An unofficial and free mod for FS2020 to load Google Maps textures

That would be great. It needs simulated traffic picked up from predictions, too.

This would involve filling gaps between the individual street view photographs which are spaced several metres apart, during which the environment might have changed significantly.

I suspect it would be quite the challenge: much harder than making 3D buildings out of several aerial images. If this were feasible, I would have thought Google would have done it already so that you could fluidly navigate the street rather than being confined to fixed points.

Would Microsoft have legal justification to do something if it did modify game files?

That's only to allow access to Google Servers from China. Not required for the mod itself. > An HTTP proxy that can access Google (you may not need this if you are outside China) https://github.com/derekhe/msfs2020-google-map/blob/main/REA...

Bing used to have better maps data than Google. Birds Eye was really cool. It was a brief window when it was better. MS Research had a project that was basically streetview before streetview existed. ~2010, there was a whole platform within bing maps for applications to integrate. One of them had photosynth, which made reconstructed, explorable models available within the map, long before integrated mesh became a standard mapping feature.

There was lots of cool stuff available, but that whole org was held back by, I assume, internal politics. It was so bad that Azure Maps, another Microsoft product, doesn’t even use Bing data (or at least didn’t when it was announced and last I checked). Very sad.

One thing in particular that's really stupid for a flightsim is that it lacks military and dual-use airports in the Netherlands. So major passenger airports like Eindhoven (probably the #2 nationally) don't exist at all because there's a few F-16s based there too. Even the aerial photos have been edited to resemble a farm. It's so dumb.

I think it's because Bing still blurs those too. It's not been required by law for over 10 years and Google doesn't do so. But bing never bothered to fix it.

It's just really stupid when going for a high fidelity sim and then leaving major airports out.

Ps: sorry for being so outspoken but I just don't understand how it makes sense to leave so many airports out. FSX never did that, X-plane doesn't and even other mapping services don't.

It's also held back by MS exclusivity policies and shit cloud gaming. I'd love to buy it and play it, but it's not on GeForce Now or Stadia, where i play heavy games. I saw it was supposed to be on XCloud whatever the name today is for their Xbox as a service service, signed up for it, and not only is it not there, the whole service and everything around it is a steaming pile of garbage. The UX is terrible, latencies atrocious, etc. Just getting to the correct page listing the games is a fight, since half the links result in 404s ( I don't know if it's just the multiple rebrands or the fact that I'm physically in France but use English as main browser language, but neither should be that problematic for a company the size of Microsoft).

Such a game ( heavy resource consumption, lots of data to continuously update) is perfect for cloud gaming.

The issue is that the map data in FS2020 is not 1:1 with what's on Bing. In Bing maps, for example, I can see my apartment complex in bird's eye view, however in FS2020 it's a construction site (a 5+ year old aerial image).

Are you and I watching the same video? I see a drastic difference in most of the video, other than the major city (New York?) at 7:55.

I mean, look at this screenshot [0]. Do you really think there's not much different?

[0] https://preview.redd.it/cpuficwfgdy71.jpg?width=1920&format=...

It's the Edgley EA-7 Optica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgley_Optica

An Edgley Optica apparently, looks wicked!

https://orbxdirect.com/product/optica-msfs

Yeah this is annoying.. There should be an option to 'just use it as installed'. It worked 2 months ago, why would it suddenly need an update to work. Sometimes I don't feel like doing the update but it forces me to anyway.

I'd understand if it didn't allow you to do multiplayer that way but I never do anyway.

It doesn't help that the launcher is not only really slow at installing, but their download servers are slow as balls (by today's standards) as well.

I have gigabit internet, and I'm averaging 75 Mbit/s on this 85.6 GB update. At that speed, theoretically it would take just under 20 minutes to download. And I have the game installed on an WD Black NVMe, which can theoretically read/write at up to 3 GB/s.

And yet, I'm 90 minutes into installing, and I'm only 30% done.

What's really aggravating is that I bought the game through Steam. Steam was supposed to solve this bullshit of having to wait for patches to download by doing it automatically in the background.

And what’s even worse is that the downloader is part of the game and puts load my GPU. It usually takes my 3090 from 30W at idle to 105W while downloading. That’s a not insignificant amount of heat and energy when the downloads are slow enough that you need to leave it on overnight.

It’s so bad that there is a meme I’ve seen which shows Steam claiming 55hrs of play time (when the game is open) and MSFS showing only seven hours of flight time.