Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a new version of the legendary series of civil flight simulators. The project is the responsibility of the French team Asobo Studio, which in 2019 released the award-winning adventure gane A Plague Tale: Innocence.

Gameplay

The game is the first full-scale version of the cycle since the Microsoft Flight Simulator X released in 2006. Unlike the simplified Microsoft Flight, we get a powerful simulator that covers the whole Earth and offers as many as thirty-seven thousand airports. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in its basic version allows you to take control of 20 aircraft. The player could use mainly general aviation units like Cessna 172, aerobatic planes and huge passenger machines like Boeing 747.

The authors put emphasis on realism. Compared to FSX, improvements have been made not only to the simulation of individual systems and aircraft flight models, but also to the variability of air masses near mountains or tall buildings. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 also introduces such an important novelty as the realistic longitudinal slope of the runways and the various surface types.

The game offers special tutorials leading step-by-step through the take-off procedures of individual aircraft and subsequent flight stages. The degree of realism can be adapted to the user experience. At the lower difficulty level settings, the aircraft can be fully controlled from the external view, with all key flight parameters - these are displayed in the corners of the screen through a simplified interface.

The simulator has also been enriched with multilayer, volumetric clouds, and weather data is downloaded regularly from the network.

Technical aspects

The game has an impressive graphic design. The machines have been recreated to the smallest detail and the locations are dripping with details thanks to the use of photogrammetry and satellite images taken for the Bing Maps service. Such solutions have their limitations, which is usually affected by the detail of the map, which is why some of the known airports and objects were modelled by hand. To generate the scenery, the creators of Microsoft Flight Simulator were also assisted by artificial intelligence developed by Blackshark.ai, ensuring that the area is recognized and filled with default objects such as trees and buildings. Huge amounts of data are downloaded on an ongoing basis from the virtual cloud of Azure.

The game offers support for many controllers: from mouse and keyboard, through gamepad, to joysticks and HOTAS sets.

Last updated on 22 June 2023