
Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI - physicsAI
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-53811956
======
tpmx
Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright:

First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC
program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it
outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.

Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download
about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's
not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually
downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug:
if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is
kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of
randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me)
seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are
simply stuck at the download step.

Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two
(with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to
load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff
that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another
minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going
back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.

Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:

\- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.

\- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns _when the
Azure-based geometry servers are slow_. Did they do blocking networking in the
same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real.
The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous
youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer
representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There
are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.

I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a
better understanding of the simulation performance.

(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)

Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.

Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can
only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth
- about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS
slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most
of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations.
Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these
random variations in FPS much.)

Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT,
PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could
sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.

Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is
fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly
downvoted e.g. on reddit.

Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/bugs_issues_megathread/?sort=new)

Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted
to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.

~~~
user_501238901
According to many long-time flight simmers, the performance of this title is
about the same as previous ones, with the addition of 10x improved graphics.
So that's why they don't care and you're getting downvoted on Reddit.

PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically
outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.

~~~
tpmx
This game has been marketed to a much, much wider crowd with a massive online
media campaign. So it needs to work. It doesn't.

(Also 3xxx series cards aren't released yet.)

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bufferoverflow
With some hilarious results:

[https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg)

Notice the little porches added by the AI. It's actually impressive how good
the 3D models turned out.

~~~
neolog
What is the explanation of what happened there?

~~~
maxerickson
It can be OpenStreetMap again (like the obelisk).

There's a tag for museum aircraft, 'historic=aircraft', but the tiles rendered
for openstreetmap.org don't show it, so people add a tag saying it's also a
building.

It's only a theory, I haven't correlated a picture from the game with matching
data.

Here's an example from the USS Intrepid:
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026)

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wjossey
Lots of folks here saying “it’s impressive but...”

The game was probably released faster than what one would expect from a super
polished title, but the game is still extraordinary. The visuals are superb,
the detail is spectacular (I can see my real house with our pool as I fly
over), the mechanics are incredible for a base flight simulator (lots of stuff
you’d normally pay extra via addons for), and the game has been out less than
a week.

They’re going to make the game better, and if you’re into flight simulators
it’s a super easy purchase.

I went into this week with high expectations and my expectations were greatly
exceeded.

~~~
saiya-jin
> if you’re into flight simulators

I think this will be a problem a bit - apart from initial WOW effect, not that
many people are into civilian flying. Its way too complex for casual gamers
and learning curve is almost vertical, you need ultra-expensive hardware (how
many want to spend 1000s in covid times?) and to be honest, non-combat
realistic flight sims are really not for everybody, I would say not for most
gamers.

People rave about details, but plenty of places look on similar level as if I
would take google earth's built in flight sim - I am talking about what I've
seen around Mont Blanc, not exactly a remote place. Yes, few more nicer
buildings and slightly more detail, but that's hardly enough for non-geeks.

Sorry to sound so pessimistic, it is a fantastic game in its own tiny little
niche and I am sure most issues will be resolved over time, I just think
nowadays that niche is pretty small and won't expand that much because its not
something that's easy to grasp and have fun quickly.

~~~
xnyan
I will agree that it’s definitely a niche and not everybody likes it, that
said you really don’t need thousands of dollars of gear to enjoy it. The
breadth of controller support is actually one of the most incredible aspects
of the game to me - Basically everything is supported including an Xbox One
controller. I’ve actually used the gamepad a little bit and it was a perfectly
enjoyable experience. I think you would get more out of it with some more
specialised gear. For less than 100 bucks you can get a perfectly good
joystick and yoke combo that will give you quite a bit of depth.

------
jturpin
This game has been a ton of fun for me. The load times are annoying, but it
runs well for me most of the time on my two-years-ago-it-was-high-end PC (6th
gen i7, 1080 not-TI, m.2 drive, 16Gb RAM). I managed to find my 10 year old
flight stick from when I played FSX and thats been great as apparently this
game has caused a flight stick shortage. I would recommend people try it out,
I have not encountered any game-breaking bugs (except for maybe the rudder
control being weird but that could be the aforementioned flight stick). My
recommendation is lower the sensitivity way, way down. I have mine at -60% on
all axes. Medium graphics look pretty good too.

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meheleventyone
The results are super iffy, if your area matches the designed solution it’s
great otherwise you are in for the weird version of the place. Which seems par
for the course with these AI based solutions. There’s some obvious funny
issues that have cropped up in the media but in general the results are
mediocre from the perspective of actually representing places you know.
Iceland for example has a loooooot of trees and the height data is just
bizarre in a lot of cases.

It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as
long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it’s great fun.

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skybrian
I don't have Flight Simulator, but someone on Facebook posted a screenshot of
a friend's house in a suburban area in Florida, and I duplicated the image in
Google Earth. It's just one data point, but here's what I noticed.

\- The water looks better in Flight Simulator. A large pond has ripples and
reflections in Flight Simulator but it's just flat in Google Earth.

\- Trees and houses look better in Google Earth. Flight Simulator put trees in
the middle of a house and in the middle of a street, and they seem a bit more
crumply.

\- Neither one gets palm trees right. On a major road with palm trees next to
it, Flight Simulator turned them into green stalagmites and Google Earth
didn't model them at all, leaving them as flat shadows on the ground.

It seems like if you like good-looking water or clouds (which Google Earth
barely has) then Flight Simulator would be better, and obviously clouds are
important for flight simulation. But if you just want to see the sights,
Google Earth is pretty good and Flight Simulator isn't necessarily going to
model things better.

~~~
user_501238901
Half the point is the delay of gratification. If you want to see the different
islands of Hawaii, there will be some downtime while you're cruising. The
tension starts building once you get closer and closer, until you finally get
to see the absolutely epic view.

Comparing Google Earth vs Flight Sim is the same as watching 3D images of
hiking trail end points vs actually walking through the trail.

~~~
skybrian
I guess, but in practice, wouldn't you speed up the simulation for the boring
parts? Can't you put the plane wherever you want and start flying?

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bitxbit
How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail?
Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?

~~~
godzillabrennus
It’d be kind of amazing if GTA 6 was using this kind of tech to create its
open world environment when it releases.

Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro
transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure
up for delivering the open world imaging.

~~~
vlunkr
Considering GTA V has made literally billions of dollars I doubt they'll need
any free to play mode.

~~~
madeofpalk
“Making lots of money” does not seem to suppress companies from trying to make
more money. See, Apple and App Store.

~~~
WilTimSon
I think their point was that GTA 5 was not free-to-play and still made
billions. It could be sold at full price up until 6 releases and then 6 could
be sold at full price for years and people will still be interested.

~~~
jon-wood
GTA 5 has an interesting revenue model, the game itself has to be bought, and
you can play all the single player with just that. Once you get into
multiplayer it’s much of a free to play model, with the usual choice of
grinding through to acquire resources or just paying real money for in game
money.

------
jimnotgym
Can I ask a different question, putting the scenery apart, is it a decent
flight sim?

~~~
bitxbit
It’s probably the best flight sim to date. I see huge potential for addons to
leverage the map data. Perhaps an arcade mode to make it more accessible to
casual gamers.

~~~
ppod
Overall maybe, but I'd say the jury's out on the flight model vs X-Plane, and
it (currently) doesn't model airliner systems quite to the level of the
payware X-plane airbuses or the Zibo boeing. It really crushes X-Plane on
weather currently.

~~~
Stevvo
X-Plane's flight model is unquestionably better.

~~~
TylerE
I think that is very questionable.

X-Plane handles some edge cases better for sure, like stall/spin.

The _feel_ of MSFS is much much much more real... like how there's always a
little bit of turbulence.

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Havoc
The cities they picked to hand model are bizarre as hell. Major ones like
London and Paris are missing but completely unknown ones are in.

~~~
ceejayoz
London and Paris have fairly uninteresting airspaces from an aviation
standpoint. Flat, not many airports. If sightseeing is your thing, there are
better ways.

I wonder if it’s based on usage from previous versions of Flight Simulator.

~~~
VBprogrammer
I'd say the approaches into Heathrow (as least on westerlies) are pretty
iconic, being that they tend to turn final over central London.

------
0pranav
I wish this game launched with xCloud. I understand that simulation enthusiast
won't be interested in that but for many people like me who don't want to
worry about streaming and storing all that world data, as well as people not
having enough resources to run the game it would be the perfect opportunity to
try game streaming.

~~~
nickflood
I think, it's down to the Xbox version not being available yet. I'm sure once
it's out, it'll be available through xCloud.

------
bob1029
I feel like Microsoft needs to take this a step further and just put the
simulation on the server too.

Considering their current global footprint (latency) and the fact that the
game already requires a massive amount of always-on bandwidth, it would seem
like this is a less painful conversation in this case.

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ourmandave
I've been watching a few unboxing videos on youtube where MS has sent
influencers a box with the Deluxe Premium Ed (comes with 10 DVDs for install)
with full HOTAS controls.

(Even after the install there's a 19g download update.)

I wonder if everyone who gets one has a system with the specs to run it?

~~~
fyfy18
I have an 8 year old workstation as a gaming PC, with a 3GB GTX 1060, and a
2.5" HDD as a data drive, and it works fine for me on medium graphics at
1080p.

~~~
ourmandave
Yeah, I'd only seen a spec list from a guy playing max setting on 4K.

But he was on a brand new stupid level hardware PC.

------
faebi
To be honest, I expected the AI to be a lot better and nuanced. It‘s good
enough but does not catch a lot of things who should be obvious based on
satellite and street view data. I think the google data would be a better
source than bing but I understand the issue there.

------
yayr
I think this is a quite impressive piece of tech, especially the AI generated
landscape, flora and fauna. Of course there is always a gap to 100% accuracy,
this is the case with every AI model I know, no matter what domain. I wonder
how they measure accuracy here?

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mrkeen
Microsoft Flight Simulator's (69,99€) AI is so good they'll charge you not to
use it!

The Deluxe Edition (89,99€) includes everything from Microsoft Flight
Simulator plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models
and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.

The Premium Deluxe Edition (119,99€) includes everything from the Microsoft
Flight Simulator Deluxe edition plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with
unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.

~~~
xnyan
Or, you can pay $1 and use it for one month via xbox game pass for PC, or $5
if you’ve already used the $1 offer in the past.

I’d strongly recommend this if you’re not very sure you’ll like the game.

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perryizgr8
I wish I had a PC powerful enough to run it. It sounds amazing looking at all
the memes.

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maydemir
I think they must be release a map/navigation app by using this data.

~~~
meheleventyone
It’s based on Bing so it already exists.

