Flight Simulator 2024's huge ambition means 'you can now exit the plane, walk around… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment'
Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorge Neumann talks about the tech behind MSFS 2020, and some astonishing-sounding features coming in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Scope creep: this time we're sure it won't be a disaster at all.
Really neat if they could pull it off and have it not ruin anything else in the game, though I think I'd want any social stuff to be optionally enabled rather than always on.
According to the article they're expanding on their cloud-based streaming tech, aiming to reduce the local base install from >100 GB to ~50 GB.
So what's actually downloaded is probably just the airplanes and a very low detail version of the planet, streaming data in over the internet as you fly (or now also walk I guess).
Imagine if Flight Simulator 2024 ended up being the sleeper killer social app of the decade. How surreal would that be? Like, if you showed me that screenshot without context, I'd think I was looking at a new hitman or second life: third life or something.
Edit
"The way I think of this now, it really just comes down to, how good is the data we get, and how much are we throwing at it. I mean, for example, I'm currently on the, I call it the living world. We added hundreds of species of animals that run around. I worked on things like Zoo Tycoon…we have tons more animals than the native zoo game, and it's just a tiny little feature in Flight Simulator, but it feels like, oh yeah, we can do that.
"Right now, we have every ship on Earth, right? Every ship on Earth sends us a transponder signal… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment. I think we're in a new era of making games that I think are going to break new ground, from a scale and complexity perspective."
Dude, what are you actually trying to make right now? Like, this isn't flight sim stuff anymore.
I better be able to set the airplane in autopilot and then go out and watch an inflight movie. Unfortunately, walking around inside the plane doesn't seem possible.
Then again, if I couldn't walk around the plane while it's flying upside down or while part of its hull has been ripped off the plane, I would be disappointed. Preferably with NPC coworkers and attendants screaming at you.