Gulfstream

This is ... "interesting" ...

The problem when Microsoft/Asobo raises the bar to "the world", now many people are going to be pointing out the fact that there is some overlapping satellite imagery in a desert in Mongolia, or that a car drove through the grass on the side of the road on a rural road in Wyoming, or that there is a cloud overlaid on terrain just south of a remote village in Africa. At the end of the day, this is a FLIGHT simulator. These things are minor nitpicks that will easily be improved over time as the data and imagery in the cloud is constantly updated. The fact that we have numerous levels of volumetric clouds that cast accurate shadows on the ground and on each other, plus a modern graphics engine and flight dynamics, is more than enough for me to give this a spin ... pun not intended.

It's crazy that I've been called out before for saying things like "in-game", which to some in our community seems to imply disrespect towards flight simulation. I'm both a commercial pilot and software engineer and I honestly don't care if you call it "in-game", "in-simulator" ... whatever works for you and how you use the product. But this is looking very impressive.

Boeing/Airbus partnership and, finally, in-game shots of airliners!

The email. Where is it? Where is it Microsoft?! Ok, relax ... breathe. It will all be ok.

Microsoft PM me, I'm that commercial pilot guy / senior software engineer with the gaming rig. I'll tell you anything you want! 😋 edit: and I can prove all of that.

I really want in. Not only am I am I a CPMEL but I am also a senior software engineer. I'll take all the bugs, glitches, and anything else that's wrong and file proper bug reports with them. No problem being disappointed with some of it. From reading the review of people who saw the pre-alpha, I will be blown away I'm sure, bugs and all.

I really hope I get in. I've been on AVSIM for decades now, always reading about the latest addons for Flight Simulator and contributing to the forums. I'm a commercial pilot and have a beast of a system to run this thing. Please, Microsoft, email me that invite! 🤣

https://i.imgur.com/7dJOpRw.gifv Car going through the trees on the middle road. LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE. /s .. just waiting for the lift of the embargo and the alpha for these comments to be rampant. And the developers wondering why they added cars in the first place. "But how is the flying?" ... "IT'S GOOD BUT THAT TRUCK DISAPPEARED".

So this is confirmed, if it already wasn't. https://www.asobostudio.com/careers/mission-designer-flight-simulator-72

You'll notice another issue above the nose of the aircraft, where they have to overlay airport layout data on top of the satellite imagery. The underlying satellite imagery bleeds around the taxiways. In addition, the overlaid taxiway ends abruptly when it hits the satellite imagery on the ramp. This would likely be very jarring when taxiing at ground level. None of this bothers me, as this simulator is so far beyond what we already have that I'll take it, warts and all. But these are some of the little issues that are actually some of the most complicated to handle on a global scale. While we may not care about funky textures on the sides of some autogen building when flying over it at 5,000 feet, we will notice screwed up ground textures when taxiing around an airport.

I wonder how they are, globally, going to handle issues like I've circled above. Aircraft from the sat photos on the ground. Surely this must be a problem on the roads with cars ... they would have to overlay all the roads with the "driveable" roads that allow the 3D cars ... how can that be done for every road on the planet? And how can they prevent aircraft images showing up randomly on airport taxiways and aprons (as in the image above) for all 40,000 airports?

What happened to this poll? VR was very low compared to seasons and ATC and then out of nowhere it is now tied?

Ok, stay with P3D simply due to seasons (?) while the rest of us bask in what appears to be shaping up as a revolutionary flight simulator, miles beyond the old ones. That's sort of why I really don't get it.

I get it as a "nice to have" but the urgency that some people are seeming to give to it, that's what I don't get. I'm sure it will get in eventually ... but as it does not really affect anything other than how things look (as I mentioned above) ... it can wait. I would put VR and helicopters WAY above seasons, and those won't be there at launch.

I guess I don't get it. If they can let me descend through cloud layers, pick up icing (yes this happens in the summer all the time), fly through variable weather down to a slippery wet runway ... I simply do not care if there is snow on the ground or the trees are turning red. You don't need snow to get slippery and ice. So ... why is this any sort of a priority?

I doubt the 20 or so people on this thread will have a big enough impact for them to shift 200 developers over to making sure seasons are in place for launch.

I honestly do not care about this at all for launch. Zero. Zip. Nada. After what they have displayed here, I will be fine flying around in this world for a long time. Sunny days, dark nights with ILS down to minimums in volumetric clouds. I'm sure its something they could think about in future updates, especially something like changing the trees in certain places to be either fall colored or bare of leaves. Other than that, how important is this really after what we've seen?

On another forum it was being discussed that OpenStreetMap data is being used. If that is true, that's brilliant. That would give them accurate placement of buildings and height maps for a huge portion of the globe, that is continually updated to be accurate by contributors. Yes, Bing maps has this too but the more data they can combine, the more accurate the planet.

No, Microsoft competes with AWS and Google and they all have massive data centers, with thousands of servers that they own. Microsoft is not leasing servers from anyone.

That's not what's going on, per say, but as in many of the videos that came out today, a lot of the reviewers simply said "they said a lot of technical stuff" 🙂 It is tough for the Asobo developers to explain how this works to a flight simulator crowd who is not necessarily familiar with current 3D world generation techniques. Note: I am not a developer on this game. However, there are LODs, and the world is not pixels as you are thinking, it is triangles as you are familiar with. I say this as having experience with engines of this scale, but certainly not this impressive. When they said they stream "pixels", it's because the reports are asking them if they are basically streaming high quality orthos out to 600 KM which they are obviously not. But there isn't really a good way to explain to a non-tech reporter exactly what structures are going over the wire.

Asobo produced "A Plague Tale: Innocence" in 2019 which was a fantastic game with a great, custom 3D engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Plague_Tale:_Innocence

I am thanking both Asobo and Microsoft. Whoever at Microsoft originally had the thought of "we can do this again" lit the spark. Handing it to Asobo, clearly a group of insanely talented developers, was the fire. And they are stoking those flames by clearly paying attention to what the community is saying. They know the flaws of the past and seemed to plan from day-1 to include every possible thing we've always wanted. Things like already planning low-level integration for external cockpit hardware. They know how technical the flight simulation community can get. So you can use this on XBox One with a gamepad, or hook it up to your triple-monitor home cockpit setup with real switches. My mind is blown at the moment from today's news.

I feel like a lot of this stagnation across the sim market over WAY too long of a period was simply because they didn't have to. Once Microsoft left the market, there were essentially two simulators and neither one was necessarily a competitor to the other. So they stuck with 10-year old weather engines and lighting systems, because why not?

From the Polygon article ... this is a concern of mine (but might not often be relevant), the "sides" of things. Yes, they do buildings in cities because they are aerial photogs captured at angles from aircraft ... but the sides of cliffs, where planes haven't mapped and satellites can't see .... well ... Maybe this is where 3rd parties step in to clean up specific areas of interest. OR, it just automatically improves itself as the Azure data/algos improve.