I can't help but think about possibilities that extend beyond our traditional perception of flight simulation once MSFS is released.  By all accounts, this will be a dynamic "ecosystem" that will produce a virtual, evolving world.  If that can happen with weather, scenery and features on the ground, I wonder if players, yes, I said players...because this will become a console game at some point that reaches the masses, can create their little places in that world.  We can all fly, but can people build scenery, mods or addons that allow them to take a nice drive somewhere?  Perhaps they can walk through and explore cities.  Maybe players will be able to create avatars and actually interact face-to-face in places, which brings a lot of interesting possibilities.

I also can't help to wonder how much of the MSFS world can be tapped-into and borrowed for other games or applications in the future as well.  With the level of detail so amazing when it comes to modeling this world, depending on how accurate that is, I can see this having scientific and educational purposes aside from flying too.  Maybe someone can test-fly their real-world aircraft design in that environment while someone else is modeling atmospheric research. 

The reason I bring up these out-of-the-box ideas is that this is a huge project for Microsoft, and the team is large- 200 people.  There's a lot of money, innovation and talent going into this, and it seems like an awful lot to spend on a "game".  This could very well be a test bed for innovation on the part of Microsoft, as well as for others.  From the way the developers are making this thing sound, it will be a world like no other, not just with visuals, but under-the-hood as well, and perhaps the sky's the limit in terms of what this will evolve to become. 

I just hope the first iteration gets released sooner rather than later so we can all start contributing to this new paradigm in flight simulation. 

 

Edited December 3, 20196 yr by dal330200

For sure, I see expansions and other games/programs being made from this engine, even running side by side possibly. 

I don't think its a coincidence that Microsoft came out of nowhere with a new simulator. If someone at Microsoft got bored and thought lets make MSFS again for the heck of it just to flex, we would be getting an updated/better running Prepar3D in the name of FS11. Ever since they announced how the FS world was being made and driven months ago, its definitely a showcase for bigger things in the future. 

I've been thinking along these lines also.... why would a flight simulator need to display every blade of grass?

However, besides the visuals, there are also the fancy wind-ground interactions in the Asobo video.  Those will probably be computed in the cloud, for the whole world and downloaded to your PC rather than calculated there.  And that data can certainly have commercial value, from predicting pollution in city centres to wild-fire spreading just to name a couple of topical examples.

12 minutes ago, lzamm said:

Those will probably be computed in the cloud, for the whole world and downloaded to your PC rather than calculated there.

In an interview somewhere (can’t remember where) one of the developers says the atmosphere (including the water) is all handled by the GPU. It couldn’t be cloud-generated (no pun intended) otherwise the offline mode wouldn’t work.

44 minutes ago, Bottle said:

In an interview somewhere (can’t remember where) one of the developers says the atmosphere (including the water) is all handled by the GPU. It couldn’t be cloud-generated (no pun intended) otherwise the offline mode wouldn’t work.

 

A lot will certainly be done locally, but there's no guarantee that all the bells and whistles - such as "one wing feels the updraft while the other doesn't" - will also be available when offline. I just can't see the streamlines along mountains and over buildings being generated on a PC in real time with any semblance of accuracy, GPU or no GPU.  Still I may be wrong - we'll have to wait and see.

Edited December 3, 20196 yr by lzamm

This topic has already been brought to the attention to simmers, but was anything but receiveid whith extreme short-sighting upon the community who does not want to see beyond their own very small inner flightsim-circle.

Here :

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/562927-msfs-as-a-global-world-rendition-platform-earth-atmoshpere/

I stand my case, in 5-10 years from now, with a constantly upgraded project and massively freely contributed from data crowdsourcing we can imagine a proceduraly generated very plausible environnement at ground level detail. That would make MS investment in FS a commoin platform rendering from ground to stratosphere, for a lot of software applications.

But you are on Avsim here, don't expect so much thinking beyond the price of addons.

10 years ago it came on a disc now you download it 10 years from now all instant streaming you never own it.

29 minutes ago, tarere said:

 

But you are on Avsim here, don't expect so much thinking beyond the price of addons.

Why are you posting on Avsim then  if you are so contemptuous of this community ? Makes you feel good to insult people ?

9 hours ago, lzamm said:

I've been thinking along these lines also.... why would a flight simulator need to display every blade of grass?

General aviation pilots appreciate ground detail. 

Dare I say that we might get a Microsoft Train Simulator in the future as well?

Imagine if you land at an airport and just hop into a train or truck and go to the next airport (and repeat).

15 hours ago, lzamm said:

A lot will certainly be done locally, but there's no guarantee that all the bells and whistles - such as "one wing feels the updraft while the other doesn't" - will also be available when offline. I just can't see the streamlines along mountains and over buildings being generated on a PC in real time with any semblance of accuracy, GPU or no GPU.  Still I may be wrong - we'll have to wait and see.

Welcome to modern technology. Our PCs are capable of a lot, and flight sims have been some of the last games to actually utilize current hardware to its fullest potential. This is part of why larger, more complex aircraft perform so poorly in FSX/P3D. Not because aircraft systems are so taxing (they're actually fairly cheap compared to the rest of the simulator), but because the sims themselves haven't been designed to handle high resolution digital displays and hundreds of interactive parts.

Offloading so much of the rendering engine to the GPU is a big step forward and will allow the CPU to handle all physics calculations quite easily I'd imagine. I have no reason to believe we won't see the same physics in both online and offline mode.

November 7, 1967

Secretary Gardner, Senator Pastore, Chairman Staggers, Members of the Congress, Cabinet, ladies and gentlemen:

It was in 1844 that Congress authorized $30,000 for the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Soon afterward, Samuel Morse sent a stream of dots and dashes over that line to a friend who was waiting. His message was brief and prophetic and it read: "What hath God wrought?"

Every one of us should feel the same awe and wonderment here today.

For today, miracles in communication are our daily routine. Every minute, billions of telegraph messages chatter around the world. They interrupt law enforcement conferences and discussions of morality. Billions of signals rush over the ocean floor and fly above the clouds. Radio and television fill the air with sound. Satellites hurl messages thousands of miles in a matter of seconds.

Today our problem is not making miracles--but managing miracles. We might well ponder a different question: What hath man wrought--and how will man use his inventions?

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson 

Microsoft and DTG have been working closely for some years DTG working on bringing titles to the game console so don't be surprised if TSW makes it to the game catalogue, and my be one of the unnuanced titles that's being talked about.    

Question: How Far Can This New World Take Us?

Answer: Our bodies nowhere, but our minds, emotions, spirit and imagination as far as we want to fly!

Isn't that wonderful. I can hardly wait!

Kindest regards,

Spirit Flyer 

Stephen