I love the fact that they have a Carbon Cub in their promo video.
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9 Cities from the November build:
The Southamption segment is interesting here (9:31) https://youtu.be/Z2HwLeJSAGc?t=571 as shows a landing at Runway 02, and the section where you cross over the M27. It shows the limits of where the photogrammetry sort of breaks down a bit, and probably the reason they’ve not shown a lot of very low level detail (< 200 ft). Still, pretty good though…
One more, with the artifacts on the bottom left corner and on the highway. (it’s not a criticism, more just interesting):
Plus, here for fun, ‘Birds Eye’ aerial photo isometric views that Bing maps has, and are used as the base textures; using the four views of the same spot allows them to calculate heights and side textures without LIDAR etc.
It’s also really interesting that sometimes you can see where cars or trucks have blocked the ‘birds eye view’ of things like fences, and the image processing (I dislike calling it AI, such an overloaded term now it’s practically meaningless) does the good stuff of removing things but then struggling to guess what is behind them. Because the four compass views are taken in different passes, it allows the processing to remove the vehicles from the textures…
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I am skeptic, yes you know me.
All I saw until now was some demo of ortho streaming engine with some AI plus weather engine.
According to the preview from Hal Bryan they are now trying to glue it with some FSX core functionality!
For me it is way too far to be somehow excited. Will wait and see how it all turn out.
Definitely wish them success.
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<.many expletives of exceedingly vile nature> that looks spectacular! those cities! that wheather! the gentle rocking of the plane! oh my.
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This is truly revolutionary. My dream flight sim basically. People might moan about need for internet connection (for best representation of the world) but it’s the best solution until you can get those 2PB drive into your PC.
Imagine if you wanted (not that anyone would) whole world made with phototextures and detailed as in MSFS but in present flight sims on the market - X-Plane, AeroFly FS2, P3D? You would probably never afford it. With MSFS even console “peasents” (sorry for the term) will be able to fly wherever they want and witness the beauty of our planet.
On top of that even if we get basic functionality on par with FSX like ATC, AI traffic, real world weather, missions, flight school etc. I would say we will get spoiled at this point.
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A very interesting aspect will be bridges. This is what Satellite based elevation data usually can‘t cope with very well.
Fixing every glitch around the globe will be a huge effort. I wonder if there will be cooperation with other projects?
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Definitely, there was a picture of Gothenburg above in the thread with the ICON A5… My home town. Älvsborgsbron (name of the bridge) is like this massive landmark coming into the city from the sea. It was completely missing. I hope we are able to point out things like this and have it fixed. That would be an immersion breaker otherwise.
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I’m getting Giddy …I can’t help my 55 yr old self really!! 
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From all these press events and interviews, did anybody happen to mention anything about plans for a combat flight sim?
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You mean - a damage model on top of that? Bombing major cities to rubble? OMG… 
Battlefield - MSFS Edition.
Some news and first hand reports about the playable demo at XO19.
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/564747-xo19-msfs-playable-demo/
If your ‘ok boomer’ resistance is pretty low today, and you can’t muster the strength for the avsim visit, the summary is something like:
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Looks nice and smooth, no hardware details.
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ATC is coming, and it will include real life traffic and schedules. (!)
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Stock aircraft will be ‘study level’. Manufacturers like Boeing are keen partners etc.and the Microsoft team is keen for people not to have to buy lots of things outside of MSFS2020 just to get the overall experience.
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Seasons and VR availability on release day questions got blank look replies. They are obviously pretty wary of committing to something they didn’t initial plan their dates around. (follow on details in here)
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The demo was offline and cached areas.
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They know bridges are hard, and they are working on them.
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Hahaha
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Guys this is all huge stuff, I was not disappointed at all in my experience and the sounds, visuals and flight modelling and the very fact they don’t want you to spend loads of money out of the box for something that should be in the sim just speaks volumes, the passion and commitment to the flight simulator is very positive!
This is nice to hear.
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This made me smile.
Developer-
Yeah, no shirt Sherlock. Why do you think it’s still early alpha!
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I’m just pleased they seem to be including things like scenery, weather and ATC / Traffic in the ‘box’ as the base product.
On one hand the flight sim market is great because one guy can sell a $30 package for ‘cloud textures’ and the sims are open enough to make it work, but on the other hand (and where I’m sort of heading recently) the whole nickle and diming after-market is a complete ghetto. Leaving things out of a base product and letting the hobbyists/opportunists pick it up as payware is just a sort of stockholm syndrome the sim market got into without realizing how weird it is.
I don’t think MSFS 2020 will be the be all and end all of flight sims, but it will shake down the status quo a bit, which I think it really needed.
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With many users also being budget conscious and/or financially conscious in a security context - having dozens of third parties to send money to doesn’t work out very well.
Then there is freeware, which during my time on FSX was more miss than hit - and the “too good to be true” rule also applied because that usually meant it was pirated.
A strong base will bring a sigh of relief indeed!
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The radar elevation data is just used for quite coarse hill meshes and the like (say, 3m). The buildings height are done from the point clouds from the photos analysis. That’s either the aerial photos (from about 6000 ft in an airplane for the map products, with a four way camera) or combined with street view taken from the bing cars (or the 3rd party they used).
Anyone remember Microsoft Photosyth?
It allowed you to import a whole bunch of photos and then it would make a 3D model and map them over these projected points. It was pre-VR, but sort of a similar basis to how photogrammetry things like this - .
Most of the work came from the (very readable) MSR 2009 paper, and seeing MSFS you can see how the processing of all these photos has led to how the sim scenery works:
Interesting stuff.
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This is little bit not fair. What I mean is that eg XP includes enough in the box :
Scenery - imo enough good allowing me to fly VFR most of our Air Race
Weather - real time download available and I am still ok with the default art
ATC - sure lacking but there is very good FM instead
And talking about the streamed ortho. This is something all new sims have = FlyInside and FSXX.
Maybe we will see some updates in this regard also from the ‘older’ big players.
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But sure understand what you talked about.
I agree that the third party market is really gheto and can be quite confusing even for experienced simers.
Just the latest example in ‘vegetation overhaul’ for XP :
TerraFlora
SFD Global
Global Forests
