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Comment by ajakate | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone here played the new Microsoft Flight Simulator Game they released in 2020? I was blown away by how accurate the environment and maps were (at least in Chicago and Bloomington, IL). By far the most realistic representation I've seen in a game before. Even outside of the iconic buildings of downtown, a lot of the smaller buildings in far out neighborhoods were more realistic than I was expecting.

I know the game has gotten a lot of praise on the graphics. I guess they leaned heavily on bing maps to build out the game's environment. Would be crazy to see what could be created with something like google streetview data.

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Bing gets the credit, but much of the data is from OSM.

Indeed, the Melbourne Monolith for example, for which I love the idea.

https://australianaviation.com.au/2020/08/typo-caused-melbou...

The thing I find strange about MSFS is that the 3D visualisation is in many cases much worse than the Google/Apple maps. It seems to replace many buildings with generic models - they have the same shape, but the textures and style is obviously just a generic sculpted to fit. Apple/Google maps use the actual textures of the buildings themselves.

For my home city for example Apple maps has full 3d for every single building and it looks amazaing, but in MSFS most of the buildings are replaced with generic copy paste American suburbia style structures.

It's likely to help keep the size of the game data "under control" vs the map data streamed at you by Apple Maps or Google Earth / Street View bein' streamed in small(ish) chunks from a massive database of texture data stored on corporate server disk pools.

The game actually streams in much of its contents also. They still stream in the satellite ground textures, but they don't use these to texture models in the same way as Google/Apple maps.

You get much a much higher LOD in the simulator than on Google; gaming GPUs have a lot more to work with than integrated/consumer GPUs. Google Earth just looks better sometimes because the source data and reconstruction is better. They are really dedicated to in-house photogrammetry for many years, when Microsoft/Bing have just been buying data from 3rd parties.

I'm over 150hrs into it and an obsessed. I mostly fly in the Bay Area. The data is old but is good enough where I could not only find my house, but saw my car in the driveway.

There's a free plugin for swapping in Google maps data to but it's really best for areas without photogrammetry.

But the sim is so detailed that when I went on a discovery flight IRL I had zero issues finding my home from the air because I already was familiar with the view from up there.

I had the opposite experience, I was disappointed to see how some famous cities (Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro) look really bad with generic buildings. Maybe it's a US vs rest of the world thing, or am I missing any setting here?

Could be your bandwidth or not having the version up to date. Living in Copenhagen, it is remarkably accurate. I literally crashed into my apartment.

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