
Flight Simulator 2020 – New Development Footage - doener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu4CySB2E6s
======
sixothree
I was a child on a Commodore 64 with Flight Simulator. Before school one
morning I took off from Chicago, leveled off, and pointed my cesna towards my
city - New Orleans. When I got home, to my surprise, it was some 50 - 100
miles away. I took it in for a landing and... nothing. Nothing happens. Still,
that was the best nothingness and I remember it to this day.

Looking forward to this version.

Addendum: When my parents took me to purchase my first pc - an ITT XTRA, I got
to choose one piece of software to take home with it. Of course it was MS
Flight Simulator.

~~~
gamedna
I was introduced to MS Flight Simulator at the same time as my first "PC", the
IBM PC jr. Your description of "nothingness" hits home quite well.

Take off was scheduled from boston each night after dinner. Before bed, level
off and head towards LAX. Wake up in the morning to find nothing, and nowhere.
Rushing home from school to frantically try various radio frequencies until I
could find the location on the included maps. This went on for months, because
most days the computer would be shut off by my parents before leaving for
school.

It would happen that there was one magical day when the plane touched down at
LAX, taxied off the runway, and the bliss of pure silence was gifted when the
engines were cut off.

Such is an amazing thing.

------
mech1234
I checked the minimum required specs advertised for FS2020 and it made me sad.
I have a pretty decent used dell M6800 workstation at home (gen 4 i7, K3100M
graphics, 32GB RAM) and I don't know if I'll be able to run it.

~~~
eternalny1
They have not released the minimum specs but I doubt they are targeting people
with 20xx RTX cards and an i9. Only the "1%" would be able to use it and
they'd lose a ton of money.

Also keep in mind this is designed to run at 60 FPS at 4K on the XBox One X
apparently, so you can check what the specs on that box are.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The Xbox One X specs are at [1]. It's basically a custom RX580 and custom
Athlon 5370 sharing 12 GB of GDDR5. That gets you a bandwidth of more than 300
GB/s. The parent's mobile system 'only' has 4GB GDDR3 and 100 GB/s graphics
memory bandwidth. Bandwidth and capacity will be key to buffer up the high-
resolution tile images. You can get a desktop card with similar capacity for
around $200, but it looks like you'd either going to need to be the 1%, have
an old crypto card, or have a newer PC build.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Hardware_comparison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Hardware_comparison)

------
fmajid
It's great to see this great franchise come back from the dead. Will they have
a 737 MAX simulator?

~~~
glouwbug
Too soon, my friend

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
To be honest, I would pay good money for a simulator that could have scenarios
for common Air Disaster episodes.

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
You're in luck -- that exists today!!!!

With the combination of a professional P3D license, weather add-ons, and
quality add-on aircraft from companies like PMDG, you really can recreate a
lot of those scenarios with exceptional detail. Throw in a high-end VR headset
and you can really feel like you are there! Here's an example of me playing
around at home ignoring a windshear alert:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04FeelpjzvE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04FeelpjzvE)

~~~
duncancarroll
Wow, that's pretty cool. Does P3D have native support for VR or are you
hacking it in somehow?

~~~
silicon_wally
it looks like it's not natively supported in P3D, but possible with the
additional FlyInside [1] software

[1] [https://flyinside-fsx.com](https://flyinside-fsx.com)

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
that is incorrect; it has native VR support in the current version.

------
atonse
This is so exciting but the biggest question in my mind is what hardware
you'll need to drive all this stuff.

Are they using 3 Nvidia cards in SLI for the demo, or something similarly
insane? The 32 GB memory isn't that crazy given how cheap memory is these
days.

~~~
WillPostForFood
It is launching on Xbox One as well as PC, and it only has 8GB of RAM and a
fairly slow CPU.

~~~
ceejayoz
The Xbox One version won't look like this, though.

------
eigenvalue
It looks amazing of course but the ocean/lake water looked really off to me,
like it was a static texture map and not dynamically moving with
waves/currents. I would think it would be easy enough to simulate this in a
low cost way with some demo-scene type display hacks so I'm surprised they
don't do something like that.

~~~
arianestrasse
When you're that high, the individual waves and currents are simply not that
visible. What you see on the video IS how it actually looks in real life.

As always, whenever you find yourself saying something along the lines "I'm
surprised they haven't thought of it...", the odds are they actually have
thought about it and that you're wrong. After all, it would be comical for
Microsoft to spend so much on dynamic, volumetric clouds and then just throw
in the "fluid simulation engine" a.k.a. static textures from Flight Simulator
98.

------
geocrasher
I have been a casual flight sim player for a long time, starting in the late
80's with a 286 and Flight Simulator 4. cd c:\fs4, then fs4. In my memory
forever.

Back on Prodigy, then AOL, some of us kids partook in what became the first
Virtual Airline. I had a knack for coming up with custom planes that flew what
we thought the real thing would fly like, and we had a lot of fun. Today the
VA hobby is still going, much to my own surprise.

I still fire up FSX with my HOTAS and have fun. I fear my meager GT740 will
not run FS 2020, but I guess I'll have to bite the bullet on that. I _have_ to
have it. 14 year old geocrasher demands it!

------
bennettfeely
So it's looking like the 2020s are the decade that video game graphics become
indistinguishable from real life video.

~~~
Aardwolf
It's amazingly photo-realistic, but my eye can notice uncanny things. In this
case, I notice a grid-like regularity in all the water-wave patterns seen
throughout the video. But, still amazing :D

Example:
[https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=165](https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=165)

Same water when zoomed out:
[https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=183](https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=183)

~~~
dariusj18
That's pretty realistic IMO. I was up in a float plane in Alaska and remarked
at how fake reality looked.

------
mrguyorama
I'm terrified of how excited I am for this. I got huge into aviation and
Flight Simulator X, and now I'm worried this will be a huge deviation in
design despite looking amazing and exciting. Will I still be able to design
and modify custom terrain? Will I have to subscribe to some expensive add on
service just to get their streamed ground textures? They say you can cache
them for frequently used or favorite areas, what if you let that theoretical
subscription lapse? Would you lose all your locations?

------
cdiamand
Always great to see obsidian ant content get shared. I enjoyed his Elite
Dangerous videos a few years ago. Looks like he's branched out a bit.

------
jordache
The clouds kinda looks fake.. too consistently feathery.

~~~
vanderZwan
I suspect it's more the contrast with the visible aliasing in the textures
than the clouds themselves

------
aaroninsf
Flight Simulator was what convinced my father to pull the trigger on an Apple
][+ with Monitor // and disk drive. Only one, but.

Oh those flat mountains. Oh that ziplock packaging. A tear for the old skool!

------
zippergz
I've been into various flight simulators since I was a kid. This looks super
cool, but I have always been disappointed by how much more effort it seems
like goes into pretty graphics than realistic flying (including detailed and
realistic aircraft controls). I would prefer rudimentary graphics with
extremely accurate flying and controls than the other way around, but I guess
I'm alone in that because they always get the flying to "good enough" and then
blow out on graphics.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Crashing could be more realistic too. I get the feeling no one else feels this
way or no one else should feel this way. They could at least play sad music
and give me a lecture a la Police Quest after each crash.

~~~
mrguyorama
Very VERY few people buy a Flight Simulator to crash into something. However,
failures, like an engine flaming out or gear not extending are perfectly
simulateable even in current gen simulators

~~~
perl4ever
Well, back in the day, when Flight Simulator was mainly Meigs field and a few
other locations, crashing into things, particularly the Sears Tower, was one
of the more interesting things to do with it. That and flying under the Golden
Gate Bridge. But a crash would just draw a zig-zag line across the windshield
to indicate broken glass.

------
mothsonasloth
I tried DCS World last week and gave up after 30 minutes, crashing and
accidentally ejecting from the planes.

Will I make it more than an hour with this new game?

~~~
acidictadpole
It depends what you want to do. FS2020 is not going to likely have any kind of
combat in it.

I fly both FS2020 alpha and DCS World fairly regularly, obviously the former a
lot more in the past little bit. If you'd like help with anything DCS world
I'd be more than happy to help out.

------
msadowski
This looks amazing and I truly hope it comes with an API. Back in a day when I
was working on drone autopilots we were using X-Plane to develop Hardware In
The Loop (basically a drone autopilot piloting a simulated aircraft).

Fun times on the tuning side (especially helicopters were tricky) and having a
Blackbird fly in an automatic mode was pretty good too!

------
m23khan
This is great stuff! I really hope Kids interested in airplanes are fascinated
by this and get the same amount of joy I got when I played this through my
high school years some 20 years ago. My adventures with Flight Sim ended with
FS98 and now it seems the simulation has come a long, long way!

------
nonfamous
The raindrop effects on the canopy are really impressive. Took me back to my
gliding days.

------
zentiggr
Ran FS X up to a couple of years ago, FS98 before that, all the way back to
C64 Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and the Sublogic Flight Simulator.

This looks awesome but CYAC is still my all time favorite. I need a Win10
compatible flight stick, though.

------
yori
Nice review of the latest update to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Where did the video creator get the original footage from? Can someone point
me to an official Microsoft footage?

~~~
Brave-Steak
Seems like he put together the video from small videos off of the official
channel
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqONzeACDBaF6FfKjh7ndAQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqONzeACDBaF6FfKjh7ndAQ/videos)
which is linked in the video description.

~~~
yori
Thanks!

------
snek
I've had a lot of fun playing the alpha so far, it runs really nicely on my
computer (can't say exact specs but it surprised me how well it runs)

------
mongol
What is the best flight simulator for Linux, today? I read that previous
versions of MS Flight Simulator did not work well in Wine.

~~~
quux
X-Plane 11 runs on Linux.

------
acoye
A strong cloud simulation is key here.

