Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

Usually, we fear the concept of “take the money and run” - investing in a game/program and having it never pan out for whichever reason.

In this case with Microsoft - the same phrase rings through in a whole other way. Here’s a bunch of money - go to town! The results are stunning.

I hope that Microsoft sees the benefit of doing this purely for the sake of doing it as well, as I think it’s good PR. Everyone has their gripes with one version of Windows or another - but a solid MSFS gives us a reason to really want to have Microsoft as part of our digital family and there is a lot of value in having that user support as a business.

All gamers pretty much need Microsoft (for Windows) - but how many of us actually want them?

1 Like

I wonder too if it will be the basis of some further technology utilization for Microsoft. Could be this is a win-win for them…

1 Like

Just some random thoughts, as have a cup of tea in hand. :tea:

I wonder how much of this FS 2020 idea was because Asobo did a tech demo of all the landscape/scenery stuff and Microsoft liked the idea of the ‘Azure’ hook in?

For people that don’t know Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing offering, where they are trying to transition the company from being desktop based (Win10, Office etc) to datacenter-based offerings. Microsoft saw the success of things like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and knew they had to heavily invest in all that to keep up. Also, at the same time, when it came to things like Search and Maps, then Bing was pretty much a money hole, just to give the appearance of competing with Google.

So here’s Microsoft, with big ol datacenters, lots of Bing map aerial photography, and was thinking ‘how could we use this in a consumer product of some sort?’. Asobo come along with a tech demo showing that (a) you use the datacenters to stream the textures/data as you go and (b) you use the datacenters to do massive processing jobs to do the ‘AI’ bit, to make up the mesh, autogen and all that good stuff. To cover the world you’d need some serious computing power plus base data. Places like Orbx didn’t have that, only someone like Microsoft or Google is in a place to get that going seriously (or rather, without having to relicense huge datasets plus pay for the cloud computing).

In some ways, I wonder if FS2020 is just a lucky coincidence of other bits of the puzzle just being around for Microsoft, and Asobo being smart enough to show the potential at the right time. Cool.

PS Anyone applying to the ‘Mission Designer’ vacancy for the sim? Careers | Asobo Studio :slight_smile:

5 Likes

“Faculty of analysis”

Oh well…that eliminates me!! :rofl:

1 Like

14 posts were split to a new topic: Non-Windows Gaming OS One Day?

One indication if your area has detailed Bing map data already or not is by finding where you are curious about and then seeing if right mouse clicking that the ‘View bird’s eye’ selection is possible or not. That’s the 4-way aerial photo data, that I think might be used for the really detailed areas in 2020.

Bing Maps - Directions, trip planning, traffic cameras & more

You don’t need to get too far out of a major area for it not to be there. I wonder if this will be the limits where the autogen takes over a lot more?

1 Like

Looks like no Tech Alpha build today. Sad Fridge.

4 Likes

The rare but still technically English three exclamation point email… :slight_smile:

Testing before release? Don’t these people know anything about how the sim software world works? :clown_face:

11 Likes

I know! Where is the Microsoft I used to remember! :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Interestingly enough, the View bird’s eye is available neither for Rouen nor for Naples while both feature in their “9 cities” video. Also, for some places (like e.g. Luxembourg) the bird’s eye view is pretty old and does not allow to rotate the map.

However, perhaps the team has access to non-public data.

2 Likes

I read some worrying news some 5-6 weeks back that they won’t support TrackIR? That sounds really worrying. Have we gotten any clarity from MS for that yet?

1 Like

I think it’s just that the support isn’t in yet. I can hardly imagine that they wouldn’t support it at all in this day and age.

1 Like

Can we raise our pitchforks at the lack of conformity to how our pitchforks are usually brandished? I’m so confused.

1 Like

Hmm…no bird’s eye view of my house. But I’m 30 miles west of Charlotte in an area nobody really wants a birds eye view of.

Except birds. They totally want that. :smiley:

4 Likes

Same as VR. Will be looked at after release, or they’ll make best efforts to add it as the schedule permits.

You have to wonder if perhaps they are a really competent games team, but didn’t actually play flightsims that much before starting this endeavor? They might also be getting a lot of their consumer advice from people that stopped playing at FSX about 5 years ago, and are basing ‘what makes a good sim’ of off those features.

I still can’t get over that they would make a new flight sim and then the community had to remind them that VR (or even TrackIR) would be important. The recent comments in the interview (video above) were a bit weak (in my mind), in that of course people want to do the feature really well and not ‘half arsed’ but I think that pretty much misses the point entirely. The producer talked about ‘bad interaction in VR’ and ‘people have to look under the headset all the time’, plus ‘framerate making people dizzy’. While these are all challenges, I don’t buy them as reasons not to put in some initial implementation using reprojection and a mouse pointer - I mean, it really only sounds like they don’t actually play sims in 2019 when they say stuff like that.

3 Likes

I mean, it’s more likely my idea of ‘birds eye’ marker is completely wrong to be honest :slight_smile:

The only other thing I can think of is that they might be planning to kill off Bing Maps in the nearest future (compared to Google and Apple it’s not used as much), so they aren’t updating it with the latest data online anymore. Dunno.

2 Likes

Or they just looked at the Navigraph '18 survey. It was clear from it that there is only little percentage of civi flight simmers using any form of head tracking or ( who would say that ) VR.

Fact is that TrackIR or similar is much more common in combat sim community than civi community.

2 Likes

I would say these are some kind of expectations we all have but which are not exactly objective if you will.

Same, in my case, with the streamed ortho. I was first concerned about resolution and colors and whatnot. But today, looking out of the window from my office, I realized that the ortho is just the foundation for great VFR experience. The important part imo will be the AI ‘reading’ these streamed ortho 2D images and trying to populate ( as correctly as possible ) the world with the details like buildings, trees, grass and whatnot ( the more the merrier ). And these DETAILS will fill the usually empty spaces of our current sim landscapes and will make pleasure from any kind of low and slow flying.
On one hand it is great that orbX can do manually place all these details for particular location. But for whole world we need exactly this AI to do it automatically in real time!
If they implement this in any reasonable detail, that would be next gen VFR sim for me.

1 Like

I get what you mean, but the survey didn’t result in asking for worldwide VFR capable streamed scenery data either, but it looks like they got that.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

I think it’s on the dev team to not just use the past to predict what to build in the future. Given that X-Plane and P3D natively support TrackIR and VR since 2017 (ish) it’s still pretty odd to me. Asobo actually developed some stuff for Hololens for Microsoft about 3 years ago as well, so I see it as a bit of a ‘yellow flag’ that they understand the sim market as of 2019.