DANNY: It's impossible not to
be emotional about flying, but what that emotion is can vary
quite a bit. For some it's the thrill. The wonderment of a human being
airborne, hurdling through the skies at impossible speeds. For others
it's fear. The lack of control, unimaginable heights, bumps along the
way, and the terrifying lack of legroom. It can be wonder. The
feeling of exploration, the excitement of seeing somewhere new
at the destination and along the way. And of course, joy. A journey back after
too much time away, seeing old friends, embracing loved ones, returning
home, or finding a new one. There's no escaping the wonder of
mechanized human flight, and proof of that is in the game
we're about to talk about today. Microsoft flight simulator is one of the
longest running game series of all time. And over its 40 year tenure, it's also
been a showcase for the power of video games. Not just their power
to simulate real world places, but their power to stir
emotions in players. Microsoft Flight Simulator is among
the most beautiful and technically impressive pieces of software ever made,
a labor of love for two teams separated by an ocean and 5,000 miles, because
that ocean and each of those miles are actually in the game. You see, Microsoft flight simulator
contains the entire world. Every country, every city, every airport, road,
almost every tree. And in this video, we're going to explore how the teams
achieved that and more. How they created their digital twin of planet
Earth, the way they breathed life, weather, and nature into that world, how
they modeled dozens of planes to a higher degree of fidelity than we've ever seen.
And in many ways most importantly, the effect of releasing a game that
allows people to visit home as a global health crisis has billions of us grounded. I've been obsessed with the story of
how this game was made for a while now. So it's my absolute pleasure to share
it with you. So please sit back, relax, and let us take you on one of the most
unique journeys in game design you're ever likely to be on. - I've been at Microsoft for
over 20 years now. And so the, the notion of making another
Flight Simulator has been, had been around ever since I joined
the company actually, in 2000. There was obviously still some products
going on, but we had stopped in 2007 with Flight Sim 10. It's a fascinating IP inside the
company because it's our oldest IP. It's our oldest longest one, the IP. It's always surprising people when they say
it predates Office and Windows. It's a fascinating pride in the company
for this particular product type, because it goes all the way back to 1982.
When that first version came out, it pushed what was possible on a PC at
the time. And that was super important. It was always an evaluation, do
we have something new to say? Is there technology that
really takes us forward? DANNY: Jorg Newman, a veteran of
Flight Sim, would lead the project from here in Seattle with a team of just over
a dozen people, mostly focused on licensing, publishing, and feeding in
expertise from other Microsoft teams including Bing Maps and Microsoft
cloud computing tech Azure. We'll dive into those a little bit later. But to talk to the
developers of the game, we have to take a long-haul flight from
the Pacific Northwest all the way to Bordeaux in France, the home
of veteran game developers Asobo, a studio with
quite the diverse resume. - We have really a two-sided organization.
One part is more simulation. We worked on Fuel. It was a bike, truck,
car, and quad racing game. It was a little bit more arcadey, even
though the engine was very realistic, but all of the settings were very action
oriented. It was already open world. And the other side of the company has
been more specialized in Pixar titles and adventure games, character based. DANNY: Asobo has grown slow and steady
over the past 20 years from the original 12 to 210 today, doing a lot of support work
and contract work on larger titles. As Sebastian said, around two thirds of
the team work on more tech focused games, their open world racer Fuel being a good
example. While the other third works on more action adventure titles, everything from colorful kids games like
Up! to their more recent darker hit, A Plague Tale: Innocence. In fact, Flight Simulator and A Plague Tale were
being developed at the same time and remarkably, they share the same engine.
Asobo has been collaborating with Microsoft for around a dozen years, starting way back on the Xbox 360
with the motion game Kinect Rush and more recently with Microsoft's
augmented reality tech HoloLens. And in fact it was a HoloLens collaboration
that planted the seed of a new type of Flight Simulator. - And it was in 2015, we worked on a HoloLens project together,
and the HoloLens project basically took a few pieces of earth like Rome
and San Francisco and Machu Picchu. The whole point was that you basically
teleport yourself to a place on Earth in the AR with the AR device, and you
could walk around. And I remember Machu Picchu looked just amazing.
It was, it felt totally real. Even though I'd never been there, it
was like exactly what I imagined Machu Picchu to sound like,
and to feel like, and to look like. And then the thought
was, can we do this worldwide? And I think we tested
it. Like, so, you know, the thing that was probably the
greatest advancement since the last version, Flight Sim 10,
was the cloud. And oftentimes we think of
the cloud as sort of, sort of almost like storage or something
like that. But it really, in our case, it's more than that. We're doing cloud compute, and
we're doing cloud streaming. Now that Microsoft has that
established this Azure stack, but it's basically data
centers all across the world. You can get massive amounts of data
to people with like low latency. And that was the fundamental idea. Can
we get the entire world stored? Yes. 'Cause A, we have Bing Maps that have
the world already. Can we get it stored? Yup. Azure storage. Can we process it?
Like can we do things to that world? Yes. The Azure has lots of machine learning tools,
and there's Azure compute that helps us with that. You can spin up however many VMs you
need. And then can we stream it to the end consumer? The answer was also
yes. So it had lined up the ambition and the vision that Flight Sim
always had, which was a complete earth, was now doable at a much higher level
of fidelity 'cause you didn't have to stick it on a disc. DANNY: Okay, Let's back it up a little bit,
because a lot of complicated stuff was just talked about. The HoloLens project showed that creating
an accurate 3D representation of a place was possible by
pulling data from big maps. The question was whether or not this
was scalable to do the entire planet and the barriers were threefold. One, could you store the
entire globe? Well, yes. Bing Maps has aerial photography of
the whole planet. That's technology that's pretty commonplace these days, but most of that data is flat
photography with some terrain height mapping, and flying over that
would just look like traversing a painting of the earth, albeit a rather
bumpy one. To make a realistic planet, you're going to have to fill that in
with 3D detail: buildings, trees, roads, and more. Some larger cities
have photogrammetry available. This is the process of capturing accurate
3D data of buildings rather than just flat images. But while we have
photogrammetry of some larger cities, we certainly don't have
it for the entire world. The Eiffel tower might be scanned,
but your uncle's bungalow in Kansas probably isn't. Painting in
this detail home by home, road by road, and tree by tree
could take the studio years, perhaps even decades to complete,
which brings us to number two. Do we have the cloud computing capabilities
to have VMs or virtual machines chew through all of this map
data and through algorithms the team has programmed, paint accurate
3D objects onto the entire globe? The answer again was yes. And so we go to the third and
final technological obstacle. Is it possible to stream this data to
people's computers with low enough latency that they don't even notice? And
the answer again was theoretically, yes. Why was streaming
this data essential? Because the sheer amount of it was
something we'd never before seen in a video game. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Like when you look at
what we have in Bing, we have 2.5 petabytes of data
that store basically aerial photography, satellite imagery,
and then also height fields. And that's 1.7 million
DVDs for us. So impossible, impossible to put that somehow in a box
and sell it in stores, as it cannot be done. But streaming,
that is now a thing. And this is sort of the first time that
I've seen a game that really uses that entire stack that we are now
enabled with for an experience. And I think that's why it feels like a real
leap ahead in gaming. Because there's never been a project that's like, hey,
the entire planet and every house, 1.5 billion houses and 2
trillion trees in a product. And it's enabled by the cloud, and it's
abled by the Microsoft tech stack. You can do AI on your local machine, but
you can't process the planet on your local machine. You'd need 10,000 computers.
That's why only something like, Azure can do this. Yeah, the challenge
I think was how do we get from all this data to something
which looks like the planet? - We try to be smart, so we started with an itty bitty tiny team.
It was the first group that came in, that was the Seattle map
and the Grand Canyon map. And we flew around with a little
Cessna, and it worked. And it looked, it already looked good, but it
was just a very specific use case. But it gave us confidence
honestly, to build the team. And that was the first time, that was probably the first time I
showed it to anybody 'cause it was just between the, you know, four of
us trying something, 'cause that was really what I nowadays
call the static world. You know, it's just buildings and trees.
And there's lots more to do, right? The dynamic world, there's a
living world. There's all these layers. At some point we just established, hey,
we want to land everywhere. That is, that was way beyond what
we had for that first prototype. But yeah, I mean, we took it step by
step and moved the team carefully. DANNY: Alright, now let's get to the
fun stuff. The tech was there, but a statue is nothing without a
sculptor. And this block of marble was particularly large: an entire world
packed full of houses, trees, buildings, roads, hills, mountains, valleys,
weather, and so much more. So to turn this world from a photograph
into something that resembled the real world with all of its depth and detail, the team at Asobo, with the help of some
external partners, would have to create technology to help them sculpt this
world, algorithms that chipped away at the marble, and new technologies
that filled in the details. - In February we started. And
you have to like, if you know, how photogrammetry works, it's basically a 3D photographs
taken at a specific time of day. So the Seattle map, imagine we
had a pretty damn good Seattle map, but it had shadows baked in. There's some stuff that
doesn't look so good. You know, the Space Needle didn't look so good.
Because anything that has an overhang, you know, these things are taken by an airplane,
and it takes a photo every second. And then it constructs a 3D point
cloud, right. That's how that works. Overhang stuff are good. Trees look like you draped
over like a sort of a blanket of green. It doesn't really look like a tree. So
there was certainly some, some issues. And then there were some early
experiments done on like shadow removal, for example. That was a big thing.
We looked at Bellevue, which is a, it has a bunch of skyscrapers nowadays.
And there were these cast shadows cast on the street. And, uh, it didn't
look great. So we tried actually, there was some experiments, can we get rid of the shadows and do
procedural textures in between? There's clouds in photographs, right? Like
from satellites. So cloud detection, cloud removal, that was a big deal. And
then also color correction because the, when the planes fly overhead, they're flying stripes basically
and strips. And you get these, you get the Earth, it's complete, but
it has these color breaks all the time. And it, because it would be taking
a different time of day, sometimes even months later,
right? So that was the, they were some of the earliest
technical hurdles to jump through. DANNY: Once they'd figured
out a strategy for color correcting the world and removing
shadows from buildings and clouds, the next target was trees. Tree models
from photogrammetry look ridiculous. So the team would have to build technology
to populate forest and streets with realistic looking trees. To do so
by hand would take years again, probably decades. So they would have to use machine
learning to create a process that would accurately paint the entire globe. - You give the machine two pictures,
one picture with a forest, and let's say there's a stadium in the
middle where there's no trees. And then someone goes and paints all
the forests in whatever red, right? You paint it. And you give the machine
to two pictures, and the machine sort of learns. If you, if you do
that millions of times, the machine sort of learns
to do the same thing, right? Later you give it just a picture of
trees, and it's going to paint in red. This is like a very simple way of
understanding. And if you do it enough, enough times, then you get a
system which is good enough. And then you can just give it tree
pictures, and then you feed it, well, the entire globe, right? And so that's, that
is billions and billions of pictures. It's not perfect. It's
going to work, whatever. It's going to work in 90% of the
planet, then all of a sudden, oh, it doesn't work at all in Africa.
And so we have to refine it. So this thing has been
redone several times. The one you see currently is the sixth or
seventh iteration, right? We tried colors. We tried shapes. We tried machine learning,
all sorts of things. Usually it's a, it's a combination of techniques, which can only really work because
the planet is so big. If you had one computer, it would take
a lifetime to process the planet. You really, you just can't. DANNY: Even with a stack of Azure virtual
machines crunching the numbers, it takes around three days for
them to paint the world with trees. This tech was refined to recognize
different types of trees based on factors like color and geographical location, but machine learning can't be
used for everything. For example, the technology used to populate grass
is a client side algorithm that looks at the Bing maps data and renders grass depending on a number of conditions
and filters. It doesn't always work. Sometimes green roads
kind of throw it off, but it was the smartest way
to produce the desired effect, as billions upon billions of blades of
grass would have been simply too much for the cloud. But one problem that did seem to be
similar to tree generation was generating the millions of buildings scattered
around the globe. And for this, the team reached outside of
the studio for some expertise, a company called Blackshark who
collaborated with Asobo to build this technology. But it wasn't a
one size fits all solution. - You have some buildings where,
where like in Seattle, like it's 3D scans or
there's already buildings. So there's obviously it's not just done,
right? We need also, is there texture? Is this glass, or there's all
sorts of stuff. So that's, that was already handled on
our side, but that company, basically they can build buildings
in 3D when you have nothing. I mean, most of the time, what we have
is a top down picture. And so they look at the top down picture
and find the roof color, not only color. And they trained a computer,
some AI to recognize, is it a flat roof or is it
like a, this roof, right? What kind of roof is this, right? And then it can basically say after
enough training, it can say, yeah, this is a hangar. This is a
school or whatever. It can, can find the type of building
just by looking at the roof. They combined that data was data
from OpenStreetMap or other data. And in the end, they spit out a
building, which is, um, I would say, as close as possible. The goal was to make it seamless
because there's so many different data sources. And some
are high res, low res, 3D. And you want everything to look as
much as possible the same in the end. It's hard to see the transition when
you go from a actual real scan photogrammetry, right? Where it's the
actual building. And then next to it, there's a, whatever, there's a village,
which is not in 3D. So then, then that buildings get generated, and
then it goes into a rendering engine and the shading has to be exactly the same.
And really make sure that you don't see any difference. DANNY: Photogrammetry and building detection
did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to creating an effective 3D
representation of the entire globe, be it your hometown, a village in a part of
the world you've never been to, or a popular tourist destination. The algorithm tooled and tweaked by
the studio can effectively generate realistic approximations. But there are some structures that
the game needed to make as accurate as possible. Firstly, there was
airports and astonishingly, Microsoft Flight Simulator lets you take
off and land at every airport on the globe, be it a dusty strip in the
outback or a major metropolitan hub. There are over 37,000 places
to leave or come home to. By using Bing Maps photography, the
team hand outlined airport perimeters, which informed specific rules for the
building generation algorithm to follow, creating approximate versions of
terminals, gates, and hangars. Then they would trace other elements
such as the runways, parking spots, even down to the taxiways. 80 of the most popular and busy airports
were given a more handcrafted feel, with unique architecture
and added detail. With 40 more of these be given the finest
level of attention with near perfect representation in the game. Though how many of these you have access to
depends on which tier of the game you buy. Many points of interest such as famous landmarks and
buildings were handcrafted too. Many of these were created by the studio,
and many more have been developed by the community post-launch and
added to an in-game marketplace, a community of passionate designers who
could more quickly react to the needs of the player base. So if airports and cities are the
beating hearts of human existence on this planet, then we better pay
attention to the arteries. OpenStreetMaps provided a level of
broad data and local knowledge to help the team craft accurate streets,
roads, highways, bridges. Vehicle traffic on those roads was handled
by a similar tech from Flight Sim 10, but mass instancing was
added to help CPU load whenever you flew over large parking lots, as the team noticed that the old code
was trying to spawn tens of thousands of unique car models and dumping
performance. Just like world generation, the human life on this planet was
also created using a variety of machine learning algorithms and
hand painted detail. But this world was orders of magnitude
larger than any of the game world we'd ever seen. So how do you test to make
sure everything's in its right place? How do you check for accuracy? And
when is accurate enough, enough? - There's still some bugs. Like there's some roundabouts where we
don't really quite know the orientation of the cars. So they, they
end up going like, you know, like the teapots in
Disneyland. And it's kind of, they kind of don't rotate
quite right. And, um, you know, there are some bridges that
frankly, like here in Seattle, our photogrammetry is a little bit
older, like it's from a few years ago. So they're, one of the bridges
actually doesn't exist anymore. 'Cause was a sinking part of
bridge, and it's gone. So they built a bridge right next to it. But some of our data still has the cars
driving on the old bridge. So it's, you know, because fundamentally
the world is a dynamic place, right? It's not like there's a single truth
moment and that's the world, right? The world constantly changes.
So we, our data will always be, it's mostly an approximation. Its,
its vast majority of it is correct, but are there going to be some
problems and errors? Sure. And then we get a new update, and then
it's going to get fixed. So it's, it's more dynamic than a
typical game would be. - At some point the world is too big to test. The test team
on Microsoft's side was very smart. So they made a very
smart grid of the planet. And then they had locations which were
very representative of all the regions of the planet and all the
different situations. And then you, you really reduce the amount of
testing. You know, that if, uh, if it works in Seattle, it's gonna work
in Portland. You know, stuff like that. And then you always do a little
bit of random fly around. I think that's just flying
around with a Cessna. It takes years and years and years
to, to test the whole planet. So you can't do that, but if
you have a smart test done, which tests all the different cases,
and then plus a little bit of random, just checking if the test
plan is valid, um, you, I would say you would catch
99.9% of all the issues. There's always going to be something,
like you've seen the monolith in Australia. Something can always happen,
but it's going to be very limited. DANNY: The monolith Sebastian is referring to is this, a 212 story building in
Melbourne that really doesn't fit in with the surrounding architecture.
And its creation is down to a typo. While pulling data from OpenStreetMaps, the sim generated a building from the
data field containing the amount of stories the building had. And
instead of 2, a user, nathanwright120, had typed in 212. The team has since
updated the game to filter out this sort of clearly incorrect data. Okay. So by now they've built
the world. It has mountains and oceans, cities and airports. It even has your
hometown in it. So what's next? Well, eventually we're going to talk about
the planes, but before we do that, let's talk about the single most
important facet of flying a plane, the most critical factor in
every pilot's flight plan. - The vision was that the world
is dynamic and, and for that, you need a dynamic weather system. So we looked for what is the
best available weather data in the world. And we ran into this company
in Switzerland called meteoblue, and they, they are pioneers in their fields in
that they have this vast array of weather forecasting material and data, historical
data, and also current data. And, um, we basically talked to them and
hooked them up with Asobo. And then it was really a integration
of their data, how to do it smartly, and then also how to render it
in a way that it was believable. - So then it's almost like Bing data, right? It's just that Bing data for the
planet is mostly static. So Jorg says, it's going to get updated from time
to time. And meteoblue is the same. You don't scan, you don't pull the whole
planet, right? It's too big. You say, I think we're pulling a few hundred kilometers
around the user, and you just call us over and say, hey, what's the weather. And it's going to give you some sort
of a voxel space, right? It's like, it's like little boxes, little box
up for the wind, for the turbulence, for temperature, for clouds. If
you don't have the data, well, you can put random clouds in there. But what is really crazy is that it's
actually real data coming from the world and then going in that system. DANNY: The atmospheric simulation going
on in Microsoft Flight Simulator is fantastically complex, taking into
account air density, humidity, and even pollution when casting
light and generating clouds. The sun, moon, stars, and cities all
generate their own light, as the wind blows the clouds
that bounces it around. In fact, the wind even creates water turbulence, making the landing of sea
planes more challenging. - If you have the sun going down and
there's a cloud at 200 miles away, which is creating shadow, it's going
to shadow the whole world, right? And so you have to actually get
that. If the whole world is shadowed, that means that the clouds above
your head, they're shadowed. But these, these then cast less shadow, uh,
less light onto the ground. So the ground is now darker because
the clouds above you are darker. - The difficulty is what is the best
techniques for whatever, for mountain ambient lighting.
So for example, if you go at Bhusawal
and you go down into the valley, you're going to notice that
the ambient light of the sky is hitting the fog differently.
And if you don't do that, if you don't do that specific calculation,
the fog is too bright in the valley, and it looks weird. And if you actually
account for this, the fog all of a sudden is right. And it feels oh, it
feels like a real valley. And so this is all different systems for
whether it's mountains, valleys, clouds, airports, planes, and all
these things. So it's one, it's one global emanation system but
which has dozens of little different systems optimized for each situation. DANNY: The weather effects in Microsoft Flight
Simulator are frequently breathtaking. By default, you fly in
accurate data for your area, but you're also free to change the
weather to wherever you want at any time. You don't even have to pause the
game. Not only is this world a digital twin and the weather
copied from real-world data, but the team licensed FlightAware to accurately
represent real time air traffic, too. But for a game
with all of this detail, we've yet to talk about the most
detailed part of the experience. - From the get go, we said,
we're making a sim for simmers, and I can tell you that simmers greatly
care about every single detail. So I think our detail, if I have it right,
is 0.5 millimeters or something. It's super, super high res
when we need it. And every single piece of text that is
in a cockpit has to be exactly accurate because they know it. They
will tell you if it's wrong. We opted to have relationships
with every manufacturer. So we, we actually licensed all the planes,
and that what that gets us is a deep collaboration with the
manufacturers themselves. And then sometimes they give us
a scan already, it's in the rare case, but they give us access to planes
and also to the pilots. For the planes, we actually initially started
modeling the cockpits. Nowadays you actually scan the
cockpits. So this is just an evolution also where I think games are.
Like if you look at Forza, they're doing very
similar things. It's why this is now possible to get
this just exactly right. And specifically for a sim that
is really so close to reality, I think it's critical to get to
that level of detail. And even the wear on the textures, you know. If there's a
button that gets used a lot, it actually, you will see that, that it gets used a
lot. So it's not all factory new. DANNY: Asobo's audio team spent
months capturing the sound of flight from ambient cabin noise to
open windows, closed windows, to 3D audio recordings at
multiple points around the plane. The vast majority of Asobo studio
took flight lessons as well to try and understand how the plane feels and to
get to grips with the litany of systems at work during flight. And according to Sebastian, older versions
of the game were able to simulate many of the systems. PCs in 2006 were
pretty good at electricity, hydraulics and fuel mixture. But one area where Asobo added much
more fidelity was the number of control points on the plane that interacted
with the physics of flight. In the past, the plane was taken as a single object,
and the effects of things like speed and air pressure were universal. But Asobo threw out that single
box and added a thousand surfaces. - And funny enough, actually the single point system didn't
go up to a thousand at once. Actually there was one point, and
then I added one on each side of the wing, say, oh, that's better. And then on the tail, and then one more
here, and one more here. I said, oh. And the idea is basically to
capture more and more detail. So let's say with a single point
system, you fly over a bump in the air. If the bump is on the right wing, you
don't get it. You don't have any change. And if there's the point on the
right wing, you're going to get the bump. But if there's just one point, well,
you don't really get the exact bump. You get something, right? If
there's now ten points, oh, you get a better bump, and maybe
it's shaped like this or whatever. And so we just added more and more
points until we ended up over a thousand because it captures more,
more of the little details. And also it's, so in normal flight, it's really only important
for the wind and the turbulence. But when you start doing
aerobatics or stalls or splints, that's where basically a stall is when
both wings stop sort of flying, right. They just drop. But when you stall
sometimes, and you're not careful, you can get it so that only one wing stops flying and the
other continues flying. And then you spin. And this thing basically, yeah, it means that one wing is
flying and the other is not. And so you need to have two points, at
least, right. And then you find out, oh, but stall is not something which
happens just all at one time. You know, you can look the
videos on YouTube. Some people put strings on wings,
and you see that stall starts stopping often in the middle, and it
propagates out to the wing, right? It's some, it's a continuous
phenomenon. It's just, it's not on off. And so I said,
oh, now that you captured this, I need hundreds of points
to actually have a stall, which comes from the
middle and goes outside. And that's why step-by-step we just
wanted to capture more and more of the reality. - Yeah, it was user based, right? We listened so much to what
consumers said in the blogs. And then the forums, we re-read
them literally every day for years. And a lot of people said, well,
the stall is just not right. And the stall in Flight Sim 10
was a hard coded, you know, hard coded event. You are now
in stall. And it never felt right. And so then at some point Seb was like,
look, I'm just going to add more. And now it's a realistic
stall, which is great. - One of the things I love the most about
video games and the work we do with Noclip is that games are
very technical things. But the ways in which
we all talk about them, it tends to be about the
way they made us feel. I know this has been complicated. There's been a lot of machine learning
and algorithms and data points, but I just want to leave you with one
more. And I think it might be my favorite. I asked Jorg what happened when they
took the training wheels off the player. What happened when for the first time
they were presented with that globe and they could pick anywhere in the
world to fly to. Where did they go? What was the place that
was the most popular? Was it New York, or the Grand
Canyon, or the Bermuda triangle? His answer surprised me. And it probably shouldn't have surprised
me considering the year we've just had. But Jorg said that 70% of
players flew to the same place. They flew home. - Like, I remember certainly
when the coronavirus hit, like, I remember like I was supposed
to go, like you just said, I was supposed to visit my family. And I couldn't because they
live in Germany. I'm like, ah. So I actually flew there and called my
parents. And I shared the weather, and we just talked about the weather. It
was the same time of day, same weather. It looked exactly right.
And I basically called them up and said, hey, I'm as close to you as I can get.
I think we see that replicated a lot. The stories that people tell us,
I mean, there's lots of emails we get every day of people telling
us stories like this. And I think it's been, it's been, if it was even just a little bit
helpful in these trying times, I think then it was unexpected in
many ways. Like nobody wants this, but I think it brings the world.
The world moved away from us a little. And I think it's, it's a little
bit closer inside the sim. So I think it's great. Great to see it.
This game will never be for me, but holy shit what an absolute triumph these devs have accomplished. The weather stuff in particular feels like magic
The point in the end about flying home first is so true, I haven't been to the place where I grew up in almost 10 years. I took 3 realistic flights that I used to do in the past, two regional plus one international (5 hours flight). The arrival to the home airport was very emotional.
noclip is one of the highest effort youtube channels about gaming. hope people continue to support them.
This game is part of the reason I love Game Pass. I got this game because of it, and boy was I hooked.
I even made a comic about it.
Don't forget to nominate it for the game of the year in the Steam awards, because it seriously is the best game to release this year.
As someone who played a lot of Google Earth VR, i think they really brought themselves down by using Bing Maps, i didn't even know that Bing Maps was a thing until a bit after the release of this game, i looked around and everything i've seen is 6-8 years old at this point
I live in a neighborhood thats in full development and nothing is the same anymore
and yes i realize that bing is microsoft, it's still terribly behind compared to Google Maps
and don't get me wrong, i think all the other tech involved is brilliant
Cool. When can I play it on Xbox? I was promised console play, and I'm disappointed there has been complete silence since release.
My computer lags so hard with this game. I can never seem to get it to play smooth.
My CPU probably isn't ideal though tbh.
Why are thumbnails so dumb nowadays? Do I really need an arrow pointing to the horizon indicating it’s the entire planet..?