Microsoft Flight Sim players have the world at their fingertips; now they want a time machine, too

polygon.com:

When Microsoft Flight Simulator launched in 2020 it felt like the entire game development industry took notice. And how could you not? The software giant’s passion project launched with a satellite-mapped version of our entire Earth, a breathtaking day and night cycle, and real-time air traffic. The simulation is a seemingly effortless fusion of the real and the virtual that you can fly through by the seat of your pants, while playing on consoles and in VR. But players of a certain type always want more. Their latest ask? One time machine, please.

To understand how we got to the point where a community of thousands of amateur pilots is now requesting that one of the world’s largest software companies disrupt the linear flow of time, you have to understand how complicated MSFS is in the first place — and why its developers won’t say no yet.

First off, developer Asobo Studio hasn’t created the entire planet from scratch for players to fly over. Instead, it built MSFS to be a platform for raw data — high-resolution satellite imagery, topographical information, and real-world aircraft transponder signals — which it then digests to create the game world more or less on the fly. That’s how you get snowfall on top of images of green grass, sunsets sliding over mountain valleys, and realistic air traffic in-game. Among those data sources is a stream of real-world weather information, which the game receives in real time from its meteorological partner, Meteoblue. The MSFS platform then subdivides the globe into 100-square-mile cubes (sort of like a chunk of land in Minecraft) and sets the simulation loose to do what it can to simulate that weather.

When you look out your window and see a cloud in the sky, you’re not going to