The builders of Microsoft Flight Simulator have rather a lot to be happy with. Final month, on the FlightSimExpo 2024 in Las Vegas, representatives crowed about their 15 million customers and one billion flight classes logged — numbers Asobo Studio claims put them on the high of the heap because the most-played flight simulation ever printed. Now the studio is again on that grind cranking out Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, due out this fall. Asobo calls it “probably the most formidable sim ever undertaken,” and given its monitor report, I’m inclined to consider them.
The lengthy talk, delivered by head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jörg Neumann and Asobo Studio co-founder and CEO Sebastian Wloch, stretches over an hour and a half. However these 90 minutes embrace numerous scrumptious morsels for devoted digital pilots — enhancements corresponding to app-based offline flight planning, elevated density of floor site visitors at main airports, and the power to really step out of the cockpit to carry out pre-flight checks in first-person.
However the tidbit that ought to flip PC and console participant’s heads probably the most is the invocation of a brand new associate, an organization that Microsoft lately acquired referred to as Vexcel Imaging.
Vexcel is a groundbreaking imaging firm identified for its UltraCam line of aerial survey cameras. These multi-spectrum arrays embrace extra conventional RGB coloration sensors alongside near-infrared sensors. Mixed with their software program, the result’s a dramatic enhance within the decision of picture information being shared with the crew of designers at Asobo — as evidenced by MSFS 2024’s latest teaser trailer, proven on the Xbox Video games Showcase.
Neumann used a little bit of his time on stage at FlightSimExpo to let followers peek backstage, so to talk, at what was truly being proven in that trailer — particularly in its opening moments as a single-engine airplane flies over Monument Valley in Arizona.
“The pure environments are one thing that individuals have by no means seen earlier than,” Neumann mentioned. “Not on this scale, actually not on this stage of element.” Then he handed the reins to Wloch to go a bit of bit deeper. You may watch the complete phase round the 14-minute mark.
What’s vital to know is that beforehand, Microsoft Flight Simulator had been making use of three-dimensional belongings — issues like homes and bushes — automagically on high of two-dimensional information. However there’s solely up to now you may take that form of automation, which is why the primary time I flew over the Nice Pyramid at Giza, the complicated of pyramids was surrounded by a forest of oddly brown deciduous bushes as a substitute of sand dunes. Utilizing UltraCam information to do photogrammetry — that’s, 3D reconstruction of real-world components from nothing however picture information — offers Asobo’s terrain-rendering software program much more to work with.
“We now have the bottom, which is all 3D, as a substitute of […] 2D with a texture,” Wloch mentioned. “There’s numerous completely different 3D supplies [including] the grass, the rocks, and the bushes. Every thing is now 3D […] and every part is procedurally generated on high of the world information.”
However Vexcel’s digicam expertise isn’t standing nonetheless. This summer season, the Austrian company is adding LIDAR to its arrays as nicely. That can seemingly add altitude and relative distance to the info being shared with Asobo along with graphical information. And that, my associates, may allow procedurally generated environments the likes of which nobody has ever seen in a industrial flight simulator.
Count on extra on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 forward of its Nov. 19 launch date, when it is going to grow to be out there for buy and as a part of Xbox Sport Move.