The scale of the ambition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty astounding. Made with 800 game developers over four years, the title has a seriously impressive set of numbers.
I got a big download of the ambition at a preview event at the Grand Canyon, where the game makers flew us over the canyon and compared it to the simulation. The flight sim of all flight sims comes out on November 19 on the PC, Xbox Series X/S and GamePass on day one.
One of the most interesting feats is that Microsoft shifted the game’s computing from your local PC to the cloud, said Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, in an interview. The massive amounts of data are computed in the internet-connected data centers and then streaming in real-time to the user’s machine, where the simulation is visualized onscreen.
In the 2020 version, Microsoft had a hybrid structure that streamed data from the cloud and also used the local compute resources on the user’s own machine. That resulted in downloads to your PC of up to half a terabyte, far more than the 23 gigabytes for this year’s game.
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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also bringing massive enhancements to the simulated Earth by increasing the detail of its virtual environment by a factor of 4,000. The team built a “digital twin” of the Earth, much like would-be metaverse companies want to do. But this world was built with realistic physics and a huge level of accuracy. It has systems for all things that can affect flight, from ground activity to extreme weather, fuel and cargo, and turbulence. The hot air balloons in the game are simulated across 6,400 surfaces giving a realistic reaction to heat density — when you turn on the heater, the air will heat up, and it’s going to inflate the massive balloon.
The Earth in the flight simulation is really as close to a digital twin of the real planet as has ever been built, Neumann said. I heard a lot about digital twins from Nvidia — it supplies the chips to run simulations that let BMW build a digital twin factory to perfect the design before it builds the factory in real life. And Nvidia ambitiously is building Earth-2, a simulation of the entire world so accurate that it may one day be used to predict climate change for decades to come.
Overhyped and then hated, the metaverse went into hiding, and it’s lurking inside digital twins like BMW factories and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. In fact, Neumann said the company got a lot of the data for the photogrammetry of its planet-sized simulation from other enterprises that are digitizing the Earth.
Enhanced digital elevation maps use more than 100,000 square kilometers of countryside photogrammetry to enable visually stunning digital twin experiences. More than 150 airports, 2,000 glider airports, 10,000 heliports, 2,000 points of interest, and 900 oil rigs have been carefully hand-crafted while a procedural system generates all 40,000 airports, 80,000 helipads, 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly 3 trillion trees our planet.
Since the game journalists outnumbered the flight sim leaders, I paired up with Samuel Stone of Den of Geeks to talk with Neumann. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Did this have to start a long time ago in order to get that plane in the game and plan this whole event?
Jorg Neumann: You mean the real-world thing? No, actually not. The CEO of Cirrus, his name is Zean Nielsen. I call him an innovator. He wants to revolutionize how planes are perceived. Most people think of planes as scary things. They’re too far away from their lives. When you look at Cirrus’s commercials, as you’re driving up to an airplane–have you seen these things? Mom and Dad come out, a boy and a girl, and a dog. Then it says, “Here’s your weekend getaway private jet.” Okay, cool? The tone is a very playful, friendly tone. He’s a big believer in Flight Sim.
GamesBeat: I’m astounded that our pilot let Charlie take over.
Neumann: Because they want to show that it’s not scary. In very many ways, it’s like driving a car. It has all these security features. It’s super stable. You flew it. You saw it. It’s super reactive. You really feel in control.
He looks at the world of aviation through the lens of, we need to get more people comfortable with aviation. It has a lot to do with history, specifically in this country. Aviation was a family tradition. Often it was people from the Greatest Generation coming back from the war, becoming crop dusters and things like that. Having private planes, getting their grandkids into private planes, that sparked them to become pilots. That’s fading a little. Getting people back into the dream of aviation and flying is their thing.
I get phone calls from literally every manufacturer on the planet. “You have to help us with recruitment. There aren’t enough pilots.” The commercial aviation space is lacking 800,000. We know that. There’s not enough transport pilots, not enough passenger pilots. There’s a crisis coming because they’re all aging out. The Level D simulators cost $40 million. There are very few of them. They’re all looking for ways to get people into aviation faster. Then they look at us with 15 million people playing. The quality is good. This is the best recruiting tool ever. They support us however they can. Our relationship with the manufacturers, typically–if I ask them for something, they say, “How else can we help you?”
Samuel Stone: When Flight Sim came back in 2020 it came back bigger than ever, with all of that third-party aviation support. Taking all of that data, all of that feedback, how did that inform the direction you wanted to take 2024?
Neumann: It absolutely informed it. We almost completely reversed the typical way of making a game. Typically you sit there with a bunch of designers in the room and decide stuff. In this case we said, “What do people want? What are their problems? What are their needs?” Our design priorities came from the community. We have our own ideas. Nobody said, “Jorg, put giraffes in the game.” That’s a me thing. But all the serious fundamental stuff came from consumer needs. I feel great about that.
The whole process is healthier, I think. You can easily respond to people, because you already have common ground. They’ve told you what the problems are. We can propose solutions. They give us feedback on those solutions. As we implement we go through with what they actually need. I’ve been making games for 30 years. I’ve never done it this way, and it’s better. I’d never go back.
