How Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 uses machine learning AI, and how much of your data it might need

rockpapershotgun.com:

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on Steam and the Microsoft Store today. Developed once again by Asobo - otherwise celebrated for their stinking rat hordes - it builds upon the 2020 game by "[taking] advantage of the latest technologies in simulation, cloud, machine learning, graphics and gaming", in the words of the launch announcement release.

We've got a review in the works, but code has landed late, so our write-up might take a while. In the shorter term, I thought you might like to know how, exactly, MFS 2024 makes use of "machine learning" technologies, taking into account the energy cost of such wacky gadgetry and the creeping relationship between increased reliance on automated tools and laying people off. More immediately, you might like to know how much of your internet package it'll devour as you play.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 shares many of its moving parts with the 2020 game, which made use of tech from Blackshark.ai, Microsoft's Azure tools and Bing Maps to analyse satellite and aerial imagery and generate terrain maps and objects such as buildings. While a lot of this is delivered by the initial download, some of it is streamed to you on demand.

The major change with MFS 2024 is that it streams a lot more, while simultaneously trying to offer a lot more visual opulence. "We did surveys and asked people, how can we do this - what can we improve?" MFS head Jorg Neumann told me in an interview earlier this month. "And one of the areas that was very consistent was well, it would be nice if the ground would look a little bit better. Because in MFS 2020 we had the whole world and it looked good from a certain altitude, but once you landed, it didn't look super-detailed."

MFS 2024 tries to address this by way of a new online machine learning platform that generates terrain detail on demand, based on rules given by the developers. "So we looked at the textures, basically, and the way it works is we had a team that marked up 28,000