“He just looked at me and said, ‘Why are you showing me a video of Seattle with a plane?’” Neumann says. Neumann then showed it to Phil Spencer, a VP at the time who is now the head of Xbox. Using data of Microsoft’s home city of Seattle, which Bing Maps has rendered down to five-centimeter resolution with photogrammetry, Asobo took a few weeks to put together a demo of a Cessna flying downtown. In 2017, Neumann got in touch with Asobo and asked if they’d be up for giving the project a shot. “ just looked at me and said, ‘Why are you showing me a video of Seattle with a plane?’” I just thought to myself, ‘Man, if we could just do this across the entire planet, wouldn’t that be something?’” And even then, in early 2016 or something. “I mean, I’ve never been to Peru, but it was real to me. “I remember the first time I put on the headset, the sights and sounds were so real,” Neumann recalls. A demo called HoloTour, which let players fly around Rome and Machu Picchu, marked the first collaboration with Microsoft’s Bing Maps team. In more recent years, Neumann had been working on projects for HoloLens, Microsoft’s augmented reality headset. And people talked about it in the hallways, but it was always, ‘What are we going to add? What do we have to say? You know, can we actually make a meaningful step forward?’” “Why did we take so long to come back? Honestly, I’ve been at Microsoft for a good long time, and the desire to make another flight sim was truly always there. “After Flight Simulator X, frankly, I think we just got more and more focused on Xbox and essentially just divested the team at the time,” Microsoft’s head of Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, tells me. Why is Microsoft reviving Flight Simulator now? And while it carries the weight of an iconic series, it feels like it came from nowhere. This is a full-throttle effort from Microsoft to re-create the natural world and the magic of flight. I’ve been playing a pre-release alpha version for a couple of weeks, and it’s frankly astonishing. The new title, developed by French studio Asobo and simply called Microsoft Flight Simulator, is an ambitious attempt to leverage Microsoft’s Bing Maps data and Azure-powered procedural generation technology to render our planet in unprecedented detail.
#Microsoft flight simulator x 2017 upgrade#
In just a few weeks, though, Microsoft is releasing perhaps the biggest upgrade to the series in its 38-year history. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. It’s also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. It is one of Microsoft’s all-time iconic brands. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad’s lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft - Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers.
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