5 ms·
An unofficial and free mod for FS2020 to load Google Maps textures
- warning26 5y agoIt's really a shame that FS2020, an otherwise great product, is evidently held back by the mediocrity that is Bing™
- n8cpdx 5y agoBing 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.
- renton_wal 5y agoAll speculation, but I bet they screwed themselves on licensing. Google put a ton of money into acquiring mapping visuals themselves, as did apple. Microsoft simply licensed the hell out of it. When Google was ready, they were able to sell their mapping solution. Microsoft, on the other hand, was short sighted and only copying Google. Another example of Microsoft playing copycat to Google, and having it pay off poorly in the long term is bing411: Google launched goog411 to gather voice data, Microsoft spent a ton of money and copied and used their top tier voice recognition service. Google shut down goog411 not long after: it was never about offering a service.
- Bluecobra 5y agoMicrosoft was involved with satellite imagery back in the 90’s, so I don’t see how they could have been copying Google. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Maps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Maps
- renton_wal 5y agoI'm not saying they were copying the concept of sattelite imagery, but rather they were late to the business model of maps-as-a-service. And thus, significant components of their modern (after usgs) imagery had licensing terms onerous to competing with Google. Also, it's not just satellite imagery, but street view. I'm referring to the google strategy of selling the maps as a service, something that microsoft took a while to catch up on. > involved with satellite imagery back in the 90’s Yes, they partnered with the USGS to distribute already collected map imagery. They didn't, for example, purchase/build a whole fleet of imaging cars and planes like Google did. Also, because google had their eyes on a different prize than microsoft, the licensing terms of the map imagery had language baked in around reselling.
- lapetitejort 5y agoMy dad hooked up a GPS to his laptop with a serial port and successfully used it with Microsoft Streets as perhaps one of the first car GPS navigation systems, maybe back in 2000 or so. MS bought Streets in 1994, four years before Google was founded. They dropped the ball with maps.
- gambiting 5y agoFyi, first GPS navigation system fitted to a production car came in 1990: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_navigation_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_navigation_system
- bluedino 5y agoMS streets and trips was available at OfficeMax for $50, though. We used that suction cup attached blue LED USB GPS receiver and a laptop for war driving, so much fun.
- tfigment 5y agoI did something like this around 1999 to do house hunting in Boston area. Didn't actually work that well for me though.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoOne 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.
- sofixa 5y agoIt'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.
- fomine3 5y agoI tried Xbox Cloud Gaming and it works somewhat great. So I want to play MSFS for reasons that you wrote, but it's not exist on cloud gaming despite it's available download for free for Xbox subscriber. MSFS downloader and download server is the worst one I have ever used. I got just below 1MB/s for downloading required 200GB assets, while I can download 80MB/s from Stream. I gave up to play. It connects very far away server, and maybe no duplexing. Developers, do you know Azure?
- mef 5y agoEnjoy it while it lasts!
- polishdude20 5y agoIt doesn't look that much different from what I see in the video.
- wildrhythms 5y agoThe 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).
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoAre 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=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b7c0b606588a68d38755e413b58dfeb053e88de8 https://preview.redd.it/cpuficwfgdy71.jpg?width=1920&format=...
- polishdude20 5y agoThe image you show definitely looks much better yeah. I guess I was watching a part of the video where the difference was more in the lighting and season
- EvanAnderson 5y agoQuasi-related: Has anybody done a driving simulator using Google Streetview data? I would really enjoy being able to prep for driving to new locations w/ such a tool. I don't particularly enjoy driving in unfamiliar places (particularly in urban settings). I scout out destinations using the browser as much as I can, but reality ends up being so vastly different, spatially, as to render my preparation nearly useless. A first person driving simulator w/ spatially-accurate projection of Streetview data would be very useful for me and would probably be a heck of a lot of fun.
- dsr_ 5y agoThat would be great. It needs simulated traffic picked up from predictions, too.
- YPPH 5y agoThis 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.
- formerly_proven 5y agoCode: https://github.com/derekhe/msfs2020-google-map/blob/main/src/server.py https://github.com/derekhe/msfs2020-google-map/blob/main/src... Seems to be utilizing drivers\etc\hosts to point bing maps endpoints at this local HTTP server which then queries Google Maps. Since this isn't modifying any game files, MS doesn't really have a legal justification to do something here.
- Titan2189 5y agoThat'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/README.EN.md https://github.com/derekhe/msfs2020-google-map/blob/main/REA...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dTal 5y agoWould Microsoft have legal justification to do something if it did modify game files?
- Damogran6 5y agoI use FS2020 once every 2 months...and there's always a 50-200Gb download penalty waiting for me.
- pridkett 5y agoAnd 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.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYeah 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.
- MaxikCZ 5y agoI hate this. The only game I sometimes play on my phone (Bloons TD) just sometimes announce I need to download 300MB patch. Not even killing the app, clearing cache and restarting in airplane mode allows me to run it before I download that chunk. My FUP is low and I cant just willy-nilly download it on the go. Let me play the version that I played yesterday!
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoIt 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.
- 542458 5y agoMinor, but what plane is that in the Reddit screenshots? It’s very cool.