Microsoft Flight Simulator will return in 2020 with a reboot. Here's a look back at the evolution of the beloved PC-based game, from 1982 to now.
" Ayton, based in NSW-Australia, who in his spare time creates aircraft liveries and scenarios, says that,"Microsoft may have been notably absent from the last 13 years but the genre has itself been very much alive.
" Ayton's day job involves pilot training for rookie aviators in the real world, using desktop simulators. Costa and Ayton, widely known in the simmer world through their social media channels and participation in forums, might have happily carried on forever with FSX. But out of the blue they, and a small band of other carefully selected simmers, received emails from Microsoft, inviting them to attend a preview event in September 2019 in Renton, Washington, to flight-test a pre-Alpha version of the new Flight Simulator. It was the simmer equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka's factory. But the bigger question was: Why was Microsoft resuscitating its Flight Simulator? "In the hallways of Microsoft the dream of making another flight simulator has always been alive," Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, tells CNN."Sometimes, what it takes is the right convergence of things. We knew FSX is highly regarded, lots of people play it and love it, but to take something meaningfully forward you need trigger points. In our particular case there was a convergence between tech, tools and partners."Courtesy Microsoft The tech goes back to when Neumann was working in collaboration with Bordeaux-based game developer Asobo Studio on a project for Microsoft's mixed-reality HoloLens platform."You could go anywhere on Earth -- you could go to Machu Picchu and it would look exactly real, the rendering tech was there," says the Flightsim boss. Simultaneously, Microsoft's Bing was accumulating a hyper-real high-definition database of satellite imagery:"The planet's getting scanned at a rapid pace. We have two petabytes of data on Bing in ultra-high detail, and we're going to have full mapping of the planet very soon." "Then you need to have tools," says Neumann:"You need to store all that data and you need to get it to people, so we have infrastructure with Azure which enables us to get that to everybody's machine." Somewhere along that journey, during the development of HoloLens, someone decided to throw an airplane into the mix, and suddenly the potential for a resurrection of Flight Simulator became a possibility. But that would depend on partners too -- aircraft manufacturers, data providers, third-party communities, the simmers, and Asobo, which Neumann says"is the perfect developer for this -- they have an awesome engine for rendering huge worlds."When Sebastian Wloch, CEO and co-founder of Asobo, started working with Microsoft on the new Flight Simulator the first thing he did was take flight lessons. The bulk of Asobo's employees also started flying to ensure they had a grip on the experiences they were trying to digitally recreate. One example of the level of realism now achievable in the new Flight Simulator will be that weather will mirror what's happening in the real world by drawing on live weather data feeds. Previously flightsims simply pasted in generic imagery of clouds. "Thanks to the conjunction of new technologies we can now finally render the world realistically, making users feel more connected," says Wloch."The clouds are what we call volumetric, meaning they're 3D. When you fly through clouds the weather engine shows 3D rain. If you have the sun behind you and the rain in front, you're going to see rainbows -- everything's extremely realistic." As the elements started to align, Microsoft was increasingly conscious of the need to have simmers on board. For the past three years, Microsoft had been discreetly hovering around discussions in simmer forums and identifying their needs. Then, at E3 in June 2019, Microsoft announced that the new Flight Simulator would be available in 2020, initially on PC, then on Xbox. Concurrently they invited simmers into an insider program to interact with the development team, helping shape the game. Then in September, at Microsoft's preview event, Costa, Ayton and other invitees from the insider program got to flight test it.
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