“So we are actually now hiring planes and we equip them with cameras and fly ourselves.”Įarly on, the team worked with the data from Microsoft’s Bing maps. There’s some stuff in Australia, some stuff and Japan a nd then I say, ‘ hey how about Brazil?’ And everybody looks away,” he told me. “I ‘m trying very hard to get other continents captured because it’s very much United States and y ou have great data for Europe, pretty good data for Western Europe. That includes cities - for which the Flight Simulator team now charters its own planes to get the photogrammetry data - but also smaller features like adding more animals, including birds, and getting better weather data (and maybe historical weather data in the future). As Jorg Neumann, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator at Asobo noted a number of times during the event, the mission here is to build a digital twin of the earth. And for those who feel nostalgic, the team also brought back 24 classic missions from previous Flight Simulator versions.īut beyond looking back, Asobo and Microsoft also used this event to look into the future a bit. Microsoft and Asobo also brought back four classic airports, including Chicago’s Meigs Field and added 14 heliports and 15 glider airports. You’re not going to do steep turns with it anytime soon, but it’s a fun diversion.Īnd there is more. It’s a beast, no doubt, with its massive engines and weight. The Spruce Goose feels a bit like a novelty, but it’s also a beautiful model and surprisingly easy to fly. I’m sure we’ll see some helicopter tutorials pop up in future releases, though. Interestingly, while there are no new tutorials in the game to teach you how to fly helicopters - because the team argues that with all of the assistance functions turned on, it’s actually pretty easy to fly them - there are about half a dozen glider tutorials in the game now. And you can launch a glider from anywhere, too, whether that’s JFK or your local glider field. And those animations are nice, too, including your friendly launch helper running next to the glider to help keep you steady as you start your takeoff roll. One nifty feature is that you get the option between winch launches - which are standard in Europe, for example - or using a tow plane, which is the usual way to launch a glider in most of the U.S. If you’re looking for a more relaxed flying experience, gliders are definitely the way to go. Otherwise, there are very few surprises here. Still, as Bossard told me, the idea here was to create an engine that allows real-life glider pilots to find thermals exactly where they would expect them to be. “Sometimes you have to make some clever choices that help us to create the same kind of behavior with a low computational cost.” “If we want the perfect simulation, then we would need a quantum computer 100 years from now,” Asobo’s Martial Bossard explained. The weather engine doesn’t create clouds from first principle, for example, and so when creating the system for the thermals, the team had to work from where the clouds are and then work backward from there. The physics engine for this takes into account everything from the outside temperature, the angle of the sun, the material the sunlight is reflecting from and more - but the Asobo team also admits that it still cheats quite a bit here to do this within the computational limits of the engine. Here, too, Microsoft added some new visualization to the sim to let you see up- and downdrafts around you. As you would expect, Gliders are a much more docile affair.
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