A single copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator would need 20,000 of them. Last week, we learned that The Last of Us Part 2 would ship on two Blu-ray discs. But those kinds of high-quality assets come at a cost. It looks incredible, especially at night with thousands of lights - each with a different and accurate color temperature - winking down below. Flying into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, passing the skyline and making the big, left-hand turn on final approach is a trip I’ve made dozens of times over the years. New York City looks nearly indistinguishable from the real place. That includes satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetry data, with some resolutions down to just three centimeters. Flight Simulator will draw from two of the service’s three available petabytes of geographical information. To achieve this, developers at Asobo Studio are tapping directly into Microsoft’s Bing Maps dataset. Just spin the globe on an X-COM-style world map, zoom into the airport that you’d like to start at, and you’re ready to go.Īssets will not only include all of our planet’s 197 million square miles of land and water, but more than 2 million cities and over 40,000 individual airports. When Microsoft Flight Simulator launches some time in 2020, it will give its users access to the entire planet. Image: Asobo Studio/Microsoft Powered by Bing It’s a remarkably ambitious project, and the team behind it still has a long way to travel. Its new approach to creating in-game assets, using data drawn from Bing Maps and Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, represents a unique technological challenge. The experience - flying a virtual plane and a real one back-to-back in the exact same airspace - proved to me the power and accuracy of the technology powering Microsoft Flight Simulator.īut Microsoft Flight Simulator is far from perfect. Not only did Microsoft let me loose inside the game to fly a single-engine plane anywhere in the world, I also flew a real Cessna 172 over Seattle. This was not your average demo day, however. The final product is due out some time in 2020 for both Windows PC and Xbox One.Įarlier this month I traveled to the Pacific Northwest for a hands-on demonstration of an early version of the game. But, Microsoft surprised everyone at this year’s E3 by announcing a brand-new version of the classic, simply titled Microsoft Flight Simulator. That’s the same year as Gears of War and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, both titles launched at the beginning of the last console generation. Microsoft Flight Simulator X was released over a decade ago, way back in 2006. And, for the last few years at least, I was pretty sure that franchise was dead. It’s Microsoft Flight Simulator, a game that has roots that go all the way back to 1979.

Believe it or not, Windows isn’t Microsoft’s longest-running franchise.

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