Microsoft Flight Sim players have the world at their fingertips; now they want a time machine, too
When Microsoft Flight Simulator launched in 2020, it felt like the entire game development industry took notice. And how could you not? The software giant's passion project launched with a satellite-mapped version of our entire Earth, a breathtaking day and night cycle, and real-time air traffic. The simulation is a seemingly effortless merging of the real and the virtual that you can fly through by the seat of your pants, playing on consoles and in VR. But players of a certain type always want more. Their final question? A time machine, please.
To understand how we got to the point where a community of thousands of amateur pilots is now demanding that one of the largest software companies in the world disrupt the linear flow of time, you have to understand how complicated MSFS is in the first place – and why the developers are not ready to say no.
First off, developer Asobo Studio didn't create the entire planet from scratch for players to fly over. Instead, construction took place MSFS to be a platform for raw data – high-resolution satellite images, topographical information and transponder signals from real aircraft – which it then digests to create the game world more or less overnight. This way you get snowfall on top of images of green grass, sunsets sliding over mountain valleys and realistic air traffic in the game. These data sources include a stream of real-world weather information, which the game receives in real time from its meteorological partner, Weather blue. The MSFS platform then divides the globe into cubes of 100 square kilometers (a bit like a piece of land in Minecraft) and let go of the simulation to do what is possible to simulate that again.
If you look out your window and see a cloud in the sky, you won't see that same cloud in-game… but you will quite cloudy when you accelerate for takeoff.
And what did gamers do shortly afterwards MSFS launched? They flew directly into the eye of Hurricane Laura, the deadly Category 4 storm that ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2020. Of course, not everyone was available to fly when the hurricane was in town. That's why they've asked if developers can give them some sort of slider to turn back the clock so they can revisit this and other extreme weather events to test their mettle in the skies. At least that part could be relatively simple.
But if we do build a time machine, what about? historical weather? Wouldn't it be great to fly the Spirit of St. Louis in the exact same ice conditions as Charles Lindbergh over the North Atlantic? What if we could simulate the exact speed and direction of the crosswind the Wright brothers felt at Kitty Hawk on the day they took their first flight? And while we're at it, can we go back and watch the Spanish Armada sink? Would you like, Jorg?
Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, hasn't said no… not yet, at least. Here's Neumann, from the most recent developer update Archived on YouTube December 1:
Microsoft has a relationship with a company called Vestas. They have something called the Vestas Climate Database, and we've looked at this quite a bit. And the problem is they don't have global weather. It doesn't really fit into our system, so I don't think this will happen anytime soon, unfortunately.
Flight simulation' will continue to evolve for many years to come, so I'm not saying we'll never do this. But this is not easy. (…) We used to try to make historical missions, like famous icing flights or something like that. And we actually couldn't do that. And sometimes we said, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have historic weather?' It's just… it's very difficult.
What's remarkable here is that Neumann doesn't simply laugh the idea off. In fact, it's something he and the Asobo team have been thinking about for years. What he's saying is that the raw data simply doesn't exist, and if it did, it certainly wouldn't go back to 1588. But if the data does become available later, he's open to working with it.
“I think it's just that players have to be patient,” Neumann concluded. “We'll find out someday, but not anytime soon.”
So there you have it. Time machine attached.
The latest update for Microsoft Flight Simulator, also known as a 'SIM update' as it mainly deals with the game's core mechanics of flying, is now live on consoles and PC. Polygon can confirm that neither a heavily modified Delorean nor a blue police phone booth is present in the patch notes… yet.