I do wonder who the game appeals to though, since it's sold on PC and Xbox. I played it as a child on my PC and the experience was quite immersive, even if the graphics were bad.
I recently played the new one on the console, and it just felt... off. I didn't feel immersed, though the plane handling seemed realistic. I think my brain was primed console-wise for something similar to a GTAV flying experience, and I can definitely say that I had far more fun zipping between contoured hills in GTA than I did on MFS2024. Maybe had I played it on PC, my reaction would be different.
For what it’s worth, I really really enjoy flying over places I did/will travel to. Last year, I had a backpacking trip of Yosemite valley planned I was very nervous about. I flew the route a few times (in an F-22) and it calmed me down, knowing when I’ll be climbing, when I’ll have the best views, etc. Probably not a standard use, just my $0.02
This is actually the use that a number of private pilots I know personally - they fly an unfamiliar route in the simulator.
Yes it’s not a professional flying simulator but it’s good enough to get an idea of where you’re going, what you’re doin, what you’ll see and it helps tremendously especially when you’re flying VFR if you don’t have GPS.
Ha. I thought I was the only person that did this. I have a very spatial memory and before a vacation I love to fly around the area at low speed and build up my model of the terrain.
It would be so cool to use Microsoft's "earth copy" for stuff other than just flight sim. They say it's the most accurate representation of the earth ever. Wonder if you can do some interesting science with that.
MSFS 2020's Earth is unbelievably good from the air, but it (understandably) does not look great and is sometimes not entirely physically coherent up close at the surface (outside of airports and a limited set of bespoke areas).
There's also some crazy errors that are visible from the air, like many rivers being raised up hundreds of feet[0], and many bridges being solid underneath[1].
I always assumed one of primary things in a sequel would be to train an even bigger and better satellite maps -> 3D scenery model, especially one that understood a wider (and better-localized) variety of building configurations, so we'll see.
"earth copy" is just marketing lingo. Models are approximations made for a specific goal at a time. You cannot build a model that is both good for gaming and meteorology.
99% of that engine value is procedural terrain and graphical shaders. It looks great but has no scientifical value.
Just like the "digital twin" hype train, cool simulations have fancy graphics, useful simulations don't.
I would argue that humanity has been advancing rather steadily towards "true AGI" since at least the Jacquard loom. Otherwise, if you wait to admit progress until you actually have evidence for having achieved AGI, it'll just look like the Heaviside step function.
How can you claim that we've been advancing steadily when we don't even know how far the destination is, or if we're moving in the correct direction? There's no basis to claim that it will look anything like a step function; if we do achieve true AGI someday the first one might be equivalent to a really stupid person and then subsequent iterations will gradually improve from there. It seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
Show me a computer that can reason in a generalized way at least as well as a chimpanzee (or whatever). And no, LLMs don't count. They are not generalized in any meaningful way.
Please do clarify why LLMs aren't generalized - other than not being embodied, they seem quite general to me. Is there any particular reasoning task that you have in mind that chimpanzees are good at, but LLMs are incapable of?
We used to be in this space, and with Ayvri/Doarama - which was a 3D virtual world but not a flight simulator, it was used by paragliders to replay flights, commercial drone operators, some defense, transportation planning (trains, maybe others as well), etc etc.
We approached Microsoft when we were selling the company, and the response we got was "you're too close to work we're doing for us to even look at you or talk to you". I assumed that meant they are building out a digital twin, with capabilities to run in a browser at high speed with high resolution (which we did). That was 3 years ago. I'm surprised we haven't seen something from them yet.
It is Microsoft after all. They are quick to put out press releases and imply or even promise functionality, but you can spend your entire life waiting for them to actually deliver.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dangerous jumps).
I made a basic version of this to help me pass the UK driving test, which is fairly difficult: 40 minutes of virtually error-free driving is required and the pass rate is 50%.
It's 2.5D, I used a 3D engine but the graphics are just satellite imagery projected on to a terrain map.
Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
>> would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
The cities (at least for ETS) are a miniature version with only a couple of streets and some landmarks (in larger cities). It doesn't really come close to reality.
The lighting, clouds, weather are great and make it look beautiful. Nature looks great in the game. But in terms of urban areas, particularly buildings and roads it is much much worse than Google Maps/Earth. You also see the seams in the construct in places like coastlines.
Something I would have loved to see, especially in this era of AI, is improvements to the ATC system. But it seems we're stuck with the one from FS2020, which in turn is largely the same it was 20 years ago.
Not everyone can or wants to go to VATSIM for realistic ATC coverage, but the default one is just dreadful. Obvious phraseology mistakes, happily vectoring you towards terrain, asking you to descend 20k ft. in 2 minutes, and the only way to communicate with it is via a list of pre-determined options.
There are some third party companies working on LLM based ATC. It's a hard problem but that's mostly because there are a lot of rules and regional differences. Which is something that LLMs are actually good at making sense of. The new multi modal OSS models are only going to make this easier.
MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.
Yes, I was thinking of stuff like BeyondATC or SayIntentions. As another comment pointed out, MS of all companies seems particularly well positioned to pull this out if they wanted to and it could be a very strong selling point for hardcore simmers, or even as a learning tool for more casual players.
This is the first I'm even hearing of MSFS 2024, I figured 2020 would just be a continuous WIP for a long time to come. I used it for practice but haven't dusted the equipment off in awhile, but this sounds like some nice improvements. 2020 was already pretty astounding in its quality and the leap from the existing flight sims.
2020 is astonishing in VR. I get the same melancholy I do on a real plane and can fly for hours sightseeing out the window. There is also a real sense of peril.
Sim games are perfect for avoiding motion sickness. You'll typically get those when your avatar walks around. This is why in first person games, you'll teleport places instead of walking in VR
MS Flight Sim makes me sick, as does any driving game or any game where locomotion involves the view moving without associated real-world movement unless teleportation is used.
I can play Beat Saber, PokerStars VR, Zombie Training Simulator, Gorn, etc., for literally hours at a time and feel fine.
But in a racing game, as soon as the car starts moving, even at only 5 mph, I get nauseous. Same in MS Flight Sim. I don't have to be doing crazy maneuvers to feel sick, just taxiing makes me sick.
This is pretty much the norm for most people. If virtual world movement matches real world movement, you're fine. But as soon as there's a mismatch, that's where motion sickness begins.
One of these days, I'll try taking motion sickness medication beforehand and see if it helps.
Maybe it's something like the French saying Le Mal du Pays
"Le Mal du Pays is usually translated as 'homesickness,' or 'melancholy. ' If you put a finer point on it, it's more like 'a groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape"
My biggest issue with Flight Simulator 2020 doesn’t seem to be addressed.
It contains tutorials on how to control the planes, but no storyline, no built in missions. If you are motivated by a narrative, this is not a game for you. It only does the simulation, but doesn’t really help people get into the game through a kind of narrative.
I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls. I might have that, if there was a reason for me to learn those things, as a motivating story that would drag me in. I think it’s an enormous missed opportunity in terms of making the game appeal to a wider audience.
I still hope it will be there in 2024 edition, but this interview didn’t give me much hope.
I think that is the whole sell of 2024? It is still a self guided story but, career mode you have to start as a student, earn your hours and licenses in order to take on bigger and more interesting jobs etc. Eventually you buy your own planes, which enables you to take on bigger jobs and so on.
So in theory from what I have seen, your story is that of a career pilot, with intro cutscenes and voice acting etc. This has all been shown already.
If you find it most fun to haul cargo, your story is that you will go get the licences, grind the smaller jobs. For more casual fun experience you might choose to specialise in agriculture jobs which are going to be more engaging/shorter.
The truth is though, it is a simulator, and flying takes fooreeever. You can't make casual flying and flight sim meet in the middle without throwing away 90% of the flying experience, which is level flight at altitude on your way to a destination.
This is why although I am an aviation fan, and a train fan, I don't play either sims. I have not got 2-8hrs to hurry up and wait.
This is already confirmed as at least somewhat implemented. There are missions for things like search and rescue, farming, and oil rigs. There's also a new avatar mode to enable doing virtual walk arounds and the like.
It's obviously a personal taste thing, but a lot of people 'want' as much detail as possible; the satisfaction for them being that if they sat down in those cockpits, they'd have a good chance of being able to fly.. for a few minutes before crashing horrible anyway :)
That was my motivation and narrative for playing it anyway, and judging by some of the paid realism mods, I don't think I was the only one
mfs 2020 seems to do what it says on the label - be a simulator.
the entire point of a simulator is to give you the sandbox to do whatever you want while having as near of a realistic experience as possible.
if they try to add these things to the mix, i assume it is to make it more accessible to game pass audience, who might not shell out the full price just to try it out.
for many who love to play this genre, especially content creators, instead of expecting the game to give a storyline, they make their own! like for me it would be trying the 787 in the air routes where the landing strips do not support large planes for a hypothetical scenario, for example.
it not quite the same, but your own creativity is what give games like minecraft so much longevity. on the other hand, once you finish a "career mode" (as proposed for mfs 2024), you may not be motivated to restart.
Is Microsoft Flight Simulator meant to be that kind of game?
> I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls.
Then there are different games where this is not expected. I have always thought MFS is meant to be as close as possible to true flight, to such an extent it can be used to practice actual routes.
I've recently built a gaming pc after decades of not having one, one of the reasons was MSFS. I'm not a huge gamer of FS expert but just having the possibility to use some of the amazing tools that the community built on top of it are worth it, for understandable reasons these are not available on the console version.
One example of such a tool would be Little Navmap which makes it possible to plan routes and use your iPad as a "GPS" device. There's some screenshots in my blog post about it, in case anyone is curious: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-my-ipad-for-microsof...
Tangential but I keep wishing for an MS Space Simulator revival - I realise there are other games that scratch that itch these days but I did enjoy how very seriously it took accurate simulation (plus occasional silly touches like the various futuristic spacecraft).
I've played MSFS, X-Plane and DCS, and to be honest there is only one sim made with love and a near perfect flight model and systems, and that is FalconBMS combined with the dynamic campaigns hands down the only flight sim I really enjoy ATM.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to give it a try!
To be fair to MSFS they're not that well suited to the military side of flying. GA and airliners are great now though so I always thought of DCS and MSFS filling different niches and having a completely different focus.
“The team built a “digital twin” of the Earth, much like would-be metaverse companies want to do.” Was this actually a goal of “would-be metaverse companies”?
My impression is that they were much more focused on highly abstracted spaces designed to facilitate work and social interactions.
Yes, I pictured the metaverse as more of a Minecraft type of thing. I don't think it's a good comparison, unless MSFS wants to become a MMO experience... "Runway permission wait simulator 2024!"
This might be thinly-veiled shade tossed at "Earth 2", ostensibly a metaverse company that sells real estate in a non-existent game for fake money (i mean cryptocurrency).
I read the article more as trying to save face over this outlet or reporter previously being credulous about the metaverse, but perhaps I misread it. I'm not familiar with this reporter or outlet, so I could very well be wrong.
Still prefer that over dependence on the cloud which is problematic on metered internet, slow connections or the day they decide to shut down their servers.
MSFS 2020 only streams terrain data from the cloud. It sounds like MSFS 2024 will stream the entire rendered video feed, similar to other cloud gaming services.
"When users load into the sim, only the textures, meshes, and map data that they need will be downloaded to avoid unnecessary bandwidth and disk space usage. "
One thing I've always wished Microsoft would do with every version of Flight Simulator but especially this one is have an "Arcade flying" mode.
I want to see the hyper-realistic rendered world in as high resolution as possible.
I want to fly around the planet.
But I don't want to be limited to the detailed specifics (and speeds!) of real life planes.
Why can't we have a mode to make a plane as easy to fly as it is in GTA5. Or "superman" mode where I don't even have a plane, and I can just move around at (almost) any speed [i'm sure rendering would become a problem]
Did you try Google Earth VR? You can get the "superman" experience there (and even scale yourself up/down).
In most ways it does not look as good as MSFS (no dynamic weather, animations etc), but you get a lot more of accurately modeled cities with 3D buildings.
A version with visual candy like dynamic weather simulation would be excellent...
Google Earth desktop basically gives you that with even better Earth model. Last I checked you could enable a super simple airplane mode that even worked with joysticks. It always felt like future to me :)
They are adding a walk around mode which is external to aircraft. Also while flying, you can adjust the simulation rate dramatically to decrease time to destination’s (supported in 2020 as well).
This is actually one of the strengths in X-Plane; there's a scenery gateway where users can submit custom airports or tweak existing ones. They started that many years ago and at this point there are many thousands of user contributed airports with carefully modeled 3D scenery. With every patch release they bundle what's on the scenery gateway and things get better.
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).
I’m very curious about this. How do you manipulate flight controls with the headset on? Do you go by feel or is there a matching representation in the virtual world?
Personally, I don't have a HOTAS, I just an XBox controller and of course the VR controller.
The cockpit is interactable with the VR controllers. You can reach forward and push buttons and turn knobs. It's a bit awkward, but it's doable.
I'll typically hold the XBox controller in my left hand to control the flight stick and have a VR controller on my right hand to interact with everything else in the cockpit. It does get awkward though when I need to use the rudder or brakes, though, since in a real airplane, those are controlled by pedals. I have to try to press buttons on my XBox controller on my right hand while still holding the VR controller.
Ohhh! Ok that’s cool. I can see having a yoke and pedals then using VR control for the rest. How fiddly are the VR controls? Can you reasonably set a radio frequency or control the autopilot?
It's been a long time and I only did it a little bit.
Buttons are easy enough to work with, same with levers. Dials were hard though because the normal human behavior is to pinch a dial, but in VR, you can only really grab, and knowing where exactly the game will deal with your grab on a small dial is tricky, especially if it's an autopilot dial with nested dials.
It'd probably work better if I had a VR system that had hand detection rather than needing controllers.
Speaking from my experience (a lot of DCS, 10s of hours in VTOL VR, couple hours in MSFS2020, all in VR), if you have HOTAS controllers, it feels natural to use them, without seeing them.
Actually, my biggest grip with VTOL VR is the fact that the developer is hellbent on using vr controllers instead of joystick and throttle, which even with the best tracking (valve index) is miles away from precision of a good hotas
Cool! My interest in flight sims is more GA than military so I don’t think HOTAS is as appropriate there but I can definitely see that military flight sims are the killer VR app.
Could something like Apple Vision Pro work in an AR capacity so I can still see my physical controls?
Maybe I'm being simplistic of overly optimistic - but I would think that there would be a massive opportunity for collaboration with fluid dynamics to simulate and 'fast-forward' the weather to see likely impacts.
It might not be correct the first time, but as we map the changes from prediction against the reality, we could adjust for factors that we hadn't considered.
It seems to me that we shouldn't be too far from accurate weather prediction and perhaps with huge amount of data capture having a digital twin of the planet in which we have enough confidence in to model potential climate impacts of policies, products could allow us to have robust discussions around where we're headed and what paths we could take to adapt or overcome the impacts we're already facing.
That simply doesn’t work, for the same reason we can’t even model three massive bodies interacting with each other via gravity, which is a much much simpler problem.
You mean building a model of the atmosphere? That's what numerical weather models do and they've existed for decades. There are physical ones like ECMWF and newer ML-based ones like ECMWF-AIFS which uses neural networks.
predicting weather beyond a very short amount of time is a myth or a delusion. its a chaotic system just like any fluid that goes out of the newtonian zone.
Predicting it well enough for real world uses is a myth/delusion, yes, but predicting it well enough for entertainment purposes in a flight simulator is an entirely different, and much more mistake-tolerant, proposition.
I have been using Microsoft Flight Simulator from the earliest versions (maybe 2.0 or something) through all the versions afterwards.
I got to a juncture in my life where I was wondering what I should do. I thought "well, I love flight simulators, let's take a introductory flight".
Drove to my local airport, flew it. I was already familiar with all the controls thanks to the MSFS.
That flight had me convinced. Got my PPL, went to college and got my commercial and all the other ratings, and that was all due to one thing ...
Microsoft Flight Simulator
This new version is far beyond anything I would have imagined it would get to. I thought once it died, it was gone.
Oh no, they brought it back ... and they were serious.
I do wonder who the game appeals to though, since it's sold on PC and Xbox. I played it as a child on my PC and the experience was quite immersive, even if the graphics were bad.
I recently played the new one on the console, and it just felt... off. I didn't feel immersed, though the plane handling seemed realistic. I think my brain was primed console-wise for something similar to a GTAV flying experience, and I can definitely say that I had far more fun zipping between contoured hills in GTA than I did on MFS2024. Maybe had I played it on PC, my reaction would be different.
For what it’s worth, I really really enjoy flying over places I did/will travel to. Last year, I had a backpacking trip of Yosemite valley planned I was very nervous about. I flew the route a few times (in an F-22) and it calmed me down, knowing when I’ll be climbing, when I’ll have the best views, etc. Probably not a standard use, just my $0.02
This is actually the use that a number of private pilots I know personally - they fly an unfamiliar route in the simulator.
Yes it’s not a professional flying simulator but it’s good enough to get an idea of where you’re going, what you’re doin, what you’ll see and it helps tremendously especially when you’re flying VFR if you don’t have GPS.
Ha. I thought I was the only person that did this. I have a very spatial memory and before a vacation I love to fly around the area at low speed and build up my model of the terrain.
What is a GTAV flying experience?
Static chassis with no flex that explodes realistically on rough landings and does a pretty good job hugging the surface without much input.
It would be so cool to use Microsoft's "earth copy" for stuff other than just flight sim. They say it's the most accurate representation of the earth ever. Wonder if you can do some interesting science with that.
MSFS 2020's Earth is unbelievably good from the air, but it (understandably) does not look great and is sometimes not entirely physically coherent up close at the surface (outside of airports and a limited set of bespoke areas).
There's also some crazy errors that are visible from the air, like many rivers being raised up hundreds of feet[0], and many bridges being solid underneath[1].
I always assumed one of primary things in a sequel would be to train an even bigger and better satellite maps -> 3D scenery model, especially one that understood a wider (and better-localized) variety of building configurations, so we'll see.
[0] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/river-altitude-raised-w...
[1] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/fix-photogrammetry-brid...
"earth copy" is just marketing lingo. Models are approximations made for a specific goal at a time. You cannot build a model that is both good for gaming and meteorology.
99% of that engine value is procedural terrain and graphical shaders. It looks great but has no scientifical value.
Just like the "digital twin" hype train, cool simulations have fancy graphics, useful simulations don't.
>You cannot build a model that is both good for gaming and meteorology.
This was the prevailing wisdom in AI before generalized transformers as well. We're rapidly moving toward black box hyperintelligent AGI.
I was comparing expert systems here, not emergent ones
There has been zero motion towards true AGI so far, hyperintelligent or otherwise.
I would argue that humanity has been advancing rather steadily towards "true AGI" since at least the Jacquard loom. Otherwise, if you wait to admit progress until you actually have evidence for having achieved AGI, it'll just look like the Heaviside step function.
How can you claim that we've been advancing steadily when we don't even know how far the destination is, or if we're moving in the correct direction? There's no basis to claim that it will look anything like a step function; if we do achieve true AGI someday the first one might be equivalent to a really stupid person and then subsequent iterations will gradually improve from there. It seems like a lot of assumptions are being made.
You're really not clear if we're moving in the correct direction? What then would be for you an indication that we are?
Show me a computer that can reason in a generalized way at least as well as a chimpanzee (or whatever). And no, LLMs don't count. They are not generalized in any meaningful way.
Please do clarify why LLMs aren't generalized - other than not being embodied, they seem quite general to me. Is there any particular reasoning task that you have in mind that chimpanzees are good at, but LLMs are incapable of?
So true! I think a lot of people, even here on HN, get confused by the marketing term, "AI".
Authentic Ignorance, I guess…
That used to exist as a product called Microsoft ESP. It got sold off to Lockheed Martin when the Flight Simulator project was shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Loc...
We used to be in this space, and with Ayvri/Doarama - which was a 3D virtual world but not a flight simulator, it was used by paragliders to replay flights, commercial drone operators, some defense, transportation planning (trains, maybe others as well), etc etc.
We approached Microsoft when we were selling the company, and the response we got was "you're too close to work we're doing for us to even look at you or talk to you". I assumed that meant they are building out a digital twin, with capabilities to run in a browser at high speed with high resolution (which we did). That was 3 years ago. I'm surprised we haven't seen something from them yet.
It is Microsoft after all. They are quick to put out press releases and imply or even promise functionality, but you can spend your entire life waiting for them to actually deliver.
I would love a real world driving sim. I don’t really care for driving on race tracks, but real roads.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dangerous jumps).
I made a basic version of this to help me pass the UK driving test, which is fairly difficult: 40 minutes of virtually error-free driving is required and the pass rate is 50%.
It's 2.5D, I used a 3D engine but the graphics are just satellite imagery projected on to a terrain map.
Midtown Madness 1 & 2 are most similar to what you are looking for.
it's one of those things I'd do as a millionaire.
Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
You’d get flewced pretty quickly in any modding community.
Lol, if I were a millionaire I'd probably buy half a house somewhere kind of nice.
They could live stream the local radio for the soundtrack.
>> would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers.
And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
American Truck Simulator has 300 cities and it takes 3 hours to drive across the map in real time. It's probably the biggest world in a driving game.
The cities (at least for ETS) are a miniature version with only a couple of streets and some landmarks (in larger cities). It doesn't really come close to reality.
American Truck simulator comes close. But something like that bootstrapped of open street maps could be awesome.
BeamNG comes remarkably close in experience, although not in real world. I would love to have MSFS world as a driving game like BeamNG.
Check out Euro Truck Simulator then, I hear it's very good.
The lighting, clouds, weather are great and make it look beautiful. Nature looks great in the game. But in terms of urban areas, particularly buildings and roads it is much much worse than Google Maps/Earth. You also see the seams in the construct in places like coastlines.
That's the goal of Nvidia's "Earth 2" plans, which the article mentions very briefly.
It's Neil Stephenson's snowcrash come to life :-)
Mostly military simulations and training, probably
Imagine GTA on that map. Wondering how many years away are we from this.
Something I would have loved to see, especially in this era of AI, is improvements to the ATC system. But it seems we're stuck with the one from FS2020, which in turn is largely the same it was 20 years ago.
Not everyone can or wants to go to VATSIM for realistic ATC coverage, but the default one is just dreadful. Obvious phraseology mistakes, happily vectoring you towards terrain, asking you to descend 20k ft. in 2 minutes, and the only way to communicate with it is via a list of pre-determined options.
There are some third party companies working on LLM based ATC. It's a hard problem but that's mostly because there are a lot of rules and regional differences. Which is something that LLMs are actually good at making sense of. The new multi modal OSS models are only going to make this easier.
MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.
What are some good examples of such companies?
https://www.beyondatc.net/ comes to mind
Like this? https://youtu.be/inDm0mjp_t8?t=323
Yes, I was thinking of stuff like BeyondATC or SayIntentions. As another comment pointed out, MS of all companies seems particularly well positioned to pull this out if they wanted to and it could be a very strong selling point for hardcore simmers, or even as a learning tool for more casual players.
The answer is... ATC Simulator!
This is the first I'm even hearing of MSFS 2024, I figured 2020 would just be a continuous WIP for a long time to come. I used it for practice but haven't dusted the equipment off in awhile, but this sounds like some nice improvements. 2020 was already pretty astounding in its quality and the leap from the existing flight sims.
2020 is astonishing in VR. I get the same melancholy I do on a real plane and can fly for hours sightseeing out the window. There is also a real sense of peril.
It's quite the experience. I can't wait for 2024.
What sort of headset do you use? What's your graphics card and CPU setup?
I've used a rift S with my 1070 TI and it struggles a bit!
Unfortunately, a 1070 TI will struggle a bit even without VR. It is 7 years old at this point.
Do you get any motion sickness?
Sim games are perfect for avoiding motion sickness. You'll typically get those when your avatar walks around. This is why in first person games, you'll teleport places instead of walking in VR
I've got close to 400 hours clocked in VR.
MS Flight Sim makes me sick, as does any driving game or any game where locomotion involves the view moving without associated real-world movement unless teleportation is used.
I can play Beat Saber, PokerStars VR, Zombie Training Simulator, Gorn, etc., for literally hours at a time and feel fine.
But in a racing game, as soon as the car starts moving, even at only 5 mph, I get nauseous. Same in MS Flight Sim. I don't have to be doing crazy maneuvers to feel sick, just taxiing makes me sick.
This is pretty much the norm for most people. If virtual world movement matches real world movement, you're fine. But as soon as there's a mismatch, that's where motion sickness begins.
One of these days, I'll try taking motion sickness medication beforehand and see if it helps.
Why do you feel melancholy?
Maybe it's something like the French saying Le Mal du Pays
"Le Mal du Pays is usually translated as 'homesickness,' or 'melancholy. ' If you put a finer point on it, it's more like 'a groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape"
I get the same, it's more like a contented melancholy.
Not sad, just locked into the moment, with a certain understated freedom of mind.
You're not smiling or frowing, just existing, taking it in.
My biggest issue with Flight Simulator 2020 doesn’t seem to be addressed.
It contains tutorials on how to control the planes, but no storyline, no built in missions. If you are motivated by a narrative, this is not a game for you. It only does the simulation, but doesn’t really help people get into the game through a kind of narrative.
I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls. I might have that, if there was a reason for me to learn those things, as a motivating story that would drag me in. I think it’s an enormous missed opportunity in terms of making the game appeal to a wider audience.
I still hope it will be there in 2024 edition, but this interview didn’t give me much hope.
I think that is the whole sell of 2024? It is still a self guided story but, career mode you have to start as a student, earn your hours and licenses in order to take on bigger and more interesting jobs etc. Eventually you buy your own planes, which enables you to take on bigger jobs and so on.
So in theory from what I have seen, your story is that of a career pilot, with intro cutscenes and voice acting etc. This has all been shown already.
If you find it most fun to haul cargo, your story is that you will go get the licences, grind the smaller jobs. For more casual fun experience you might choose to specialise in agriculture jobs which are going to be more engaging/shorter.
The truth is though, it is a simulator, and flying takes fooreeever. You can't make casual flying and flight sim meet in the middle without throwing away 90% of the flying experience, which is level flight at altitude on your way to a destination.
This is why although I am an aviation fan, and a train fan, I don't play either sims. I have not got 2-8hrs to hurry up and wait.
jup, eurotruck simulator, but in the air, would be amazing
This is already confirmed as at least somewhat implemented. There are missions for things like search and rescue, farming, and oil rigs. There's also a new avatar mode to enable doing virtual walk arounds and the like.
https://msfsaddons.com/2024/09/19/heres-how-the-career-mode-...
It's obviously a personal taste thing, but a lot of people 'want' as much detail as possible; the satisfaction for them being that if they sat down in those cockpits, they'd have a good chance of being able to fly.. for a few minutes before crashing horrible anyway :)
That was my motivation and narrative for playing it anyway, and judging by some of the paid realism mods, I don't think I was the only one
mfs 2020 seems to do what it says on the label - be a simulator.
the entire point of a simulator is to give you the sandbox to do whatever you want while having as near of a realistic experience as possible.
if they try to add these things to the mix, i assume it is to make it more accessible to game pass audience, who might not shell out the full price just to try it out.
for many who love to play this genre, especially content creators, instead of expecting the game to give a storyline, they make their own! like for me it would be trying the 787 in the air routes where the landing strips do not support large planes for a hypothetical scenario, for example.
it not quite the same, but your own creativity is what give games like minecraft so much longevity. on the other hand, once you finish a "career mode" (as proposed for mfs 2024), you may not be motivated to restart.
Is Microsoft Flight Simulator meant to be that kind of game?
> I have no desire to learn all the details of an aircrafts controls.
Then there are different games where this is not expected. I have always thought MFS is meant to be as close as possible to true flight, to such an extent it can be used to practice actual routes.
The biggest part of MSFS 2024 is the 'career system' - ie proc. gen missions, I'm surprised you missed it.
I've recently built a gaming pc after decades of not having one, one of the reasons was MSFS. I'm not a huge gamer of FS expert but just having the possibility to use some of the amazing tools that the community built on top of it are worth it, for understandable reasons these are not available on the console version.
One example of such a tool would be Little Navmap which makes it possible to plan routes and use your iPad as a "GPS" device. There's some screenshots in my blog post about it, in case anyone is curious: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-my-ipad-for-microsof...
Tangential but I keep wishing for an MS Space Simulator revival - I realise there are other games that scratch that itch these days but I did enjoy how very seriously it took accurate simulation (plus occasional silly touches like the various futuristic spacecraft).
X-Plane has some pretty solid space and reentry physics last I checked. They had a shuttle landing mission which was super cool (and hard)
2024? I haven't even finished the printed concorde manual from FS2000.
I've played MSFS, X-Plane and DCS, and to be honest there is only one sim made with love and a near perfect flight model and systems, and that is FalconBMS combined with the dynamic campaigns hands down the only flight sim I really enjoy ATM.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to give it a try!
To be fair to MSFS they're not that well suited to the military side of flying. GA and airliners are great now though so I always thought of DCS and MSFS filling different niches and having a completely different focus.
Absolutely MSFS and X-Plane serve a different side then DCS and FalconBMS, have Fun ;)
BTW: If you don't want to read 1000 hour manuals:
https://www.falcon-lounge.com/
https://learning.falcon-lounge.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1...
Ah lovely, thank you for the links :)
“The team built a “digital twin” of the Earth, much like would-be metaverse companies want to do.” Was this actually a goal of “would-be metaverse companies”?
My impression is that they were much more focused on highly abstracted spaces designed to facilitate work and social interactions.
Yes, I pictured the metaverse as more of a Minecraft type of thing. I don't think it's a good comparison, unless MSFS wants to become a MMO experience... "Runway permission wait simulator 2024!"
This might be thinly-veiled shade tossed at "Earth 2", ostensibly a metaverse company that sells real estate in a non-existent game for fake money (i mean cryptocurrency).
I read the article more as trying to save face over this outlet or reporter previously being credulous about the metaverse, but perhaps I misread it. I'm not familiar with this reporter or outlet, so I could very well be wrong.
Looks awesome, shame it streams from the Cloud instead of running locally.
MSFS 2020 takes up hundreds of gigabytes and takes many hours to install, so this is likely to be an improvement.
Still prefer that over dependence on the cloud which is problematic on metered internet, slow connections or the day they decide to shut down their servers.
You could run 2020 locally, as long as you accept far reduced detail in the terrain. Assuming its also the case here?
MSFS 2020 also streams from cloud
Differently, though.
MSFS 2020 only streams terrain data from the cloud. It sounds like MSFS 2024 will stream the entire rendered video feed, similar to other cloud gaming services.
No video streaming.
"When users load into the sim, only the textures, meshes, and map data that they need will be downloaded to avoid unnecessary bandwidth and disk space usage. "
Presumably this means one day it will just stop working when Microsoft decide to shut down the cloud backend.
Can't you disable that?
How would you be able to run a game of this scale locally?
With a lot of storage. But also, they have streams of realtime-ish data for other planes, weather, ships, etc that feed into the simulated world.
Looks like they also have added career mode in 2024. https://msfsaddons.com/2024/09/19/heres-how-the-career-mode-...
When MS Flight Simulator 2020 came out, I wrote a blog post about how these kinds of virtual worlds will be used to train our robot helpers. I'm looking forward to playing this new one. https://medium.com/@jmugan/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-i...
Yep, this idea was actually explored by researchers using GTA to train self driving cars back in 2018.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/grand-theft-auto-v-used-by-res...
One thing I've always wished Microsoft would do with every version of Flight Simulator but especially this one is have an "Arcade flying" mode.
I want to see the hyper-realistic rendered world in as high resolution as possible.
I want to fly around the planet.
But I don't want to be limited to the detailed specifics (and speeds!) of real life planes.
Why can't we have a mode to make a plane as easy to fly as it is in GTA5. Or "superman" mode where I don't even have a plane, and I can just move around at (almost) any speed [i'm sure rendering would become a problem]
Rendering _and streaming_ is already a problem at jet speeds.
Given that you can jump to any point in the planet, I don't think it's a high priority for them.
They kinda did that with 2012's 'MS Flight', it was massively panned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight
Did you try Google Earth VR? You can get the "superman" experience there (and even scale yourself up/down).
In most ways it does not look as good as MSFS (no dynamic weather, animations etc), but you get a lot more of accurately modeled cities with 3D buildings.
A version with visual candy like dynamic weather simulation would be excellent...
I have! It was great.
The Drone mode in MS Flight Simulator 2020 is pretty much that - https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-to-using-the-drone-...
Google Earth desktop basically gives you that with even better Earth model. Last I checked you could enable a super simple airplane mode that even worked with joysticks. It always felt like future to me :)
They are adding a walk around mode which is external to aircraft. Also while flying, you can adjust the simulation rate dramatically to decrease time to destination’s (supported in 2020 as well).
Just 160 airports? I remember mfs98 having thousands of airports.
There are over 35,000 in the game, they're mostly procedurally generated with some light editing to fix any major issues. 160 are handcrafted.
This is actually one of the strengths in X-Plane; there's a scenery gateway where users can submit custom airports or tweak existing ones. They started that many years ago and at this point there are many thousands of user contributed airports with carefully modeled 3D scenery. With every patch release they bundle what's on the scenery gateway and things get better.
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).
With the cloud based rendering, I wonder if they will change this to a subscription.
I hope not, as a greatly prefer the one time cost model with games.
God I hope not ... Instant turn off
Related: An excellent and thorough video showing all the details from the devs and up to date information about FS2024 including gameplay footage.
https://youtu.be/CVNFLzp8TL8?si=AW2as-W73S79tDN5
I've wanted to give MSFS a go for a few years now. Unfortunately, good luck if you use OSX devices only ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Xbox game streaming?
Thanks. Yes, I learned about that today.
Yep, works great. I've played on my iPad + Xbox Game Pad before.
How TF Flight Simulator is not on VR is the biggest mystery to me. It is the most obvious killer app to showcase both the game and VR headset.
It is on VR, has been for years, and yes, it’s pretty much a killer app (imho, the only killer app.)
VR FS2020 is so good that it made me get a pilot's license.
I’m very curious about this. How do you manipulate flight controls with the headset on? Do you go by feel or is there a matching representation in the virtual world?
Personally, I don't have a HOTAS, I just an XBox controller and of course the VR controller.
The cockpit is interactable with the VR controllers. You can reach forward and push buttons and turn knobs. It's a bit awkward, but it's doable.
I'll typically hold the XBox controller in my left hand to control the flight stick and have a VR controller on my right hand to interact with everything else in the cockpit. It does get awkward though when I need to use the rudder or brakes, though, since in a real airplane, those are controlled by pedals. I have to try to press buttons on my XBox controller on my right hand while still holding the VR controller.
Ohhh! Ok that’s cool. I can see having a yoke and pedals then using VR control for the rest. How fiddly are the VR controls? Can you reasonably set a radio frequency or control the autopilot?
It's been a long time and I only did it a little bit.
Buttons are easy enough to work with, same with levers. Dials were hard though because the normal human behavior is to pinch a dial, but in VR, you can only really grab, and knowing where exactly the game will deal with your grab on a small dial is tricky, especially if it's an autopilot dial with nested dials.
It'd probably work better if I had a VR system that had hand detection rather than needing controllers.
Speaking from my experience (a lot of DCS, 10s of hours in VTOL VR, couple hours in MSFS2020, all in VR), if you have HOTAS controllers, it feels natural to use them, without seeing them. Actually, my biggest grip with VTOL VR is the fact that the developer is hellbent on using vr controllers instead of joystick and throttle, which even with the best tracking (valve index) is miles away from precision of a good hotas
Cool! My interest in flight sims is more GA than military so I don’t think HOTAS is as appropriate there but I can definitely see that military flight sims are the killer VR app.
Could something like Apple Vision Pro work in an AR capacity so I can still see my physical controls?
Maybe I'm being simplistic of overly optimistic - but I would think that there would be a massive opportunity for collaboration with fluid dynamics to simulate and 'fast-forward' the weather to see likely impacts.
It might not be correct the first time, but as we map the changes from prediction against the reality, we could adjust for factors that we hadn't considered.
It seems to me that we shouldn't be too far from accurate weather prediction and perhaps with huge amount of data capture having a digital twin of the planet in which we have enough confidence in to model potential climate impacts of policies, products could allow us to have robust discussions around where we're headed and what paths we could take to adapt or overcome the impacts we're already facing.
That simply doesn’t work, for the same reason we can’t even model three massive bodies interacting with each other via gravity, which is a much much simpler problem.
You mean building a model of the atmosphere? That's what numerical weather models do and they've existed for decades. There are physical ones like ECMWF and newer ML-based ones like ECMWF-AIFS which uses neural networks.
This is quite a comment.
predicting weather beyond a very short amount of time is a myth or a delusion. its a chaotic system just like any fluid that goes out of the newtonian zone.
Predicting it well enough for real world uses is a myth/delusion, yes, but predicting it well enough for entertainment purposes in a flight simulator is an entirely different, and much more mistake-tolerant, proposition.