Players are fixing Microsoft Flight Simulator’s monuments with Google Maps
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
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.
I don't know what the state of the law on this is.
https://boingboing.net/2016/06/01/why-3d-scans-arent-copyrig...
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
Choices like the the framing, color saturation levels, etc.
> 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.
(https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html)
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.
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.
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
They didn't create the roads, and there's no human actively taking the photos.
It's not like the law cares about effort when it sided with Google against Genius.
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.
Is that right or am I missing something?
- 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 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
The technical reason behind this bug is that Badwater Basin is below sea level; the game thinks you have crashed into the ocean.
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)`.
Done is better than perfect.
then how come you can land at Schiphol?
I'm pretty hopeful with time they'll iron out at least the most obvious cases.
0: https://www.cricalix.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC_3615...
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.
That’s unlikely to be true, game modding is at least as old as the flight sim franchise.
I remember commercial addons being sold IN STORES by the mid 90s.
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.
> You don't really need "hundreds"
You’re right about this. If one mod = one model, you’ll need hundreds of thousands.
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.
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).
Of course they do. They get PR and at worst case scenario they get quality QA.
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.
But YouTube has been great for that.
The F-14's AI RIO "Jester" can actually guide you through startup, which is very cool
(It's been Janes-90s since I sim'd)
Agree that multiplayer how-to's is lacking.
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.
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.
You do not need to buy extra content, controllers, etc to "play the game". But you can spend a lot of money to make it as realistic as you want.
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.
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.
Similar to FPS games coaching.
Instead of getting into your region's Platinum rank in Overwatch, you learn to solo fly a new type of aircraft with AI assistance turned off.
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.
Pun intended?
seemed about 70% mixture gave me best performance.
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.
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.
I think MS should make that available on the web as part of Bing Maps.
More generally, the manuals of 80s-90s simulation games were often quite packed with detailed real-world info.
https://github.com/tpn/pdfs-flightsim/blob/master/Falcon%204...
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.
Not sure how much this holds for FS2020.
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.)
[0] https://www.x-plane.com/manuals/desktop/index.html#modernmea...
[1] https://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2006/april/pho... [2] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/64/54/bb/6454bb2b0f28a0c77dc287f14... [3] https://pmdg.com/pmdg-777-200lr-f-base-package-for-fsx/#prod...
(Personally I have the B737 checklist app on iOS, even though I haven’t really flown it in the sim yet.)
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.
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.
Amazon has turned into a flea market.
"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."
I reported it to amazon.
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.
Even if Microsoft chose not to remove the license check, it would certainly get cracked. Cracks likely exist already.
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?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.eurogamer.net/amp/2020-07-3...
(if they were, google might have something to say about all this)
Getting your competitors most loyal customers to build your platform willingly
sometimes, that results in things like the sydney harbour bridge being rendered as a featureless rectangle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are 341, but note that London UK is not one of them. Many are in the USA.