I tried this mod and it was okay, with significant drawbacks. For some reason, it has attracted the most zealous group of fanboys on flightsim.to and YouTube. It's clever and works well in some ways, but in most areas it is not as radical improvement as some would have you believe.
Google maps are more detailed than bing in many areas, but in most parts of the world, you won't see an improvement above 500 feet AGL. Around major population centers there is no difference at all.
Google maps don't blur out as many military bases as bing does, and the ones that it does blur out are much less blurred and still recognizable. This was probably the biggest plus for me, I am always annoyed when I'm flying around Belgium or the Netherlands and come across a big area that is blurred out.
Google is noticeably better detailed than bing in much of Asia. In some parts of Asia, bing has no high-LOD textures at all, and resorts to pure autogen when you get down low. In some ways, it is nice that google replaces the autogen textures with real and quite detailed ones, changing rural China, for example, into something full of terraced rice paddies rather than what looked like Iowa in the unmodded sim. However, bing's autogen trees and buildings will remain, and they are now mismatched with the google textures. Remember how FSX would lay down random urban or rural textures and then place roads and autogen buildings in places that didn't align with the textures at all? Yeah, it's like that. This is a bit of FSX nostalgia that I didn't need in MSFS.
Many of the google textures have odd coloration, visible borders between texture tiles, and other artifacts. If you've used google maps, you'll know that sometimes the highest LOD is a photo taken in a different season than the lower LODs, and is a very different color. You'll see some of that with squares of texture popping to different colors as you approach them in flight. Bing seems to have less of this, and I'm sure they are progressively improving their maps to work better in MSFS, while Google has no incentive to do so.
The operation of the mod itself is clever but a bit sketchy, it intercepts all the calls to bing map textures, sends them to a new server, and translates them into google map requests. There are reports of it breaking the sim, and it uses a port and host reassignment that you may already unknowingly be using for something else. It seems like it would be easy for either MS or Google to kill this mod, and I would think that both of them would want to do so, especially if a lot of people adopt it and it starts to increase traffic noticeably on Google's servers. It's also my understanding that this mod is becoming popular with people who have pirated MSFS, because those folks had no ability to stream the bing maps but now they can stream the google ones and have online scenery for the first time. Another reason I imagine MS would want to kill it.
Because of the uneven nature of the improvements, the tech issues, and the likelihood that this mod is not here to stay, I turned it off after a few days of playing with it. I might restore it if I plan a long flight over certain parts of the world, but I doubt it.
August
