The ambition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I got to a juncture in my life where I was wondering what I should do. I thought "well, I love flight simulators, let's take a introductory flight".
Drove to my local airport, flew it. I was already familiar with all the controls thanks to the MSFS.
That flight had me convinced. Got my PPL, went to college and got my commercial and all the other ratings, and that was all due to one thing ...
Microsoft Flight Simulator
This new version is far beyond anything I would have imagined it would get to. I thought once it died, it was gone.
Oh no, they brought it back ... and they were serious.
I recently played the new one on the console, and it just felt... off. I didn't feel immersed, though the plane handling seemed realistic. I think my brain was primed console-wise for something similar to a GTAV flying experience, and I can definitely say that I had far more fun zipping between contoured hills in GTA than I did on MFS2024. Maybe had I played it on PC, my reaction would be different.
Yes it’s not a professional flying simulator but it’s good enough to get an idea of where you’re going, what you’re doin, what you’ll see and it helps tremendously especially when you’re flying VFR if you don’t have GPS.
There's also some crazy errors that are visible from the air, like many rivers being raised up hundreds of feet[0], and many bridges being solid underneath[1].
I always assumed one of primary things in a sequel would be to train an even bigger and better satellite maps -> 3D scenery model, especially one that understood a wider (and better-localized) variety of building configurations, so we'll see.
[0] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/river-altitude-raised-w...
[1] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/fix-photogrammetry-brid...
99% of that engine value is procedural terrain and graphical shaders. It looks great but has no scientifical value.
Just like the "digital twin" hype train, cool simulations have fancy graphics, useful simulations don't.
This was the prevailing wisdom in AI before generalized transformers as well. We're rapidly moving toward black box hyperintelligent AGI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Loc...
We approached Microsoft when we were selling the company, and the response we got was "you're too close to work we're doing for us to even look at you or talk to you". I assumed that meant they are building out a digital twin, with capabilities to run in a browser at high speed with high resolution (which we did). That was 3 years ago. I'm surprised we haven't seen something from them yet.
After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dangerous jumps).
It's 2.5D, I used a 3D engine but the graphics are just satellite imagery projected on to a terrain map.
And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
Not everyone can or wants to go to VATSIM for realistic ATC coverage, but the default one is just dreadful. Obvious phraseology mistakes, happily vectoring you towards terrain, asking you to descend 20k ft. in 2 minutes, and the only way to communicate with it is via a list of pre-determined options.
MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.
It's quite the experience. I can't wait for 2024.
I've used a rift S with my 1070 TI and it struggles a bit!
MS Flight Sim makes me sick, as does any driving game or any game where locomotion involves the view moving without associated real-world movement unless teleportation is used.
I can play Beat Saber, PokerStars VR, Zombie Training Simulator, Gorn, etc., for literally hours at a time and feel fine.
But in a racing game, as soon as the car starts moving, even at only 5 mph, I get nauseous. Same in MS Flight Sim. I don't have to be doing crazy maneuvers to feel sick, just taxiing makes me sick.
This is pretty much the norm for most people. If virtual world movement matches real world movement, you're fine. But as soon as there's a mismatch, that's where motion sickness begins.
One of these days, I'll try taking motion sickness medication beforehand and see if it helps.
FWIW I get motion sick easily in real life too, so I think I’m just screwed. I really wanted to play GT7 VR on PS5, but it was an absolute nonstarter unfortunately.
"Le Mal du Pays is usually translated as 'homesickness,' or 'melancholy. ' If you put a finer point on it, it's more like 'a groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape"
Not sad, just locked into the moment, with a certain understated freedom of mind.
You're not smiling or frowing, just existing, taking it in.
I want to see the hyper-realistic rendered world in as high resolution as possible.
I want to fly around the planet.
But I don't want to be limited to the detailed specifics (and speeds!) of real life planes.
Why can't we have a mode to make a plane as easy to fly as it is in GTA5. Or "superman" mode where I don't even have a plane, and I can just move around at (almost) any speed [i'm sure rendering would become a problem]
Given that you can jump to any point in the planet, I don't think it's a high priority for them.
In most ways it does not look as good as MSFS (no dynamic weather, animations etc), but you get a lot more of accurately modeled cities with 3D buildings.
A version with visual candy like dynamic weather simulation would be excellent...
It contains tutorials on how to control the planes, but no storyline, no built in missions. If you are motivated by a narrative, this is not a game for you. It only does the simulation, but doesn’t really help people get into the game through a kind of narrative.
I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls. I might have that, if there was a reason for me to learn those things, as a motivating story that would drag me in. I think it’s an enormous missed opportunity in terms of making the game appeal to a wider audience.
I still hope it will be there in 2024 edition, but this interview didn’t give me much hope.
So in theory from what I have seen, your story is that of a career pilot, with intro cutscenes and voice acting etc. This has all been shown already.
If you find it most fun to haul cargo, your story is that you will go get the licences, grind the smaller jobs. For more casual fun experience you might choose to specialise in agriculture jobs which are going to be more engaging/shorter.
The truth is though, it is a simulator, and flying takes fooreeever. You can't make casual flying and flight sim meet in the middle without throwing away 90% of the flying experience, which is level flight at altitude on your way to a destination.
This is why although I am an aviation fan, and a train fan, I don't play either sims. I have not got 2-8hrs to hurry up and wait.
https://msfsaddons.com/2024/09/19/heres-how-the-career-mode-...
That was my motivation and narrative for playing it anyway, and judging by some of the paid realism mods, I don't think I was the only one
the entire point of a simulator is to give you the sandbox to do whatever you want while having as near of a realistic experience as possible.
if they try to add these things to the mix, i assume it is to make it more accessible to game pass audience, who might not shell out the full price just to try it out.
for many who love to play this genre, especially content creators, instead of expecting the game to give a storyline, they make their own! like for me it would be trying the 787 in the air routes where the landing strips do not support large planes for a hypothetical scenario, for example.
it not quite the same, but your own creativity is what give games like minecraft so much longevity. on the other hand, once you finish a "career mode" (as proposed for mfs 2024), you may not be motivated to restart.
> I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls.
Then there are different games where this is not expected. I have always thought MFS is meant to be as close as possible to true flight, to such an extent it can be used to practice actual routes.
One example of such a tool would be Little Navmap which makes it possible to plan routes and use your iPad as a "GPS" device. There's some screenshots in my blog post about it, in case anyone is curious: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-my-ipad-for-microsof...
My impression is that they were much more focused on highly abstracted spaces designed to facilitate work and social interactions.
To be fair to MSFS they're not that well suited to the military side of flying. GA and airliners are great now though so I always thought of DCS and MSFS filling different niches and having a completely different focus.
BTW: If you don't want to read 1000 hour manuals:
https://www.falcon-lounge.com/
https://learning.falcon-lounge.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1...
MSFS 2020 only streams terrain data from the cloud. It sounds like MSFS 2024 will stream the entire rendered video feed, similar to other cloud gaming services.
"When users load into the sim, only the textures, meshes, and map data that they need will be downloaded to avoid unnecessary bandwidth and disk space usage. "
I hope not, as a greatly prefer the one time cost model with games.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/grand-theft-auto-v-used-by-res...
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).
The cockpit is interactable with the VR controllers. You can reach forward and push buttons and turn knobs. It's a bit awkward, but it's doable.
I'll typically hold the XBox controller in my left hand to control the flight stick and have a VR controller on my right hand to interact with everything else in the cockpit. It does get awkward though when I need to use the rudder or brakes, though, since in a real airplane, those are controlled by pedals. I have to try to press buttons on my XBox controller on my right hand while still holding the VR controller.
Buttons are easy enough to work with, same with levers. Dials were hard though because the normal human behavior is to pinch a dial, but in VR, you can only really grab, and knowing where exactly the game will deal with your grab on a small dial is tricky, especially if it's an autopilot dial with nested dials.
It'd probably work better if I had a VR system that had hand detection rather than needing controllers.
Could something like Apple Vision Pro work in an AR capacity so I can still see my physical controls?
It might not be correct the first time, but as we map the changes from prediction against the reality, we could adjust for factors that we hadn't considered.
It seems to me that we shouldn't be too far from accurate weather prediction and perhaps with huge amount of data capture having a digital twin of the planet in which we have enough confidence in to model potential climate impacts of policies, products could allow us to have robust discussions around where we're headed and what paths we could take to adapt or overcome the impacts we're already facing.
This is quite a comment.