When Microsoft's highly-anticipated Flight Simulator 2020 launched earlier this year, the excitement to explore stunning real-world locations had been building for months. The game was to be a showcase for the streaming capabilities of Bing Maps and Azure, and while the game had an extremely successful launch, players are turning to rival service Google Maps for optimization and fixes. Microsoft Flight Simulator's data usage from Bing Mapping Services is so impressive that any errors or gaps in the data are impossible to ignore. In places, the rendering capabilities have been scaled back a bit, and some major landmarks are missing where autogenerated technology has replaced famous landmarks and buildings with blocky polygons (or sometimes monolithic nightmares).
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, a strange and incredibly narrow skyscraper cuts through the northern Melbourne sky like an Australian suburban version of the Citadel from Half-Life 2, and I'm totally in favor of that pic.twitter. com / 6AH4xgIAWg August 19, 2020
Fascinating flight solutions
Unfortunately for Microsoft, the gaming community has come up with its own solution: Use Google Maps to fill in the gaps. Actually, the process is quite complicated, even by normal standards for creating game mods. You can't just drag and drop the models, you have to extract and convert them using various programs. The process is laborious and too detailed to tell here, but the FS2020Creation Subreddit has some helpful tutorials if you want to try it yourself. On the official Flight Simulator forums, the difference in quality of photogrammetry (the art of extracting 3D information from photos) between Bing and Google has been highlighted, and the visual comparisons between the two are clearly evident. Melbourne Cricket Ground with Google Maps 3D - Color Corrected - (Download) - Current vs New from r/MicrosoftFlightSim One user says, “When it comes to photogrammetry, we've often talked about how many cities or places have it on Bing vs. Google. However, when I was examining the same area on both platforms, to my surprise (or not) the photogrammetry quality on Bing is much worse, both in texture quality and polygon count. "The base game is, for the most part, mind-blowing. It can also be incredibly revolutionary, and despite its flaws, Microsoft has produced a great feat of game engineering, even though most of us just use it to fly on our own households Through the registry