I do wonder who the game appeals to though, since it's sold on PC and Xbox. I played it as a child on my PC and the experience was quite immersive, even if the graphics were bad.

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.

MSFS 2020's Earth is unbelievably good from the air, but it (understandably) does not look great and is sometimes not entirely physically coherent up close at the surface (outside of airports and a limited set of bespoke areas).

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...

"earth copy" is just marketing lingo. Models are approximations made for a specific goal at a time. You cannot build a model that is both good for gaming and meteorology.

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.

That used to exist as a product called Microsoft ESP. It got sold off to Lockheed Martin when the Flight Simulator project was shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Loc...

We used to be in this space, and with Ayvri/Doarama - which was a 3D virtual world but not a flight simulator, it was used by paragliders to replay flights, commercial drone operators, some defense, transportation planning (trains, maybe others as well), etc etc.

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.

I would love a real world driving sim. I don’t really care for driving on race tracks, but real roads.

The lighting, clouds, weather are great and make it look beautiful. Nature looks great in the game. But in terms of urban areas, particularly buildings and roads it is much much worse than Google Maps/Earth. You also see the seams in the construct in places like coastlines.

That's the goal of Nvidia's "Earth 2" plans, which the article mentions very briefly.

Mostly military simulations and training, probably

Imagine GTA on that map. Wondering how many years away are we from this.

There are some third party companies working on LLM based ATC. It's a hard problem but that's mostly because there are a lot of rules and regional differences. Which is something that LLMs are actually good at making sense of. The new multi modal OSS models are only going to make this easier.

MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.

Like this? https://youtu.be/inDm0mjp_t8?t=323

The answer is... ATC Simulator!

2020 is astonishing in VR. I get the same melancholy I do on a real plane and can fly for hours sightseeing out the window. There is also a real sense of peril.

It's quite the experience. I can't wait for 2024.

Rendering _and streaming_ is already a problem at jet speeds.

Given that you can jump to any point in the planet, I don't think it's a high priority for them.

They kinda did that with 2012's 'MS Flight', it was massively panned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight

They are adding a walk around mode which is external to aircraft. Also while flying, you can adjust the simulation rate dramatically to decrease time to destination’s (supported in 2020 as well).

Did you try Google Earth VR? You can get the "superman" experience there (and even scale yourself up/down).

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...

The Drone mode in MS Flight Simulator 2020 is pretty much that - https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-to-using-the-drone-...

Google Earth desktop basically gives you that with even better Earth model. Last I checked you could enable a super simple airplane mode that even worked with joysticks. It always felt like future to me :)

I think that is the whole sell of 2024? It is still a self guided story but, career mode you have to start as a student, earn your hours and licenses in order to take on bigger and more interesting jobs etc. Eventually you buy your own planes, which enables you to take on bigger jobs and so on.

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.

This is already confirmed as at least somewhat implemented. There are missions for things like search and rescue, farming, and oil rigs. There's also a new avatar mode to enable doing virtual walk arounds and the like.

https://msfsaddons.com/2024/09/19/heres-how-the-career-mode-...

It's obviously a personal taste thing, but a lot of people 'want' as much detail as possible; the satisfaction for them being that if they sat down in those cockpits, they'd have a good chance of being able to fly.. for a few minutes before crashing horrible anyway :)

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

mfs 2020 seems to do what it says on the label - be a simulator.

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.

Is Microsoft Flight Simulator meant to be that kind of game?

> 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.

The biggest part of MSFS 2024 is the 'career system' - ie proc. gen missions, I'm surprised you missed it.

X-Plane has some pretty solid space and reentry physics last I checked. They had a shuttle landing mission which was super cool (and hard)

Yes, I pictured the metaverse as more of a Minecraft type of thing. I don't think it's a good comparison, unless MSFS wants to become a MMO experience... "Runway permission wait simulator 2024!"

This might be thinly-veiled shade tossed at "Earth 2", ostensibly a metaverse company that sells real estate in a non-existent game for fake money (i mean cryptocurrency).

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to give it a try!

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.

MSFS 2020 takes up hundreds of gigabytes and takes many hours to install, so this is likely to be an improvement.

Presumably this means one day it will just stop working when Microsoft decide to shut down the cloud backend.

How would you be able to run a game of this scale locally?

Can't you disable that?

God I hope not ... Instant turn off

Yep, this idea was actually explored by researchers using GTA to train self driving cars back in 2018.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/grand-theft-auto-v-used-by-res...

There are over 35,000 in the game, they're mostly procedurally generated with some light editing to fix any major issues. 160 are handcrafted.

Xbox game streaming?

It is on VR, has been for years, and yes, it’s pretty much a killer app (imho, the only killer app.)

That simply doesn’t work, for the same reason we can’t even model three massive bodies interacting with each other via gravity, which is a much much simpler problem.

You mean building a model of the atmosphere? That's what numerical weather models do and they've existed for decades. There are physical ones like ECMWF and newer ML-based ones like ECMWF-AIFS which uses neural networks.

This is quite a comment.

predicting weather beyond a very short amount of time is a myth or a delusion. its a chaotic system just like any fluid that goes out of the newtonian zone.