Hi everyone,

This quote is from Phil Spencer in the Guardian interview.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/jul/24/head-in-the-clouds-the-return-of-microsoft-flight-simulator

What do you understand by that?

Edited August 3, 20196 yr by Noooch

That's a bit hard to say without the context. 😉 Add a link to the interview or copy a larger portion of text and we might be able to discuss this. The quote on its own says absolutely nothing.

I do think I know what Phil is talking about, it's pretty clear if you read the ENTIRE quote, but I also do think an opening post should be a bit more complete and clear before it deserves serious attention. Put some effort in it, Noooch! 😉

Edited August 3, 20196 yr by Reader

Done

Yes if you read it ill have the 20,000 blue ray disc version thank you no downloads😎

It definetely means DYNAMIC weather. What I (and probably everybody else) would like to know is if the the Azure AI can do those weather transitions based on real weather data. What I mean is, the Azure AI would calculate the weather for the whole world, based on the real data, and we would just see the weather on our screens. It would save a lot of processing power on our machines.

6 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

It definetely means DYNAMIC weather. What I (and probably everybody else) would like to know is if the the Azure AI can do those weather transitions based on real weather data. What I mean is, the Azure AI would calculate the weather for the whole world, based on the real data, and we would just see the weather on our screens. It would save a lot of processing power on our machines.

I don't disagree with you but how is it different from what we have today with, as an example, Active Sky ?  I don't think the weather transition from one METAR to another eats up so much computer processing.

8 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

It definetely means DYNAMIC weather. What I (and probably everybody else) would like to know is if the the Azure AI can do those weather transitions based on real weather data. What I mean is, the Azure AI would calculate the weather for the whole world, based on the real data, and we would just see the weather on our screens. It would save a lot of processing power on our machines.

Given that live real world weather nowadays is basically a must-have for any weather engine addon, I would think it's very unlikely that it's not supported in MSFS. With all the amazing things this Azure AI can do apparently, live real world weather should be a simple task.

2 minutes ago, domkle said:

I don't disagree with you but how is it different from what we have today with, as an example, Active Sky ?  I don't think the weather transition from one METAR to another eats up so much computer processing.

I'm not saying it will be different, but MS can use the AI to calculate and render the weather outside of your local machine, streaming after to your machine, meaning all the processing work would be made by the MS supercomputers. Is it commercially doable (the costs) on simulator? No idea. 

Actually I'm curious to see how the whole engine will work, scenery, airports, ATC, weather, physics etc. We don't have much info to work here, just a lot of speculations.

Okay, apparently this bit is the subject of interest:

Quote

Players will be able to control numerous authentic planes from light aircrafts to passenger vehicles, set their own flight paths, and navigate through unpredictable scenarios thrown up by Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to dynamically shift flight conditions. This will keep players on their toes – get too comfortable running a commuter flight, and Azure might throw up sudden shifts in the weather, turning a sunny flight into a battle to keep aloft as storm conditions roll in.

That could mean anything. The author of that article might not understand how injected real weather works in a flight sim, or it could mean there is an optional mode where the Azure AI generates random challenging conditions to keep things "interesting" on what could otherwise be a boring flight (for non-hardcore sim enthusiasts). If that's the case, I sure hope it's something we can disable in favor of either fixed weather "themes" or injected real weather.
 

6 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

It definetely means DYNAMIC weather. What I (and probably everybody else) would like to know is if the the Azure AI can do those weather transitions based on real weather data. What I mean is, the Azure AI would calculate the weather for the whole world, based on the real data, and we would just see the weather on our screens. It would save a lot of processing power on our machines.

I would think real weather injection with user-modified parameters would be an essential requirement for a modern flight sim. It's available in the other two major civilian flight sims, it needs to be in MSFS too.

If the weather calculation is done on a remote server, that's nothing new either. Current weather addons like ActiveSky and xEnviro assemble a weather model from METARs and other proprietary data on a remote server, then the model is streamed to the local sim client for generating the graphics. That's not going to save much processing power. The local computer still has to generate all the graphic effects and the response from the flight model on a frame-by-frame basis.

 

 

3 minutes ago, threegreen said:

Given that live real world weather nowadays is basically a must-have for any weather engine addon, I would think it's very unlikely that it's not supported in MSFS. With all the amazing things this Azure AI can do apparently, live real world weather should be a simple task.

That's what I am talking about, I think besides weather, Azure will handle other aspects wich will affect us. For example it would be awesome to face  birdstrikes, forest fires, volcano eruptions, fighters in warzones or military airspaces.

7 minutes ago, threegreen said:

Given that live real world weather nowadays is basically a must-have for any weather engine addon, I would think it's very unlikely that it's not supported in MSFS. With all the amazing things this Azure AI can do apparently, live real world weather should be a simple task.

It is doable I guess, but it will all depends on the ammount of money the studio behind it will have to provide the features. The time the AI is processing will cost them money, it has to be profitable (good sales/number of subscribers).

4 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Okay, apparently this bit is the subject of interest:

That could mean anything. The author of that article might not understand how injected real weather works in a flight sim, or it could mean there is an optional mode where the Azure AI generates random challenging conditions to keep things "interesting" on what could otherwise be a boring flight (for non-hardcore sim enthusiasts). If that's the case, I sure hope it's something we can disable in favor of either fixed weather "themes" or injected real weather.
 

I would think real weather injection with user-modified parameters would be an essential requirement for a modern flight sim. It's available in the other two major civilian flight sims, it needs to be in MSFS too.

If the weather calculation is done on a remote server, that's nothing new either. Current weather addons like ActiveSky and xEnviro assemble a weather model from METARs and other proprietary data on a remote server, then the model is streamed to the local sim client for generating the graphics. That's not going to save much processing power. The local computer still has to generate all the graphic effects and the response from the flight model on a frame-by-frame basis.

 

 

As I said above, I'm eagerly waiting to see in detail how every feature will work, weather included.

They can stream the visual effects of the weather (clouds, rain, snow etc). I was not talking about sending just data, but streaming the visual effects. But here I'm just guessing/speculation. Doing it like would cost them a lot of money using the AI 24/7.

8 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

They can stream the visual effects of the weather (clouds, rain, snow etc). I was not talking about sending just data, but streaming the visual effects. But here I'm just guessing/speculation. Doing it like would cost them a lot of money using the AI 24/7.

Yeah, I suppose in theory they could stream the weather graphics too, although at 4k resolution and high enough frame rates (including for VR), that's a huge amount of bandwidth. Especially if they're also streaming scenery textures and objects. 

What makes me doubt that they'll do weather graphics remotely, is that it would mean either no weather at all for those with slow connections or flying offline, or else a drastically degraded form of weather if there isn't a fast enough connection.

I can see that approach working for scenery, with low quality if you don't have a fast connection, and all the scenery eye candy if you do. But I think weather depiction is something we should expect at one quality level regardless of connection speed. It's an essential part of a flight sim. It shouldn't tax modern computers too much to generate weather graphics locally.

51 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Yeah, I suppose in theory they could stream the weather graphics too, although at 4k resolution and high enough frame rates (including for VR), that's a huge amount of bandwidth.

There would be no reason to stream the graphic files for weather, all of that would be stored client side.  Only the weather data would need to be streamed and the graphics would be generated on the player's PC.  MS will design the game to stream as little as possible, that's just good design.  With the photogrammetry texture files streaming already they will especially design the rest of the game to stream as little data as possible.

As for what Phil meant by "unpredictable scenarios" it could be any or all of the following:

- Weather changes.

- Air traffic (player and AI) gumming up the pattern or airport operations.

- Aircraft breakdowns or technical issues.

Edited August 3, 20196 yr by Mengy