GAME FLIGHT SIMULATOR SERIES
GAME FLIGHT SIMULATOR SIMULATOR

IвЂ™d never been to South America and it felt so real. вЂњWe were working on a HoloLens project called HoloTour вЂ“ the whole point was that you could use AR to visit different places on Earth and we made Machu Picchu. I think that helps you relate to people.вЂќДЄccording to Neumann, this fascination with virtual travel is how Asobo came to be involved with Flight Simulator.

I love that! I want to go there and see it. The trailer that Sebastian Wloch showed during our presentation, itвЂ™s based near where he grew up in the Pyrenees. I am able to visit the planet again now and that means a lot. This week IвЂ™ll pick some other place on Earth to explore. вЂњTo counteract it, last week I was playing in Suriname, the week before I was in Nepal. вЂњLockdown has had a big impact on us,вЂќ says project head Jorg Neumann. But now it seems developer Asobo Studio has sought to capture the spiritual, emotional element of flight as well.

GAME FLIGHT SIMULATOR SIMULATOR

In the past, Flight Simulator offered a super-technical, incredibly authentic flying experience to sim fanatics, and this edition does that, too вЂ“ the cockpits, instrumentation and flight mechanics of dozens of planes are faithfully reproduced. Being able to zoom above rolling landscapes once again was almost a relief. While watching the two-hour demo of the game given by its lead designers, I realised with a visceral lurch how much I missed visiting new places. This was impressive last year, but now, given the current pandemic, it feels genuinely wholesome. Fly over Seattle, for example, and youвЂ™ll recognise almost every building. However, another 400 key cities have been closely replicated by hand, using detailed photogrammetry. It knows the types of buildings that dominate a French city and how they differ from those in an Indian equivalent, but the artists go in and add specific landmarks that locals and tourists will recognise. Most cities are procedurally generated by the AI, based data from OpenStreetMap and an algorithm that provides architectural rulesets for the program to work from.

The statistics involved are mind-boggling: there are 37,000 airports in the game, 1.5bn buildings, 100m lakes, two trillion trees. Using two petabytes of geographic data culled from Bing Maps, together with cutting-edge, machine learning algorithms running on the companyвЂ™s Azure cloud computing network, the game presents a near-photorealistic depiction of the entire planet.

GAME FLIGHT SIMULATOR SERIES

When the latest instalment in MicrosoftвЂ™s decades-old Flight Simulator series was first shown at the E3 video game event last year, it drew gasps from the audience. In real life, I have not seen the ocean for five months and, although IвЂ™m just sitting in my kitchen watching a virtual presentation of a video game, I feel a surge of emotion. Then, on the horizon, the landscape gives way to rugged coastline, and, as the plane flies closer, we glimpse the rippling waves glinting in the evening sun.

A Cessna 172 Skyhawk flying low over a rural landscape dotted with fields and farmhouses, a copse of tall trees casting shadows over the swaying grass, a winding country lane.

Game flight simulator