Ha! That was going to be my first question (and it's not mentioned in the main article). Your link is broken though. From the looks up it, it will support VR but doesn't currently, so if you're...
Ha! That was going to be my first question (and it's not mentioned in the main article).
Your link is broken though.
From the looks up it, it will support VR but doesn't currently, so if you're looking for a beautiful virtaul-reality flight experience you might want to hold off until the supported headsets and required specs are published.
Guess my i5 3470 and 50GB of free space isn't going to cut it then. Have they announced if it's coming to the One X or just the Series X? Hope the former as it looks like my only hope of playing.
Guess my i5 3470 and 50GB of free space isn't going to cut it then.
Have they announced if it's coming to the One X or just the Series X? Hope the former as it looks like my only hope of playing.
If it comes to a desktop version of Xcloud that would be amazing. Sadly, while I have the disk space, my graphics card just doesn’t hold up, lagging to hell and back on the lowest of the lowest...
If it comes to a desktop version of Xcloud that would be amazing. Sadly, while I have the disk space, my graphics card just doesn’t hold up, lagging to hell and back on the lowest of the lowest settings. Such a shame.
It's crazy that just to download the base game would be 10% of my total internet bandwidth for the month. I've seen some people mention that the full install can take up nearly 250 GB with caching...
It's crazy that just to download the base game would be 10% of my total internet bandwidth for the month.
I've seen some people mention that the full install can take up nearly 250 GB with caching of terrain data.
Some reviews say just running the game installer counts towards total hours played. It might cause problems in getting refunds, if the game runs poorly.
Some reviews say just running the game installer counts towards total hours played. It might cause problems in getting refunds, if the game runs poorly.
Valve made a statement today saying that they won't count that time when considering refunds, and that they're going to try to work with Microsoft to improve the experience:...
I'm not really sure how they'll be able to disregard that download time specifically, but maybe they'll just make the window considerably larger for the game or something.
When I first heard about the game it sounded amazing, but then I heard how big the install was and decided that it's not for me. I'll gladly watch some people play on twitch though.
When I first heard about the game it sounded amazing, but then I heard how big the install was and decided that it's not for me. I'll gladly watch some people play on twitch though.
The map data is is really interesting. Reminds me in a lot of ways of the Unreal 5 demo video that came out a few months ago, showcasing how it can be used for film quality video production. A...
The map data is is really interesting. Reminds me in a lot of ways of the Unreal 5 demo video that came out a few months ago, showcasing how it can be used for film quality video production.
A 2.5PB world map is insane, but if Microsoft has really nailed down the ability to stream portions of a map of that size it really is a game changer.
Speaking as a casual the game is pretty fun. I played with some friends watching on Discord and trying to navigate my region based on roads and landmarks. It's a little weird that there doesn't...
Speaking as a casual the game is pretty fun. I played with some friends watching on Discord and trying to navigate my region based on roads and landmarks. It's a little weird that there doesn't seem to be any damage effects to the planes. I tried landing on my street and just kind of bounced off a bunch of buildings hilariously.
Not sure I'd pay AU$100+ for it but with game pass it's well worth a go!
No airplane manufacturer wants easy screenshots of their planes crashing and burning. It's likely it was a requirement for having their planes included.
No airplane manufacturer wants easy screenshots of their planes crashing and burning. It's likely it was a requirement for having their planes included.
Yup. Old MSFS2004 had basic crashing: Something of your aircraft that is not designed to land (wheels, skids) hits the ground? Simulation pauses. Can't unpause. Endof. That's all a flight sim...
Yup. Old MSFS2004 had basic crashing: Something of your aircraft that is not designed to land (wheels, skids) hits the ground? Simulation pauses. Can't unpause. Endof.
It turns out that one of the accessibility settings I had turned on disabled all aircraft damage. Now I've enabled damage it's better. I don't necessarily want an explosion but it's hard to judge...
It turns out that one of the accessibility settings I had turned on disabled all aircraft damage. Now I've enabled damage it's better. I don't necessarily want an explosion but it's hard to judge if I stuck a landing or not if I can nose dive into the runway with seemingly no consequence
I’m not sure of the exact reasoning either, but it’s been a thing since the 80s when MS Flight Sim got its start. I almost wonder if it’s more a tradition at this point. Just something they never...
I’m not sure of the exact reasoning either, but it’s been a thing since the 80s when MS Flight Sim got its start.
I almost wonder if it’s more a tradition at this point. Just something they never included and didn’t see a reason to add.
I was thinking of figuring out how to dual boot Windows, but it looks like I would have to buy new hardware to run this. The hardware specs seem crazy high, considering that Google Earth runs in a...
I was thinking of figuring out how to dual boot Windows, but it looks like I would have to buy new hardware to run this. The hardware specs seem crazy high, considering that Google Earth runs in a web browser these days.
Normally I would ignore this kind of hype and that’s looking like the best policy. The opening-day version will be the worst version.
It's not really in the same league as Google Earth, though. This "game" is actually, genuinely beautiful. It's very far away from Google Earth in visual fidelity. Naturally it'll take a real...
It's not really in the same league as Google Earth, though. This "game" is actually, genuinely beautiful. It's very far away from Google Earth in visual fidelity. Naturally it'll take a real graphics card. And the literal petabytes of data that you stream parts of naturally require a strong CPU to, if nothing else, do the decompressing.
I expect Google has a similar amount of map data, worldwide. But I guess we would have to look at actual numbers for the amount of data being streamed.
I expect Google has a similar amount of map data, worldwide. But I guess we would have to look at actual numbers for the amount of data being streamed.
That’s how Google Earth started out, but Google has been automatically generating 3D images of buildings in some areas. It did start out pretty lumpy, especially the trees. I haven’t checked back...
That’s how Google Earth started out, but Google has been automatically generating 3D images of buildings in some areas. It did start out pretty lumpy, especially the trees. I haven’t checked back in a while.
I’d like to see someone do some side-by-side comparisons.
There's quite a few of those. Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgZStv0lehs It's pretty clear Google Earth's is mostly generated, maybe with some primitive 3D models with the satelite...
I’d like to see someone do some side-by-side comparisons.
It's pretty clear Google Earth's is mostly generated, maybe with some primitive 3D models with the satelite image massaged over as a texture, while Flight Simulator's is like, made.
It really isn't close in terms of visual fidelity.
Yes, thanks! I see the difference, but I would take either of those. I spent some time today looking around Google Earth on my new iPad mini. It still has a crumpled SimCity-after-the-earthquake...
Yes, thanks!
I see the difference, but I would take either of those. I spent some time today looking around Google Earth on my new iPad mini. It still has a crumpled SimCity-after-the-earthquake look to it, but looking at various places I’ve visited, it’s not bad. The frame rate is fine. It takes time to load sometimes, but it wouldn’t flying around at Cessna speeds. The worst parts are bridges that they didn’t model manually, under trees, and under roof overhangs, where there’s no source data.
Apparently the Flight Simulator folks put a lot of manual effort into 40 airports, but they’re not going to do the whole world that way, and it’s in out-of-the-way places where we will see how well their automated cleanup does.
Then again I like how Minecraft looks and my first experience with Microsoft Flight Simulator was on an Apple II, where you really had to use your imagination.
It seems like Microsoft could do a cut-down version that runs on regular computers if they wanted to, and it would still be pretty nice.
The specified minimum requirements are a GTX 770 Graphics card, which you can get on eBay for $60 and came out in 2013, and an Intel i5-4460 which came out in 2014 (Edit: I got the columns...
It seems like Microsoft could do a cut-down version that runs on regular computers if they wanted to, and it would still be pretty nice.
The specified minimum requirements are a GTX 770 Graphics card, which you can get on eBay for $60 and came out in 2013, and an Intel i5-84004460 which came out in 20172014 (Edit: I got the columns confused). This seems pretty cut-down to me. I don't know how well it will run on those specs, but I bet the graphics can be turned wayyyyy down for an experience just as you describe. Their aerodynamics model is supposed to be incredibly sophisticated though, so it makes sense they need a pretty recent processor (Edit: 2014 isn't recent in terms of computer hardware, 2017 was on the edge). Google Maps doesn't try to simulate a plane flying through the atmosphere.
The desktop version of Google Earth does have a flight simulator, though it’s more of an Easter egg. Apparently there is a free flight simulator called GeoFS that used to be a Google Earth plugin...
The desktop version of Google Earth does have a flight simulator, though it’s more of an Easter egg. Apparently there is a free flight simulator called GeoFS that used to be a Google Earth plugin until access was removed, and now runs in a browser. Here are screenshots.
Google Earth definitely has 3D maps as well. They take aerial photos at different angles to build depth. Models are approximated for buildings, and in large cities are often done by hand.
Google Earth definitely has 3D maps as well. They take aerial photos at different angles to build depth. Models are approximated for buildings, and in large cities are often done by hand.
Well, yeah, that's what I said. There a basic heightmap so you can see buildings and things. That's not even close to the level detail that's in Flight Simulator. Which makes sense, because Google...
Well, yeah, that's what I said. There a basic heightmap so you can see buildings and things. That's not even close to the level detail that's in Flight Simulator. Which makes sense, because Google doesn't want to require a GTX 2070 for Google Earth.
Comparing this to Google Earth is like comparing Doom Eternal to Quake II. Google Earth doesn't have any kind of weather system, dynamic lighting, material shaders, or anywhere near the same...
Comparing this to Google Earth is like comparing Doom Eternal to Quake II.
Google Earth doesn't have any kind of weather system, dynamic lighting, material shaders, or anywhere near the same complexity in it's 3D meshes. And it's textured entirely with low res satellite and aerial photographs. They shouldn't be in even remotely the same ball park when it comes to system requirements.
I think it’s largely a matter of engineering to turn many of those things off, or reduce detail. After all, many previous flight simulators run on machines with lower specs.
I think it’s largely a matter of engineering to turn many of those things off, or reduce detail. After all, many previous flight simulators run on machines with lower specs.
That can be a tremendous amount of work for very little gain though. How many people in Flight Simulator's target audience don't have something as fast or better than a mid-range GPU from 7 years...
That can be a tremendous amount of work for very little gain though. How many people in Flight Simulator's target audience don't have something as fast or better than a mid-range GPU from 7 years ago?
For example, one "feature" that has become popular is physically based rendering, which uses complex material shaders to use information from a game's lighting system to accurately re-create the fine detail in a surface based on the way light in the real world would interact with that material (or combination of materials). You can't just "turn this off", as the texture work was never meant to be viewed without it and the resulting image would be aesthetically unpleasing to quite a degree.
The work you would need to put in to make it so users can turn this off would be to create alternate detail texture work for every surface in the game, plus alternate shader effects to layer on top of them. Now you're spending a lot of time and money creating a feature that makes your game an even bigger download, just so another 1-2% of players can buy your game.
So turn off the textures. I don't care that much about fine detail. A cartoony look would be fine by me. I play a lot of Minecraft. It seems like everyone with Intel graphics, which includes many...
So turn off the textures. I don't care that much about fine detail. A cartoony look would be fine by me. I play a lot of Minecraft.
It seems like everyone with Intel graphics, which includes many laptops, might want to run it? Could any Macbook Pro run this using Bootcamp?
At that point why not just play one of the older Flight Simulator titles? Flight Simulator X probably runs and looks better than the new one would with textures literally turned off. If there was...
At that point why not just play one of the older Flight Simulator titles? Flight Simulator X probably runs and looks better than the new one would with textures literally turned off.
If there was substantial money to be made selling new AAA games that run on low power integrated GPUs, I'm sure more companies would be doing it. Integrated GPUs really aren't built to run games. The expectation is that people who want to play new games on their computer will spend a few extra dollars to get hardware built for it.
I don’t know if Microsoft will make money on Flight Simulator or whether they care. But there are some gaming companies will port a hit game to a wide variety of platforms including mobile, to...
I don’t know if Microsoft will make money on Flight Simulator or whether they care.
But there are some gaming companies will port a hit game to a wide variety of platforms including mobile, to reach as many people as possible. Minecraft and Civilization 6 are a couple of examples. So the high-end, platform-exclusive strategy doesn’t seem to be the only one.
I think I'm gonna end up buying this game tomorrow, I've heard new things and just built a new PC. Most likely just going to stick with the base version though. The pictures look amazing.
I think I'm gonna end up buying this game tomorrow, I've heard new things and just built a new PC. Most likely just going to stick with the base version though.
It will be available through Xbox Game Pass for PC if you want a much cheaper option for trying it. There's usually a deal available for $1 for the first month.
It will be available through Xbox Game Pass for PC if you want a much cheaper option for trying it. There's usually a deal available for $1 for the first month.
Most, if not all, games under gamepass get a 20% discount while your gamepass is active. So maybe get gamepass for a month, try out the game, then buy it permanently if you like it. The 20%...
Most, if not all, games under gamepass get a 20% discount while your gamepass is active. So maybe get gamepass for a month, try out the game, then buy it permanently if you like it. The 20% discount will probably pay for the month of gamepass!
My experience so far is staring at the "Press any key" screen with no ability to move further. I was planning to have it installed ready to try out after work, but the first try was thwarted by a...
My experience so far is staring at the "Press any key" screen with no ability to move further. I was planning to have it installed ready to try out after work, but the first try was thwarted by a very strange storage issue, and after formatting the machine's secondary drive I've managed to get the 1GB base installed, but nothing more seems to be happening.
No progress bar, no indication anything's installing, no network traffic to indicate that the fabled 152GB is being pulled down in preparation. Fingers crossed for an imminent patch, I guess!
Looks like it will support VR
Ha! That was going to be my first question (and it's not mentioned in the main article).
Your link is broken though.
From the looks up it, it will support VR but doesn't currently, so if you're looking for a beautiful virtaul-reality flight experience you might want to hold off until the supported headsets and required specs are published.
Fixed the link.
The preinstall from Xbox Game Pass is 152.4 GB
Guess my i5 3470 and 50GB of free space isn't going to cut it then.
Have they announced if it's coming to the One X or just the Series X? Hope the former as it looks like my only hope of playing.
If it comes to a desktop version of Xcloud that would be amazing. Sadly, while I have the disk space, my graphics card just doesn’t hold up, lagging to hell and back on the lowest of the lowest settings. Such a shame.
It's crazy that just to download the base game would be 10% of my total internet bandwidth for the month.
I've seen some people mention that the full install can take up nearly 250 GB with caching of terrain data.
Some reviews say just running the game installer counts towards total hours played. It might cause problems in getting refunds, if the game runs poorly.
Valve made a statement today saying that they won't count that time when considering refunds, and that they're going to try to work with Microsoft to improve the experience: https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-says-the-time-it-takes-to-download-microsoft-flight-simulator-wont-affect-refund-requests/
I'm not really sure how they'll be able to disregard that download time specifically, but maybe they'll just make the window considerably larger for the game or something.
When I first heard about the game it sounded amazing, but then I heard how big the install was and decided that it's not for me. I'll gladly watch some people play on twitch though.
The map data is is really interesting. Reminds me in a lot of ways of the Unreal 5 demo video that came out a few months ago, showcasing how it can be used for film quality video production.
A 2.5PB world map is insane, but if Microsoft has really nailed down the ability to stream portions of a map of that size it really is a game changer.
Speaking as a casual the game is pretty fun. I played with some friends watching on Discord and trying to navigate my region based on roads and landmarks. It's a little weird that there doesn't seem to be any damage effects to the planes. I tried landing on my street and just kind of bounced off a bunch of buildings hilariously.
Not sure I'd pay AU$100+ for it but with game pass it's well worth a go!
No airplane manufacturer wants easy screenshots of their planes crashing and burning. It's likely it was a requirement for having their planes included.
Yup. Old MSFS2004 had basic crashing: Something of your aircraft that is not designed to land (wheels, skids) hits the ground? Simulation pauses. Can't unpause. Endof.
That's all a flight sim needs, for the most part.
It turns out that one of the accessibility settings I had turned on disabled all aircraft damage. Now I've enabled damage it's better. I don't necessarily want an explosion but it's hard to judge if I stuck a landing or not if I can nose dive into the runway with seemingly no consequence
I’m not sure of the exact reasoning either, but it’s been a thing since the 80s when MS Flight Sim got its start.
I almost wonder if it’s more a tradition at this point. Just something they never included and didn’t see a reason to add.
I was thinking of figuring out how to dual boot Windows, but it looks like I would have to buy new hardware to run this. The hardware specs seem crazy high, considering that Google Earth runs in a web browser these days.
Normally I would ignore this kind of hype and that’s looking like the best policy. The opening-day version will be the worst version.
It's not really in the same league as Google Earth, though. This "game" is actually, genuinely beautiful. It's very far away from Google Earth in visual fidelity. Naturally it'll take a real graphics card. And the literal petabytes of data that you stream parts of naturally require a strong CPU to, if nothing else, do the decompressing.
I expect Google has a similar amount of map data, worldwide. But I guess we would have to look at actual numbers for the amount of data being streamed.
Google has photos and basic height maps, but these beautifully detailed completely 3D maps.
That’s how Google Earth started out, but Google has been automatically generating 3D images of buildings in some areas. It did start out pretty lumpy, especially the trees. I haven’t checked back in a while.
I’d like to see someone do some side-by-side comparisons.
There's quite a few of those. Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgZStv0lehs
It's pretty clear Google Earth's is mostly generated, maybe with some primitive 3D models with the satelite image massaged over as a texture, while Flight Simulator's is like, made.
It really isn't close in terms of visual fidelity.
Yes, thanks!
I see the difference, but I would take either of those. I spent some time today looking around Google Earth on my new iPad mini. It still has a crumpled SimCity-after-the-earthquake look to it, but looking at various places I’ve visited, it’s not bad. The frame rate is fine. It takes time to load sometimes, but it wouldn’t flying around at Cessna speeds. The worst parts are bridges that they didn’t model manually, under trees, and under roof overhangs, where there’s no source data.
Apparently the Flight Simulator folks put a lot of manual effort into 40 airports, but they’re not going to do the whole world that way, and it’s in out-of-the-way places where we will see how well their automated cleanup does.
Then again I like how Minecraft looks and my first experience with Microsoft Flight Simulator was on an Apple II, where you really had to use your imagination.
It seems like Microsoft could do a cut-down version that runs on regular computers if they wanted to, and it would still be pretty nice.
The specified minimum requirements are a GTX 770 Graphics card, which you can get on eBay for $60 and came out in 2013, and an Intel i5-
84004460 which came out in20172014 (Edit: I got the columns confused). This seems pretty cut-down to me. I don't know how well it will run on those specs, but I bet the graphics can be turned wayyyyy down for an experience just as you describe. Their aerodynamics model is supposed to be incredibly sophisticated though,so it makes sense they need a pretty recent processor(Edit: 2014 isn't recent in terms of computer hardware, 2017 was on the edge). Google Maps doesn't try to simulate a plane flying through the atmosphere.The desktop version of Google Earth does have a flight simulator, though it’s more of an Easter egg. Apparently there is a free flight simulator called GeoFS that used to be a Google Earth plugin until access was removed, and now runs in a browser. Here are screenshots.
Google Earth definitely has 3D maps as well. They take aerial photos at different angles to build depth. Models are approximated for buildings, and in large cities are often done by hand.
Well, yeah, that's what I said. There a basic heightmap so you can see buildings and things. That's not even close to the level detail that's in Flight Simulator. Which makes sense, because Google doesn't want to require a GTX 2070 for Google Earth.
Comparing this to Google Earth is like comparing Doom Eternal to Quake II.
Google Earth doesn't have any kind of weather system, dynamic lighting, material shaders, or anywhere near the same complexity in it's 3D meshes. And it's textured entirely with low res satellite and aerial photographs. They shouldn't be in even remotely the same ball park when it comes to system requirements.
I think it’s largely a matter of engineering to turn many of those things off, or reduce detail. After all, many previous flight simulators run on machines with lower specs.
That can be a tremendous amount of work for very little gain though. How many people in Flight Simulator's target audience don't have something as fast or better than a mid-range GPU from 7 years ago?
For example, one "feature" that has become popular is physically based rendering, which uses complex material shaders to use information from a game's lighting system to accurately re-create the fine detail in a surface based on the way light in the real world would interact with that material (or combination of materials). You can't just "turn this off", as the texture work was never meant to be viewed without it and the resulting image would be aesthetically unpleasing to quite a degree.
The work you would need to put in to make it so users can turn this off would be to create alternate detail texture work for every surface in the game, plus alternate shader effects to layer on top of them. Now you're spending a lot of time and money creating a feature that makes your game an even bigger download, just so another 1-2% of players can buy your game.
So turn off the textures. I don't care that much about fine detail. A cartoony look would be fine by me. I play a lot of Minecraft.
It seems like everyone with Intel graphics, which includes many laptops, might want to run it? Could any Macbook Pro run this using Bootcamp?
At that point why not just play one of the older Flight Simulator titles? Flight Simulator X probably runs and looks better than the new one would with textures literally turned off.
If there was substantial money to be made selling new AAA games that run on low power integrated GPUs, I'm sure more companies would be doing it. Integrated GPUs really aren't built to run games. The expectation is that people who want to play new games on their computer will spend a few extra dollars to get hardware built for it.
I don’t know if Microsoft will make money on Flight Simulator or whether they care.
But there are some gaming companies will port a hit game to a wide variety of platforms including mobile, to reach as many people as possible. Minecraft and Civilization 6 are a couple of examples. So the high-end, platform-exclusive strategy doesn’t seem to be the only one.
I think I'm gonna end up buying this game tomorrow, I've heard new things and just built a new PC. Most likely just going to stick with the base version though.
The pictures look amazing.
It will be available through Xbox Game Pass for PC if you want a much cheaper option for trying it. There's usually a deal available for $1 for the first month.
Looks like I'm only able to keep playing the game if I keep a game pass subscription though, right?
Yes, you're not buying the game. It's a monthly subscription service like Netflix.
Most, if not all, games under gamepass get a 20% discount while your gamepass is active. So maybe get gamepass for a month, try out the game, then buy it permanently if you like it. The 20% discount will probably pay for the month of gamepass!
My experience so far is staring at the "Press any key" screen with no ability to move further. I was planning to have it installed ready to try out after work, but the first try was thwarted by a very strange storage issue, and after formatting the machine's secondary drive I've managed to get the 1GB base installed, but nothing more seems to be happening.
No progress bar, no indication anything's installing, no network traffic to indicate that the fabled 152GB is being pulled down in preparation. Fingers crossed for an imminent patch, I guess!
You need to update your graphics driver and install the Xbox (beta) app.
Xbox beta did the trick, thank you! I wouldn't even have thought to check whether that was required over and above the MS Store application.