Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will simulate '3 trillion trees' and is borrowing all its animals from Planet Zoo
We were all pretty amazed in 202 when Microsoft Flight Simulator let us fly around a photorealistic, 1:1 scale planet Earth with real-time weather. Today, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is being released, and this time around its developers want you to spend a lot more time with your feet on the ground. Once you land in MFS 2024, you can exit your plane, walk around, and even take pictures of wildlife. That means a whole new level of simulation, as Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann told PC Gamer last week.
«Our ambition was, hey, we need to look as good as a regular first-person shooter, at least,» Neumann said. To accomplish this, the team analyzed satellite data and «we marked up 28,000 tiles. We said, this is sand, this is pebbles, this is little rocks, this is asphalt, this is grass, this is tall grass. So we did that, 28,000 tiles, I think they're 100 by 100 meters. And then we fed that into the system.»
«We know where every bush is, and every tree.»
That's a staggering amount of data, which I imagine is necessary when you're not just simulating the airspace of the planet but all the stuff on the ground as well. «We know where every bush is, and every tree, we do know that,» Neumann said. «So we have 3 trillion trees. We now have very good confidence that we know where the rocks are, and those types of things.»
What does all that detail mean, besides the fact that you'll get a realistic world to walk around on and take pictures of? Increasing the resolution of the ground by a factor of 4,000, Neumann said, means the game can accurately simulate what it's like to land on those different surfaces like pavement, dirt, plowed fields, and even snow.
«The reality is, if you land on a field that is plowed, you'll crash your plane. Depends on the weight, but typically, if it's a light plane, you will probably nose-dive forward. So now we have every rock, literally every little rock, and your tires will hit them physically.»
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