Interview With Microsoft Flight Simulator Team

Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator and Sebastian Wloch, CEO, Co-Founder, Asobo Studio were on the microphone for an interview with Avsim.

A multitude of topics were covered , among them the amazing features list , it looked like the  What We Want wishlist  in the forums .

Discussions began with the genesis of the project in 2016 and followed through the elements that brought this amazing mix of real world weather , traffic and imagery to its current point in development.

accompanying   Images were provided in addition to an outline of Microsoft Flight Simulator's New World , its places and Aircraft.

Microsoft Flight Simulator has made use of  two petabytes of Bing Maps data covering the entire globe and allows players to fly anywhere, with 40,000 airports now available to visit.

Azure AI can add over 1.5 trillion trees, make 3D buildings, add missing buildings and ameliorate the quality of all aerial images.

Further , new from Asobo Studios proprietary engine are procedurally generated blades of grass, millions of individual blades of grass, and dirt, asphalt, building details, water and much more.

Adaptive Streaming For Bandwidth and Offline Use

Discussions include how the sim adapts to cache sizes and user locations, how players can customize their simulation parameters Streaming is optimized to adapt to available internet bandwidth. The simulator also supports an offline mode in case no internet connectivity is available.

Weather , live, real-world weather, including fronts, storms, rain, and all-real-world clouds presented in the sim. using  20 vertical layers including pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, direction and gusts.

New Aerodynamics were among the topics covered , Microsoft Flight Simulator has an improved physics engine, surface element aerodynamics and new air mass simulations. As well  a new collision model that allows the support of slopped runways, skidding, braking and bumps.

New are over 1000 simulated surfaces  described as having "locally applied 3D forces and 3D moments" , this enables local stalling, buffeting and flutter. Improved aerodynamics make  it possible to have realistic stalls, deep stalls, spins in addition to other aerobatics: chandelle, flat spin and invert flat spin.

The air mass simulation affects each surface of the aircraft locally and differently, and any 3D shape of any size impacts the movements of air. Hills, mountains and buildings create thermics, updrafts and currents.

Realistic Cockpits & A new Checklist

Among the topics were aircraft of course , inside and out ,  new rendering techniques and the included aircrafts offering realistic analog and glass cockpits with high-fidelity instruments, fully interactive and simulated touchscreens with rendering engine that displays 2D or synthetic vision 3D data.

Cockpits are described as being designed using reference photos and videos, and 3D scans

A new sound engine based on Wwise creates  realistic sound scape.

 A new  interactive checklist system has the option of highlighting the instruments,  They offer the user options from fully manual to assisted, fully automatic or  skip entirely.

45 minutes of details await , listen to the full interview Podcast MP3  .