HomeFeatures
Microsoft Flight Simulator and the quest to replace EarthHow high-fidelity does a flight sim need to be?
How high-fidelity does a flight sim need to be?
Image credit:Microsoft
Image credit:Microsoft
One question I have for Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann is whether he envisages an upper limit for the simulation’s fidelity. At what point will this phantasmagorical planet be Earth-like enough? It sounds like there’s not much further to be gained from bumping the resolution of the environment. “We increased the resolution of the ground terrain 4000 times, between 2020 and 2024,” Neumann tells me in an interview, just before the2024 edition’srelease. “And when we turned on the terrain wireframe, at first we actually thought we had the textures, because the wireframe is so dense, that it actually looks like a mesh with textures. Do we really need more resolution than a few millimetres? No, I think on that side, we’re fine.”
Image credit:Microsoft
“Right now, you either take satellite imagery which is really high and then you have a bunch of refraction in the atmosphere, or you fly a plane,” he continues. “For the plane you need to hire a pilot, there needs to be enough fuel, you know - it’s kind of limited from the logistics perspective, what you can get. So that’s why some places on Earth are much harder to get higher resolution data for, but with these drones that people fly around nowadays, maybe - we think that there’s going to be another step.”
As Scott McQuire explains ina 2019 paper, corporate digital mapping tools are unique in being both imposed from above and contested from below, a tug of war that unfolds in real-time as the software is used, and that largely works to the benefit of the corporation. Amongst other factors, he links the success of the market-leader Google Maps to a strategy of releasing the tools to third parties, from rival entrepreneurs to ordinary users, then making their various alterations part of the product. Google Maps today is both highly editable, with the ability to add reviews and personal photography, and a passive data-harvesting service that learns and profits from the motions of billions of users worldwide.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, you are always, in a way, tinkering with the map, much as you’re contributing data to Bing Maps every time you prompt it for directions. The game generates and streams terrain to you on demand, in ways familiar from other video games - for example, it displays more detail in the direction you’re facing, with generated terrain data then beamed to other players visiting the same region to conserve processing power.
The developers have been fielding feedback like this for years - as Neumann notes, one of the first things players do in Microsoft Flight Simulator is plot a course for their own neighbourhoods. He’s keen to make such exchanges evermore the heart of the game, hence the interest in drones.
“I actually had an initiative, early on in 2024’s development, that I called ‘Let’s build the world together’,” he says. “So for example our lead artist, he lives in a little village in France, and he took a drone and he captured his area in France. And theoretically, we could be able to merge that into our world.” There are immense practical difficulties to “stitching” drone photography into the world, not least the question of lighting in a simulation with a real-time day-night cycle. But Neumann is sure they can be overcome. “I think in the long term, we’re going to revisit this, because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
The emphasis on community goes hand-in-hand with an ethic of preservation. Neumann sees Microsoft Flight Simulator as a digital archive, beginning with its dozens upon dozens of new and old licensed aircraft. “I go to tons of museums, and a lot of the curators were literally saying, hey, can you help us preserve this for prosperity?” he says. “We’ve scanned their planes, and we put it in the sim, and it kind of sits there forever, basically.”
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios
The preservation angle extends to places and periods, fossilised within the amber of older versions of the game. “We have New York from 2015, we have New York from 2020, we have New York from 2024, and that timeline is really cool, you know?” Neumann goes on. He posits a system that would let people switch between eras in the game, so as to witness the geographical and architectural changes from sequel to sequel. “I think that’s neat because I always say, I have two daughters and despite my best efforts they have no interest in looking at an atlas, ever, and I think something like this can actually help revitalise the curiosity about our planet.”
“We need to think about it, but there is, certainly in my head, a plan to do some kind of planetary visualisation,” Neumann says. “For example, NASA has an entire array that looks just at pack ice. There’s another array that is public, actually, for wildfires. Can we get that? One of the things that we have in Flight Simulator is that we can basically take any real-time data source and put it into the sim, and make that a reality.”
Neumann’s enthusiasm for ever-increasing fidelity and naturalism is both innocent in itself, and in keeping with the rapacity of colonial pioneers venturing into “uncharted” territory. “I jokingly said at our an event a few weeks ago that I actually was really pushing to get butterflies in the game, because I want people to go outside the plane and actually collect some stuff,” he remarks. “I’m a collector, right? I collect all kinds of stuff, like rocks and things. Why not? Could be cool. I have my Indiana Jones hat on, you know. I always wanted to fly my double decker down to some river in the Amazon and have mosquitoes around me, and it needs to sound just right - we want to immerse players. We want it to feel as close to the real thing as we can get.”
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 - Official Xbox Game Pass TrailerWatch on YouTube
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 - Official Xbox Game Pass Trailer
With all that in mind, it’s reassuring to hear Neumann suggest that Microsoft Flight Simulator’s simulation might, in fact, be subject to deliberate limits. If there’s a feeling of social responsibility here, it’s as much to do with what not to show. For example, the real-time locations of endangered animals.
There are many creatures in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but they appear to be generic entities borrowed from the game’s ironically-named stablematePlanet Zoo, and loosely assigned to certain latitudes. The developers could have gone much further. “For 2024, we licensed this thing called Spire, and they have a transponder signal of every ship on Earth, every 30 seconds,” Neumann says. “So we now have every ship on Earth every 30 seconds. We could do that with environmental things as well.
“I was pushing hard to get a bunch of animals in, because the world needs to be alive - it makes people happy when they encounter animals in the world,” he explains. “There is actually data where you could show certain animal types with transponders, and I shied away from using it because I didn’t want to have any poachers get any data that’s useful.” There’s an “angle of responsibility” to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, he asserts. In practice, it’s not just about making it “feel as close to the real thing as we can get”.
