As part of the Flight Simulator X Service Pack 1 (SP1), we’ve spent a great deal of time fixing the most egregious scenery issues that were present in the original release of the product. We thought this deserved a bit of explanation, both to help our users understand the passion we have for making our product great, as well as the value the community provides in helping us identify problems.

The scope of the Flight Simulator world is unlike any other game out there: we fuse together a variety of data sources of different resolutions to create a world that is “As Real As It Gets.” With multiple data sets, more and more content, and a finite amount of time between products, bugs can slip through the cracks and onto your screen. Thus, scenery fixes have been one of our focal points for SP1.

Water Sloping

One of the fixes we’ve including in SP1 are bugs involving errors with water sloping. In the FSX world, hydrological data is classified uniquely with regards to how it interacts with the terrain mesh. 

For example:

• Ocean polygons are created relative to feet above mean sea level (MSL) and are forced to an elevation of 0.
• Hydro polygons contained by land such as lakes are forced to the average elevation sampled from the digital elevation model (DEM) cells on which they are spatially coincident.
• Rivers polygons are sloped by sampling the DEM cell elevation values across the cross-sections of the River Polygons. The lowest elevation is then stored in the corresponding point within the medial axis.

In the case of river polygons things are much more complex and prone to error. Many complications can be attributed to spatial miss-registrations between the drainage in the DEM and the hydro polygons. In some cases the DEM contains erroneous data such as bridge elevations being captured in the data resulting in unintentional slopes or holes in the data where an underlying DEM layer may be miss-interpreted. These issues manifest themselves as anomalies in the simulation in various ways (see below).

We have incorporated a variety of methods to fix water sloping bugs for SP1:

• Raster calculations have been performed on DEM cell values around problematic areas to create a gradual slope. In some cases, we had to validate cells with no data to have logical values.
• Hydro data is typically stored as several contiguous features. This can become problematic for the water sloping tool to digest. To mitigate issues we use geographic information system (GIS) tools to dissolve like polygons into more easily digestible chunks.
• Using a proprietary in house editing tool, we can modify both raster and vector data in a scene to obtain more precise registration.

Summary

The quality and magnitude of your feedback through fan sites and direct email (via Tell_FS@microsoft.com) has brought the most severe scenery bugs to our attention.

Consumer feedback, collaboration with our scenery test team, and assessing where FSX customers spend the majority of time in the FSX world provided us with a prioritized list of the scenery bugs we aimed at fixing for SP1. The water sloping issues at the River Thames in London and at Lisbon Harbor are just a few of the scenery bug fixes you’ll get when you install SP1.

As we move forward developing the Flight Simulator franchise, we’ll continue to improve scenery and strive for excellence. We’ll undoubtedly encounter more scenery issues along the way, and we’ll continue to ask our customers to bring these bugs to our attention.

We hope SP1 addresses any scenery bugs you’ve encountered while using Flight Simulator X. If not, please let us know!