My problems started the minute M$ tried to imply that you'd be able to explore the world with FS, not just flying.
Because that was a lie for many releases, very eggregiously for 2020 and there is zero chance it will change for the 2024 variant.
Because Microsoft simply doesn't have the data.
Modern computers might finally have the power to render a rather good digital twin of the outside real world from inside a virtual cockpit, but again, Microsoft doesn't have the data.
I finally have enough computing horse power to have a plane take off from one of Europe's biggest airport far too few kilometers from my home and fly it over my house. I have a dual 2k VR headset rendering at maximum settings with 90FPS on an RTX 4090 driven by a 7950X3D, but what I see is garbage!
Really, really bad garbage rendered at high quality in smooth motion.
Because M$ doesn't have the data, it invents it. But it does so very, very badly, generating buildings from coarse and outdated bitmaps which have nothing to do with how things really look.
It has some pre-coneptions about how buildings should look and they are extremely generic, not even primary school, more like Kindergarten but with straight lines. And then they run traffic along roads, again a completely generic mix of vehicles, with trucks obviously pasted from the US: did nobody ever tell them that 99.99% of trucks in Europe mount their engines below the cab? Or that not every house looks like an Hamburg harbor storage building from the end of the 19th century?
And they have them look the same in Germany, France and Southern Spain, when very clearly styles differ dramatically and for good reasons.
And then some of those roads are actually rivers or blind alleys you shouldn't try to drive into. Traffic follows logical patterns, but clearly the generator is just randomizing.
Inventing bad fiction when you have no data kills realism very, very quickly and knowing how badly it represents home, it can't do much better anywhere else, can it?
So what's the purpose of "going everywhere", when it's just the same lies repeated everywhere?
I've tested various places around the world where I've spent time and over which I've flown and it doesn't get better.
And again, the simple reason is that M$ doesn't have good data.
In Lyon I was astonished to see how the city looked 30 years ago, when I was flying closer, Whole quarters transformed from elegant new buildings back to deteriorated industrial and back as I went further away: closeup material is evidently decades older and you see the same on Bing maps.
So if now they claim that things will look so much better because they source the data right from the Internet, please have a look at Bing Maps before you're tempted to buy: if that looks anywhere close to what you want to see from your cockpit window, go ahead.
If it's the garbage that I'm seeing, be ready to have fake precsion garbage put on top.
Google maps does a much better job because they evidently have the much better data. It's renderings are rough and you won't easily mistake them for the real thing.
But ground truth is actually visible inside that, not a precision rendered lie.
Caveat emptor!
P.S. I also have a gigabit fiber link for data and gave it 32GB for map storage.
Zero difference in quality: garbage in, garbage out!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram