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October 6, 2019 06:39 pm

Microsoft Will Model the Entire Planet For 'Breathtakingly Lifelike' New Flight Simulator

A senior editor at the Experimental Aircraft Association tells the long and storied history of Microsoft's Flight Simulator, remembering how he'd used version 1.0 of the product "when I was about 12 years old (nearly 40 years ago)" before working on it when he was a Microsoft employee for more than 10 years, until it was cancelled in 2009. But in 2020 Microsoft now plans to release a stunningly-realistic new version for the PC and Xbox. Long-time Slashdot reader ShoulderOfOrion shared their report:After the shutdown, variations of the product lived on here and there, including the enterprise edition, which Lockheed Martin now develops and publishes as Prepar3D, and a version that was licensed by Dovetail Games in the United Kingdom and sold on the Steam marketplace. Dovetail pursued further development with a product called Flight Sim World, and Microsoft itself briefly returned to the genre in 2012 with a limited product called Flight. But it was the community of hardcore simmers and add-on developers who truly kept the product alive for the past 10 years. The essay describes the new version as "stunning" and "breathtakingly lifelike," using 2 petabytes of data to virtually model the entire planet, "including something like 40,000 airports... The scenery is built on Bing satellite and aerial imagery, augmented with cool buzzwordy stuff like photogrammetric 3D modeling and multiple other data sources, all of which is streamed via Microsoft's Azure cloud service... Throw in 1.5 trillion trees, individual blades of grass modeled in 3D, and a complete overhaul of lighting and shadows, and the result is an unprecedented level of detail for a flight simulator of any kind." The simulator also features realistic modelling of the weather, including temperature, air pressure, humidity, dew point, wind direction and speed, and of course, clouds and precipitation. "You'll even see rainbows when conditions are just right... Weather is automatically downloaded from real-world sources, creating accurate conditions that change over time." (Though there's a drop-down menu that finally lets you do something about the weather.) And that's just the beginning... Microsoft is incorporating a legacy mode that it expects will provide near-complete backward compatibility, so those of us who have huge libraries of old favorites won't be starting entirely from scratch. In addition, Microsoft is committed to providing a software development kit (SDK) with the product at launch that will give developers the tools they need to build add-ons, though they caution that it is something that will be polished and expanded through post-launch updates. In other news for add-on aircraft builders, every parameter is now exposed in plain text, with no more binaries. This means it's going to be easier than ever to create high-quality add-on aircraft, or to tinker with the ones you already have. For those who like emulating glass cockpits, those displays are fully programmable based on straightforward coding instead of a library of animations, and support things like touch screens and synthetic vision. While the team is currently evaluating something like an in-sim store for supplemental content, there will be no requirements to use it, and no restrictions of any kind on downloading freeware or payware add-ons from other sources. The article includes some fond thoughts from the software's director of technology Jorg Neumann explaining the simulator's significance. "It is in the fiber of the company's being. It is older than Windows. "I think there is a pride that comes with it, and I think seeing it come back in a meaningful way, I think makes lots of people proud."

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