SPECIAL REPORT
MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR modders imagining a better Earth
Microsoft Flight Simulator mods build better worlds.
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s version of Earth is a marvel. Satellite data from Bing Maps (someone’s got to use it) interpreted by Microsoft’s Azure AI platform creates an approximation of our planet, all 510.1 million square kilometers of it. The result is a feat of engineering to rival the real-life aircraft you fly over it—an evolutionary leap from Google Earth, exactly the world tourism simulator we need right now. Except when it’s not.
Drop beneath the clouds, and you may notice the generic office buildings that replaced iconic landmarks such as the Washington Monument and Buckingham Palace. Or the Brazilian airfield swallowed by a mile-deep chasm. Or the 2,000-foot monolith piercing the skies of Melbourne, apparently the result of a typo in OpenStreetMap, a source that Bing Maps itself pulls data from.
These (often hilarious) errors grabbed headlines and became in-game tourist attractions in their own right. But they’re not the only gaps on Flight Sim’s globe, as anyone who’s discovered a flat texture where their home town should be will tell you. “It’s great outside of cities, where all you need is rather rough heightmap and ground textures with decent resolution, and satellite images are enough,” says Ilya Perapechka, a software engineer and a key part of the Flight Sim community on Reddit, where he goes by the username ‘Jonahex111’.
When it comes to those urban centers, much more detail is required. Flight Sim uses 3D-scanned photogrammetry where possible—but Bing’s library only covers around 400 cities, most of them located in the
USA. “For all the other cities, towns and villages in the world, 3D models of buildings are automatically generated by neural algorithms developed by Blackshark.ai. This is better than nothing, but far from good.”
Living in Minsk, this is something that Perapechka knows all too well. “There is no photogrammetry for my country … and the quality of autogenerated buildings is quite poor,” he says. “But I was ready for it. The real disappointment was when I flew to London.” It’s not just the Queen’s gaff that gets a rough deal there—many of the capital’s bridges are submerged in the Thames, while the Gherkin, a skyscraper that looks like the result of procedural generation IRL, is entirely absent.
For a location as frequently visited as this, you’ve got options. On launch day there was already a London city pack available for purchase from Orbx, which offers handcrafted versions of the famous skyline.
Microsoft is gradually expanding on its work with free updates that take on one country, and a few of its most prominent cities and landmarks, at a time. But what about
the rest of the world? That’s where the modding community comes in. The FS2020Creation subreddit is a bustling swap-shop packed with homebrewed cities, airports, and natural wonders. And while some are the result of modders applying their 3D modeling skills, there’s another approach that accounts for the majority of these creations. Bing isn’t the only source of publicly available photogrammetry for cities.
Google has its own bank, used for Google Maps, and “its coverage is much better than in Bing Maps”, explains Perpechka, who says the quality of imagery is also better. The community quickly found a way of ‘slurping’ data from Google Maps, feeding it into Blender’s modeling tools and back into the game—Perapechka has made this even simpler with his Google Earth Decoder tool. “People were spending weeks to rip just a few square kilometers. So I decided to make something better, something where you can just select region on map, press ‘download’, and voila.”
IS IT A BIRD?
One of the most prolific modders working with this slurped data is known as ‘High_Frame_Rates’ in the community. “I’ve never done any kind of modding to this extent in other videogames,” he says—but just a few days after Flight Sim’s launch, having taken a test flight around his native Australia and noticing a lot of missing landmarks, he got to work. Since then, he’s uploaded versions of Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane.
Seeing its own community switch to Google data is perhaps a little embarrassing for Microsoft, given Flight Sim is, in part, a showcase for its tools and platforms. But it hasn’t discouraged modders yet, and the ones I speak to are unconcerned about any issues—at least, not from Microsoft’s side. “Since day one there has been talk about this breaking Google’s Terms of Service, which it may very well,” High_Frame_Rates says. The 3D imagery they’re using is commercial, and not intended to be used in this way—but there have been no cease-and-desists yet, and the general consensus is that Google isn’t too worried about some gamers demonstrating its product’s superiority over the competition. “I think the only real concern is anyone trying to use Google’s photogrammetry scenery and profit off of it—that’s when Google will probably have a problem with it.”
Instead, Perapechka sees a bright future for Flight Sim modding. He’s currently researching autogeneration to replace Microsoft’s own processes. He believes that by implementing neural post-processing methods, it should be possible to automatically create more detailed cities. “Of course, you can say that just one software engineer cannot do something better than Microsoft, but recent research papers make me think that it’s possible. Moreover, communities often implement better features than original developers,” he says. Flying over yet another of High_Frame_Rates’ reworked cities, it’s hard to disagree. Alex Spencer
“PEOPLE WERE SPENDING WEEKS TO RIP JUST A FEW SQUARE KILOMETERS”