generate lift, used in takeoff and landing. Oh, the cabin is marked with settings for to and land.
The autopilot was a similar adventure. Step one, turn it on, crash. Step two, I can figure out hold altitude and heading settings, now I can take my hands off and Google the rest of the settings while the plane flies itself. Garmin has a manual you can reference.
Right now I'm working on figuring out autopilot approach and landing and nav data stations.
Focus of 2020 was to put together a solid simulator experience, which it seems like they’ve mostly done. Gameplay improvements and educational material were stated to be coming in subsequent releases.
X-plane is also pretty bad for this. It has VOR and ILS tutorials, but nothing more advanced navigationally (like navigating to the intersection of two VOR radials), nothing about crosswind landing, nothing for the more complex aircraft, etc.
However, the flip side is that the simulation is generally realistic enough that you can use instructional materials for real world piloting. The VOR frequencies match the real world, the real SIDs and STARs are in the simulated Garmin GPS, etc.
Have you come across “How to fly”[0]? X-Plane does have some guides, though they tend to be maybe too expansive sometimes.
That aside, there are folks who work on their pilot licenses and stream flight sims, I have learned a fair bit from watching them on YouTube.
Ideally as you say one should just be able to use real-world pilot training materials, navigational charts and aircraft checklists (for B737, for example, there is an unofficial iOS checklist app). Then all that’s left is documentation of sim’s limitations—a good sim should tell you in what aspects it fails to simulate the real world.
It’s actually really rewarding to be able to figure out (mostly) on your own how to complete an IFR flight, given just the charts and the 6 basic analog instruments.
(Same here, X-Plane and no MSFS—as far as I heard, the 2020 version is still outdated as far as simulation of the actual physics of flight is concerned and seems to not have changed much from FSX days.)
The Boeing 777 [1] and 787 [2] have an integrated Electronic Checklist screen. Any decent simulation of these aircraft will have that; I know PMDG's 777 [3] does.
There's an excellent book called "Flight Sim X For Pilots" that's essentially just a walkthrough of flight school, starting in a piper cub and gradually progressing through to instruments flying and multiengine flying. I think it's probably a bit dated now, but it's an excellent source of information for how to do things properly in a sim, since it's aimed at real aspiring pilots.
I think the tutorials are not so useful in the game, however they gave me some basics. I spent some hours on YouTube and from zero flying knowlege, I can say I am now familiar with the Cessna 152 Takof, landing, navigation and also with the 172 with G1000 (including ILS). Wish all this introductions would be in the game.
However the overall experience is still very Beta. I got a lot of freezes, bugs on map (like a big bump on some runways that flip the airplane and game over) sometimes the nav get unresponsive (partial freeze of the game)
Even worse is that after you buy the game on steam, any in-app purchase is done on steam but download would be from microsoft and that just doesn’t work for a bunch of people.
At least this free models are just working when people copy them in place, while payed content is not even showing up at the moment.
It's also missing aircraft help data. In FSX, you had a checklist that contained stuff like takeoff speed, landing speed, climb rate, ideal flap settings, and so on. In FS2020, the checklist basically only contains instructions on how to start the engine.
The are decommissioning some of the redundant VOR stations. The VOR network will remain operational as a backup to GPS. (See: "VOR minimum operational network")
When it comes to life-critical systems, you never rely on a single point of failure. GPS is potentially a single point of failure. It can and does have errors, either due to military jamming exercises, satellite failures, or other interference. I've personally had the GPS system in my aircraft completely fail due to interference.
It's also worth noting that the FAA considers VOR navigation a required skill. It's part of the core material on the test as a private pilot.
I wonder who is the person doing the voice over in the built-in tutorial. She sounds like the same person who provided the voice of Delilah in Firewatch.
I'm surprised the game doesn't make more use of Microsoft's existing building data and aerial photography. Maybe someone can explain. But Bing maps has very detailed 3D building shape data and aerial "Birds Eye" photography. But in MFS2020 when I fly over neighborhoods with lots of trees the houses get mangled in ridiculous ways. Why would they only use low fidelity satellite imagery for this?
It might be that architectural designs are copyrighted as well in the countries and maybe that different rules apply when you want to use a design in a game than using it in an information service, such as a mapping service.
Maybe in a year or so from now once they have enough usage telemetry and have cleaned up some of the errors, they'll be willing to release an Ultimate Edition on a terabyte SSD that includes the sim and the scenery that is most commonly used. That would make a nicer "out of the box" experience and would make things better for those with limited bandwidth or data caps.
That's not a 1TB USB drive, it's a tapestry. Then they took the listing for that and changed it to a USB drive so they could harvest the 5 star reviews.
They are actually selling a USB drive through this listing now, though. From a review:
"Attractive case, but the guts are actually just a 16 GB drive with the memory addresses looped around to try and hide the fact that it's a low-mid capacity drive. It'll make folder structures just fine, but as soon as you hit 16 GB, BAM! It starts overwriting from the lowest address. Made for a nasty, nasty surprise when I was collecting data only to check it later and find nothing there but empty folders."
It’s actually $120 for the highest deluxe edition, which includes the 787, SFO airport, and Heathrow. I imagine a decent chunk of folks on this site wouldn’t want to play without the decked out SFO experience.
My guess from the list of premium airports is that Microsoft has made a judgement based on wealthy geek density. People love to fly their local or familiar airports, and the kind of people in San Francisco who play flight simulator are wealthier than most. All the premium airports are either tech or financial hubs.
My only worry is if one day they decide to stop supporting it (even if it's 10 years in the future) and all of a sudden it's not possible to fly around because the service that streamed map data from the cloud isn't running.
Hopefully modders would reverse engineer the executables to talk to their own servers (presumably it's not as simple as modifying a DNS server to return a homebrew IP address, and there are baked-in SSL certificates) and get the maps that way...
Hah, imagine doing that and streaming a map of Mars. Or the heights and structures from a Minecraft map. Or a Sim City map, Sim Copter 2020 anyone?
Afaik, there's an offline mode. It seems like you're forced to complete an online update before you're allowed to start the game proper though and you might be stuck with the original data on the discs even if you could skip that, which would sort of suck.
The game client is about a 91 gigabyte download which will include all the aircraft and a low-resolution copy of the entire world. This offline data is fully functional.
You only need to be online for multiplayer, live air traffic data, and to stream high-quality versions of the world.
Also, the game has an option to manually add areas of the world to the high quality data cache, so if you know you're going to be without Internet for a while, but still want to be able to fly over certain areas with high-quality imagery, you can do that.
that was my first thought too, but the article says these models are being used by users saving them to the "community" folder in their game install. the models aren't being submitted for inclusion into the official map.
(if they were, google might have something to say about all this)
Flying over the Redmond campus over the weekend, I found it quite sad that they didn't really put some effort into it. It looks quite flat and unpolished.
Have they fixed the castle (Kastro) in Myrina / Μύρινα on Lemnos yet (Kavala in Arma 3)? I saw a nice vide of it here, complete with a comparison with Arma 3: Exploring Arma 2's Chernarus and Arma 3's Altis' REAL WORLD AREAS in Microsoft Flight Sim 2020! by OperatorDrewski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGcMyYL17PQ
I think a lot of Arma 3 fans owning MS Flight Sim will want to fly over there. :)
the models aren't missing so much as just terrible. bing doesn't have detailed 3d representations of every building and geographical feature on earth, they're creating them algorithmically from aerial photography.
sometimes, that results in things like the sydney harbour bridge being rendered as a featureless rectangle.
> they're creating them algorithmically from aerial photography.
Google does the same thing. You used to be able to use SketchUp to model buildings for them, but, a few years ago, they switched to computer generated models. It was very obvious from the pointy trees and rough edges on buildings.
This is different than what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft is getting data from municipalities about how tall a building is, and then generating a generic building that's the right shape and as tall as the data says it is. You can see what that looks like in the article; look closely at the Melbourne cricket ground before the community fixed it, and it's just an oval building that looks like a generic multi-story apartment building. That's their algorithmic generation when they don't have 3D data from aerial photos. (There are also fun anomalies, like the world's tallest building being as wide as a single house because someone typo'd the number of floors in the official records.)
As far as I can tell, Google isn't doing that. They only have 3D buildings where there are aerial photos that can see the walls of the building, they then use that data to construct a 3D model.
Google doesnt use AI/ML for automagic photogrammetry, as a result they are really bad at things like balconies looking more like a glitch than a building feature. They also dont feed 3d models back into their maps. My building stopped existing on Google 2D map sometime 10 years ago despite having fairly accurate 3d model.
Balconies are simply about what the threshold for shape simplification is. It's just way too much data to represent a whole city and download it over Internet so somebody decided that buildings should look pixel-perfect from half a mile away, but getting closer one could see funny edges etc. so common for edge-collapsing 3D shape simplifications.
The problem is its not edge collapsing, its somewhere half in the middle producing triangle shaped protrusions with bad perspective texture on top. In this particular use case photogrammetry algorithm should have some hardcoded common sense to detect boxy building and try to maintain flat surfaces and straight lines. Instead it looks like Google picked one of the open source SLAM implementations and deployed it at scale without fine tuning :(
Look at 41 central park west train wreck. You have >20 good photos to work with, but the end result doesnt even maintain straight windows. Balconies look like Lara Croft breast from first Tomb Raider, not to mention they are all different geometry despite high quality source material showing them being all the same shape. The best data saving option would probably be no additional geometry at all, just a texture.
If you're into that sort of thing, OpenStreetMap supports 3D mapping as well. I haven't looked into it but while from my understanding it's fairly basic, at least you're sure that your data will be around in ten years and openly available for people to use and display.
Two differences: Google is way ahead, and they definitely have some quality control or manual editing happening on the algorithmically generated models - at least for higher profile buildings.
The flight simulator buildings are procedurally generated, guided by an AI. They probably went this route because it makes better looking buildings with fewer polygons and less disk space.
99% of the time it works great because you don't really care if a virtual house exactly matches the real house. You just want to see some realistic looking housing estates.
However the downside is when you go and see some well known landmark. They didn't write a procedural palace generation routine so when the AI sees Buckingham Palace it has to pick the closes "normal" building which is apparently an office block.
I suspect the best way to fix that would be to detect when the AI fails and fall back to Google Maps style scanning, which looks worse, but actually matches reality. You could also do landmark detection fairly easily - Bing Maps must have enough data about what people search for and take photos of.
Where "Google Maps style" 3D buildings and terrain are available, it's used in MSFS. It's just that there are many places without it, where the game only has a 2D satellite map to work with (plus some extra data that's available like number of floors in the buildings). In those cases it uses the AI generation.
It's a common trick to use building footprints for the basic shape, elevation data for the building height and prevailing colors for estimating roof and wall structure. It's still much better than having all buildings flat. They likely trained their ML algo on many different building photos from the orbit to output e.g. roof type, wall type etc.
Some data Bing uses comes from Open Street Maps. If its not in all the other sources of data for Microsoft and it lacks data in OSM then it will be missing.
Though I think Microsoft would be out of harms way for as long as they don't blatantly paste back the user improved buildings. However, obviously not all improvements are gathered from Google Maps and dependent on the scale this might become an issue in detecting these.