John Doe wrote:

I do not see roads/highways in my big city, definitely not clearly.


Perhaps I should clarify a point here. You are not going to see any
road as clearly as the runways and taxyways, unless they are placed in
High Res ground textures. MS do put in some major roads but only as
grey lines on the ground.

With $50,000,000,000 USD (fifty billion United States dollars) in cash,
Microsoft can afford the resources.

Not just a factor of money, but time and effort on behalf of the
programmers. I would imagine that they would rather spend the time
trying to get the flight models right and get rid of the bugs.
Plus there is a reason that they have all that cash. MS are not
generally known for their not-for-profit projects.

A equivilent complaint amongst FS users is the lack of decent
buildings in the larger towns, but if MS had spent the time doing that
for every large city and town in the world (or even in the US) then we
would only be seeing FS2000 now.


Why is that?

With an average of about 2 years in developement between the FS
releases (FS2006? anyone) that doesn't leave a lot time to spend on
the visuals. Better to let private groups make their own packages.

The larger cities have textures and buildings on the scenery mesh but
in the less important cities (even if it's big to you) they just use
sat photo textures with those crappy autogen buildings. This saves a
lot of effort for the design team. Also if they were to do
semi-realistic buildings and ground textures for every large city
(remember that the scenery databases cover the whole world) then the
size of the distribution would be rather bulky. At present it's 3 CDs
and nearly 2 gig of hard disk space, and that's with the generic and
autogen generously applied.

What may have to happen in future releases is that MS may keep an
online database of all scenery and when you purchase the game disc you
download the relevant areas that you want to fly in. I think that
X-plane already operates this system.