Microsoft Flight Simulator has come a long way since its first iteration 38 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchRwnTorjY&ab_channel=Cussan
Currently the game boasts 20 aircrafts (30 in the premium deluxe edition ) with working operational controls and global photo-realistic scenery with real-time weather and air traffic patterns. Available for Xbox or PC this title was described in a review by IGN: “The real-world mapping data, however, takes Microsoft Flight Simulator from being just an impressive game to the most awe-inspiring simulation I’ve ever experienced, in spite of its less than stellar load times. Seeing famous landmarks, landing at the world’s most recognizable airports, or just touching down in a remote landing strip in South America is mind-bogglingly cool and an absolutely unparalleled way to virtually explore our world.”
The Microsoft store lists the download size of the program as 127GB thought the official site’s recommended specs suggest 150GB of disk space. Despite being quite the investment of space this file size isn’t novel in relation to titles like Call of Duty which clocks in at 200GB on PC ever since its most recent update. Regardless, this file size is still astounding considering the game incorporates 2 petabytes of data from Bing Maps. This is accomplished through the Microsoft Azure Cloud via a procedural generation AI that analyzes the geographical data from satellite imagery and generates height maps and landscape features such as buildings and trees. In addition artists adjusted the appearance of certain well-known landmarks using materials and textures gathered from photogrammetry models of these locations. Technology was also incorporated from Microsoft’s discontinued Photosynth project, which generates 3D models from 2D photos.
This computational feat of was made possible by Blackshark.ai who released this statement about Microsoft Flight Sim on their website: “With a team of 50+ AI specialists, geospatial engineers, data scientists, and real-time rendering developers, Blackshark.ai developed a unique solution that uses the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Artificial Intelligence to gain insights about our planet based on aerial data. A deep learning neural network segments and classifies buildings, vegetation and roads globally, and a patent-pending approach is used to reconstruct detected building attributes in highly detailed 3D. The outcome has an incredible level of detail, distinctive design and recognition value, and can be streamed by the player in real-time.”
Microsoft Flight Simulator provides a captivatingly realistic environment to explore but theres more activity than just what is happening on the ground, the game engine also renders the real-time location of other planes, and weather patterns in your vicinity. Asobo, a studio boasting nearly 200 employees with past partnerships on many Disney & Pixar projects (though likely best known for their work on Plague Tale), developed this game. A partnership made 6 years prior when they originally built HoloTour, a virtual tour created using photogrammetry data from Machu Picchu for Microsoft’s Hololens MR headset (also available on PC). An endeavor which yielded this case study. To generate the weather patterns and planes the AI extrapolates geometries using live meteorological data gathered from Meteoblue, as well as air traffic data, powered through Adobos in-house game engine ACE (Asobo Conception Engine) which, according to Asobo, “is able to generate some of the largest single environments ever seen in a video game.“
The major complaints about the game center around mistakes of the AI generating inaccurate height maps, textures and buildings, in addition to long load times. Despite this, the meticulous dedication to realism and stunning graphics have inspired many players to be more understanding.
No details have been spared, the game goes so far as to model light scattering inside tiny water droplets within the cockpit window. It would be easy to spend a whole day flying through beautiful cloud patterns that “are volumetrically modeled, with 32 layers determining shape, density, and “fuzziness”.” Even pollution levels and humidity affect refraction and overall visibility.
But still of course there different graphic settings options available, for this reason the “game’s reflection system will sometimes work in a “ray marching” capacity, which offers a much lower-fidelity version of ray tracing by retranslating voxels.“
Not only does the game feature in depth landscapes, city infrastructure, and moving cars, but there are also animals including birds, elephants, giraffes and bears!
Microsoft has also expanded functionality for the public SDK in the following ways:
- “Scenery Editor: Projected mesh normal rotation issues have been addressed and it is now possible to replace single models for scenery objects.
- Aircraft Editor: Several stability fixes and improvements have been made thanks to the input from the community.
- Particle Effects System: A new node-based particles effects system is in development and features more tunable parameters. The node graph editor got some usability improvements and support for generating ribbons has been added.
- WebAssembly: Addressed some usability issues (e.g. allowing single file recompilation) and are mostly concentrating on reducing developer iteration time and improving the debugging experience. Also enhanced the way file I/O requests from WASM modules work, improved WASM modules caching and fixed issues upon WASM module shutdown.”