The methods mentioned in this tutorial are for research and learning purposes only. I am not responsible for any legal liabilities and losses caused by using or expanding this tutorial and method.
- ALWAYS checkout latest version here first if you have trouble
-
PLEASE VIEW THE VIDEO FOR INSTALLATION AND USAGE: https://youtu.be/Lk7GK5XLTt8
-
SweViver made this great comparsion and installation here
-
Some people use cracked verison of MSFS, please don't use this mod, it is not supported.
If you have any problems, please watch the videos first and look at this FAQ page
I will keep this mod up to date for every MSFS update as much as I can. If you like this plugin and want to offer me a coffee, please click the "BUY ME A COFFEE" button, or alternatively here is the link if you'd like to use PayPal
Thanks for your support!
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 uses Bing's satellite map imagery. However, the satellite maps are relatively old and many areas aren't covered by Bing. This issue occurs in different regions of the world. The Bing imagery on the mainland is from 10 years ago. There are a large number of regions where satellite images are not available. Microsoft uses the program-generated maps instead to fill in the missing areas, and the quality of these generated maps is very poor compared to acctual satelite imagery. However, after enabling the Google Maps replacer the image quality and details have been significantly improved, as shown in the images below
I have been studying the possibility of replacing it with Google Maps for a long time and there are also YouTubers on the Internet who have provided some ideas such as using a crawler to get the data from Google and import it into MSFS2020 but this method is more complicated and cannot be used on a large scale.
Later, I studied the network request and found that MSFS downloads it's imagery from Bings' servers. Which meant in theory, it should be possible to replace the pictures with other pictures. As it happens the slicing method of bing and google’s satellite images is similar and can be seamlessly switched and Microsoft also provides the converted source code (see this function QuadKeyToTileXY)
In the process of constant searching, I found examples similar to my thinking but his main purpose was to remove some unnecessary things to improve the quality of the landscapes. He also built an additional warehouse to demonstrate a method of using proxys to replace the landscapes. Unfortunately, this warehouse lacks some necessary things and cannot operate normally.
