The developers of Microsoft Flight Simulator he has a lot to be proud of. Last month, at FlightSimExpo 2024 in Las Vegas, representatives gathered around its 15 million users and one billion recorded flight sessions—numbers Asobo Studio says put it at the top of the heap as the most played flight simulation ever published. Now the studio is back at it Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, due out this fall. Asobo calls it “the most ambitious simulator ever undertaken,” and given its track record, I’m inclined to believe them.
The long talk, delivered by Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jörg Neumann and Asobo Studio co-founder and CEO Sebastian Vloh, lasted more than an hour and a half. But those 90 minutes include plenty of tasty morsels for dedicated virtual pilots – improvements like app-based offline flight planning, increased ground traffic density at major airports, and the ability to actually step out of the cockpit to perform pre-flight checks in First Person.
But the twist that should turn the heads of PC and console gamers the most is the addition of a new partner, a company Microsoft recently acquired called Vexcel Imaging.
Vexcel is an innovative imaging company known for its UltraCam line of aerial surveillance cameras. These multispectral arrays include more traditional RGB color sensors along with near infrared sensors. Combined with their software, the result is a dramatic increase in the resolution of image data that is shared with Asobo’s design team – as seen by MSFS 2024the recent teaser trailer of shown at the Xbox Games Showcase.
Neumann used a bit of his time on stage at FlightSimExpo to let fans peek behind the curtain, so to speak, of what’s actually being shown in this trailer – specifically in its opening moments, when a single-engine plane flies over Monument Valley in Arizona.
“The natural environment is something people have never seen before,” Neumann said. “Not at this scale, certainly not at this level of detail.” Then he handed the reins to Vloch to go a little deeper. You can watch the entire segment around the 14 minute mark.
What is important to understand is that before this, Microsoft Flight Simulator has applied three-dimensional assets—things like houses and trees—automatically to two-dimensional data. But you can only take this kind of automation so far, which is why the first time I flew over the Great Pyramid of Giza, the pyramid complex was surrounded by a forest of strange brown deciduous trees instead of sand dunes. Using UltraCam data to perform photogrammetry—that is, 3D reconstruction of real-world features from nothing but image data—gives Asobo’s terrain rendering software a lot more to work with.
“Now we have the earth, which is completely 3D instead […] Textured 2D,” Vloh said. “There are many different 3D materials [including] grass, rocks and trees. Everything is 3D now […] and everything is generated procedurally on the world data.”
But Vexcel’s camera technology isn’t standing still. This summer, the Austrian company is also adding LIDAR to its arrays. This will likely add altitude and relative distance to the data being shared with Asobo in addition to the graphical data. And that, my friends, can allow for procedurally generated environments like no one has ever seen in a commercial flight simulator.
Expect more on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 ahead of its November 19 launch date, when it will also be available for purchase as part of Xbox Game Pass.
