FLIGHT SIMULA ATORR 2020
A commerciall pilot delivers his verdict
PRICE Standard, £50 (£60 inc VAT) from the Microsoft Store or Steam
Humankind had been obsessed with taking to the skies for millennia – just think of Icarus – so it was no surprise that early programmers were quick to simulate flight. Preeminent among these was Bruce Artwick, whose work dates back to the mid-1970s. When Microsoft was looking for a product to show off the power of IBM-compatible computers, it commissioned Artwick to bring his simulator to the PC.
So, in 1982, Microsoft Flight
Simulator was born. Its launch met with critical acclaim as reviewers and consumers alike sensed a purpose for PCs beyond running VisiCalc, storing recipes or playing trivial games. However, after 27 years and 12 releases, internal issues at Microsoft led it to close down its developer, Aces Game Studio, and with it seemingly end the Flight Simulator program.
Not that it ever truly died. The 11 intervening years have seen continued support from third-party add-on developers and a 2014 rerelease of
Flight Simulator X on Steam. The underlying codebase also went on to become the core of Lockheed Martin’s
Prepar3D. Despite this, the flight simulation scene has been weaker for Microsoft’s absence. Other simulators have their strengths, but Microsoft’s baby could be all things to all people, whether you desired a simple game or a sophi sticated simulator.
Pro enough?
With games being outside PC Pro’s usual remit, why should we care? Firstly, there is significant debate about the degree to which this is a “game” at all, given the many serious use cases for it. Secondly, if we ignore the 11-year hiatus, Flight Simulator is Microsoft’s longest-running piece of software. It predated Windows and outlived MS-DOS, making it a key part of computing history.
However, a historical artefact it is not. With this release, developer Asobo has produced a generational leap in what’s possible on a home computer and the first genuine wow moment for cloud computing.
I’m not merely referring to the graphics, but of all this product’s living parts: the terrain, airports, cities, air traffic, weather and lighting.
The global terrain database, which courtesy of Bing Maps accurately represents the whole world, is two petabytes. Rumour has it that Jon Honeyball has a two-petabyte USB stick for updating his coffee machine firmware, but the rest of us will have to stream the data as needed from Microsoft’s Azure platform.
To transform 2D satellite data into a living 3D world, replete with buildings and trees, Microsoft recruited Blackshark.ai. Its machine-learning system reads the Bing data and automatically generates 3D buildings to populate the simulated world. Fly low and you can nitpick the results, but when viewed from up high, and bearing in mind the planetary scale, it’s a stunning achievement.
“What if I have poor bandwidth or no internet connection at all?” you might ask. Well, there’s an adaptive streaming system, where your results
“Asobo has produced a leap in what’s possible on a home computer and the first genuine wow moment for cloud computing”