The developers of Microsoft flight simulator have a lot to be proud of. Last month, at the FlightSimExpo 2024 in Las Vegas, reps cheered about their 15 million users and one billion logged flight sessions — numbers that Asobo Studio claims put them at the top of the list as the most played flight simulation ever released. Now the studio is back on that grind to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024that will be released this fall. Asobo calls it “the most ambitious sim ever attempted,” and given its track record, I’m inclined to believe them.
The long conversationhelmed by Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jörg Neumann and Asobo Studio co-founder and CEO Sebastian Wloch, runs over an hour and a half. But those 90 minutes include plenty of tasty tidbits 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 conduct pre-flight checks in first-person.
But the news that should most excite the minds of PC and console players is the call from a new partner, a company recently acquired by Microsoft and called Vexcel Imaging.
Vexcel is a pioneering imaging company known for its UltraCam line of aerial cameras. These multi-spectrum arrays incorporate more traditional RGB color sensors alongside near-infrared sensors. Combined with their software, the result is a dramatic increase in the resolution of image data shared with the design team at Asobo — as demonstrated by MSFS year 2024‘s recent teaser trailer, shown at the Xbox Games Showcase.
Neumann used some of his time on stage at FlightSimExpo to give fans a behind-the-scenes look, so to speak, at what was actually shown in the trailer — specifically, the opening moments in which a single-engine plane flies over Monument Valley in Arizona.
“The natural environments are something that people have never seen before,” Neumann said. “Not at this scale, certainly not in this level of detail.” He then handed the reins to Wloch to dig a little deeper. You can watch the full segment the 14-minute point.
What is important to understand is that before, Microsoft flight simulator had three-dimensional assets — things like houses and trees — automatically applied to two-dimensional data. But you can’t just do that kind of automation, which is why when I first flew over the Great Pyramid of Giza, the pyramid complex was surrounded by a forest of strangely brown, deciduous trees instead of sand dunes. By using UltraCam data to do photogrammetry — that is, 3D reconstruction of real-world features based on nothing but imagery — Asobo’s terrain rendering software has a lot more to work with.
“We now have the ground, which is completely 3D, instead of (…) 2D with a texture,” Wloch said. “There are lots of different 3D materials (including) the grass, the rocks, the trees. Everything is now 3D (…) and everything is procedurally generated from the world data.”
But Vexcel’s camera technology doesn’t stand still. This summer, Austrian company adds LIDAR to its arrays also. That will probably add height and relative distance to the data shared with Asobo, in addition to graphics data. And that, my friends, could enable procedurally generated environments that no one has ever seen in a commercial flight simulator.
Expect more on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 be first Launch date November 19when it will be available for purchase and part of Xbox Game Pass.