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The scale of the ambition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty astounding. Made with 800 game developers over four years, the title has a seriously impressive set of numbers.
I got a big download of the ambition at a preview event at the Grand Canyon, where the game makers flew us over the canyon and compared it to the simulation. The flight sim of all flight sims comes out on November 19 on the PC, Xbox Series X/S and GamePass on day one.
One of the most interesting feats is that Microsoft shifted the game’s computing from your local PC to the cloud, said Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, in an interview. The massive amounts of data are computed in the internet-connected data centers and then streaming in real-time to the user’s machine, where the simulation is visualized onscreen.
In the 2020 version, Microsoft had a hybrid structure that streamed data from the cloud and also used the local compute resources on the user’s own machine. That resulted in downloads to your PC of up to half a terabyte, far more than the 23 gigabytes for this year’s game.
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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also bringing massive enhancements to the simulated Earth by increasing the detail of its virtual environment by a factor of 4,000. The team built a “digital twin” of the Earth, much like would-be metaverse companies want to do. But this world was built with realistic physics and a huge level of accuracy. It has systems for all things that can affect flight, from ground activity to extreme weather, fuel and cargo, and turbulence. The hot air balloons in the game are simulated across 6,400 surfaces giving a realistic reaction to heat density — when you turn on the heater, the air will heat up, and it’s going to inflate the massive balloon.
The Earth in the flight simulation is really as close to a digital twin of th …