Post Script
Plane talking with Jorg Neumann and Sebastian Wloch
Fresh from our latest flight, we check in with Flight Simulator boss Jorg Neumann and Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch, who talk to us about the highflying sim’s ambitions for global expansion, tapping into the world’s tech and keeping things real.
The last instalment of Microsoft Flight Simulator was in 2006. Why has it taken so long to make another? Jorg Neumann: The attribute the franchise always had was that it was always at the top of what was possible on a modern computer. It really comes down to the combination of elements to really take a step forward, to really bring significant innovation. The advent of the cloud really meant we could fundamentally change things – all of a sudden you could have massive amounts of data stored, like satellite data and aerial data. That was sort of the impetus that basically said, okay, you know what? It’s critically important that the world looks right. Now we can do it.
What’s also important to understand is that the world’s changed. The cloud enables all kinds of things, but the thing that also dawned on us is that there’s so many sensors in the world, it’s crazy – not just the phone you carry around, the car you drive, there are so many satellites nowadays. For example, we looked for how we could get a totally realistic weather model of the world, and there wasn’t such a thing. Then we stumbled upon Swiss company Meteoblue that had spent years developing a prediction model for the planet: they basically broke up the planet into a fewkilometre boxes, and we benefit from all that. We have 250 million boxes around the planet, all the way up to the stratosphere. We couldn’t do that, but these people exist, and it’s because all the sensors exist, so I think it’s really just a technical evolution of where we are as a species that makes this possible.
What other advancements have been critical to the latest game, particularly for the legion of Flight Sim fans who’ve been playing for years?
Sebastian Wloch: There were a lot of requests for an improved flight model. It was great on Simulator X and it was very optimised for platforms at that time, and it had evolved over many years, but it needed a generational leap. Another thing people wanted was better skies and a better world, better graphics. And there’s been basically been a framework that it’s the entire world or nothing.
Flight Simulator also has a lot of non-sim players excited. How important was it to keep the game focused on simulation?
SW: What we try to do is find a way to make the simulation as realistic as possible, to push the realism a little further, but find a way to make it approachable for anyone. This has always been in the DNA of Flight Simulator. As we say on the box, anyone can be a pilot. We all took flying lessons and we looked at how people teach flying. I was thinking, this is going to take me forever to understand and – surprise – not at all. The first hour felt very much like a game, it was so easy, because the instructor took care of everything except the yoke. And it was like, this is just like flying around in a spaceship in an arcade game! They found a way to make it very approachable and so that anybody can learn and understand it. So we were like, let’s not dumb down the model. If you teach people on a different reality, once they master that and then you bring them to the real reality, they’ve learned something wrong. You need to train people on the exact real flight model and the exact realistic world – but you take a load off for beginners; they don’t have to do the radio or the checklist, for example.
The first thing everybody wants to do is fly over their house. We tried to buzz the Edge office but Bath isn’t one of the photogrammetried cities. Are there plans to bring more fully rendered cities to the game?
JN: Yeah – that’s what Bing does. I’m actually doing research on that right now. Some municipalities and countries are scanning their own environment: for example, they have a fully functional model of Helsinki where you can play with its power distribution and heat dissipation. It’s such a useful tool, and maybe we could basically take that Helsinki model and put it into our product. You never run out of planet, it constantly updates. Literally every week we get new data. We’re soon going to release the first world update which is a particular region of Earth, we built some handcrafted airports in that region and more landing challenges and Bush Trips. We think we can inspire people to go really explore the planet, maybe for the first time, because it’s an amazing place. And on the sim side there’s no shortage of feature ideas and requests from the community and we’ll roll it out every so often, and those updates are going to be free.
“You never run out of planet, it constantly updates. Literally every week we get new data”
In these times of limited travel, it’s quite fortuitous timing for a game that allows people to be virtual tourists – the game could really help people experience the wider world right now.
JN: My parents live in Germany and I live in America, and I can’t go and visit them, and that sucks. So I actually flew to my parents’ house in Flight Simulator and called them up! So I think it’s not fortuitous timing, but if we if we have a tool to make life a little bit better, that would be wonderful.