Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020/2024)

The other evening I was taking the back roads when a Deer sprung out of nowhere and I had to make a fast stop. As I was driving away I started to think, heck this could be possible in FS2020 now that we know there are animals and birds etc. In fact Deers have been in X Plane for years and I figured MS would likely include them. But what about small pesky rodents? For bush flying it could be interesting to start the takeoff roll and a bunch of squirrels or raccoons jump out from the grass and cross the runway. Quick thinking, slam the brakes or swerve to miss them? It could be interesting.

The good : a nice rendition of a town at dusk and clouds over the valley The bad : excessive reflections on the fuselage. They have to rein in the use of PBR ; no car red rear lights

Hi, as published in today's post (August 29th), we learned that the alpha recruitment will begin on September 12th. It said that there will be a quick survey about you and your computer performances, and I would like to know if you have some ideas of what they are looking for : About computer requirements, I think they will not require a "beast", so i think my i7, GTX960M and 8GB of RAM can be enough. Because if it's not enough, firstly I'll be very sad. Secondly, it will mean that the simulator needs a lot of computer resources, and so against the accessibility they were claiming some posts ago. About personal informations: I think they will ask …

When this beauty releases what's your first flight going to be? What plane? Day or Night? I'm going PAMR-CBBC-PAJN at 6:00am in a small GA, preferably C172. Those views...

Our benevolent moderator said in the 22nd update thread that « Off topic posts will be laughed at, scorned, and then deleted.😁 ». I wouldn’t dare to contrevene. So the time has come to start a speculative thread on tomorrow update that, we, in Europe, will see one day later (yes MS, it is a hint). We have seen so far pics of lovely landscapes and some videos that I would rather call animations. I wish that we would see in the next update evidences that they make a flight simulator not a book for the National Geographic 😁. Flight simulator action, please ! And, of course, to satisfy a majority here, rodents.

Dear Microsoft, I think it's important to know that success at the beginning depends on a single point. In the trailer we have seen super nice pictures. I'm thankfull. But, if there are no deep simulation aircrafts (like pmdg, aerosoft, ...) at the beginning, it will be useless for many. If we will not have to wait for a year or more, it will not do much sense for many people. A lot of us simmers consider realistic aircrafts as more important than great graphics. Therefore, I hope that external developers are already involved. (That's my opinion, but I'm sure that many agree with me here)

https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/marketing-pr/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-aerosoft/ Article is all in German, but basically we can expect to see airports, aircraft, sceneries, & routes brought to MSFS by Aerosoft. If I am reading it correctly, about 30 in the first year.

Tell me somethin', Microsoft Are you happy with your flightsim game? Or do we need more? Is there somethin' else we missing now? I'm hoping That you make a brand new SDK Longin' for change And that the new game will be superior Hope MS will fill the next vers

We're just a few posts short of hitting 10,000, about a piece of software which is a year or more from coming out, and about which we've only gotten a few sentences of actual information.

Just curious what XBox this will be releasing for? XBox One, Or is there another XBox coming out soon?

So far, like everybody else, I am extremely impressed and overjoyed by the upcoming MSFS. But I am not that thrilled with what I am seeing of the ground night lighting; city lights in particular. Like in previous iterations, it seems faint. They have also not shown too much of it yet, suggesting they may still be working on it. Dusk and night sky effects so far look nothing short of spectacular. I am hoping that night lighting on the ground will be equally as impressive. To me, xplane 11 offers the best night lighting, in particular streets.

This is one of my highest hopes for the new sim: In P3D there is a plethora of graphics settings you have to play with to find your personal sweet spot for your system. And when you finally found the settings that let you approach EGLL in the FSL A320 or PMDG 747 with acceptable framerates you miss out on a lot of eye candy that would be possible when you are flying in more remote areas or with simpler aircraft. So you end up having several different presets of graphics settings for different situations (region, aircraft, day-/nighttime) you have to load before each flight or even during a flight. To find the individual sweet spot for these several…

This thread should serve MS to see how we understand ATC What is important to you for a realistic ATC? Bad ATC makes me bored quickly. For me, i think it is important to have realistic traffic (quantity) request headings (bad weather) request directs different approaching (VOR, ILS, ...) SID/STARS Holdings ATC should give me a lot of instructions, I do not want to constantly have to follow my route.

What is it and how do we define it? How do replicate the feel of flying to a desktop simulator? One would think that the MSFS dev team had to ask themselves this question when beginning the new simulator. A realistic looking world would be one and that includes weather, scenery and lighting. Realistic looking / operating aircraft would be another. But the feeling of flying when we're stuck at a motionless desk, how do we reproduce that. For me it would be those brief few moments when the wings take the weight of the aircraft at rotation and you see and get a feeling of flight in the fluid medium of air as the aircraft gathers itself. I …

In one of the many MFS videos on Youtube I noticed the narrator saying they hope the detailed grass seen in a certain still shot would be affected by wind. This is off topic but I definitely see wind blown grass in the teasers for the new flightsim Deadstick on Steam (at about the 2 second mark into the video). https://store.steampowered.com/app/771800/Deadstick__Bush_Flight_Simulator/

The teasers show impressive landscapes but not yet the same landscape at different times of the year. Sat or aerial imageries in the visible spectrum are of course collected when the skies are almost cloudless, not exactly the normal average situation in most of the part of the world all year long. This is not only about snow but also about dry and wet seasons which transform the landscapes. Looking at the Australian pic in yesterday update for instance we see that GE shows a much drier ground and ground vegetation. Another example. A Washingtonian recently remarked on the OrbX forum that their Washington product for XP obviously comes from orthos shot durin…

Something which bothers me in the discussion about the integration of 3rd party content and a possible monopoly of Microsoft shop is to know whether I will be still able to add my doodles to the sim. Flight simulation is a multi-faceted hobby. Everybody fly but many of us also love to make their own sceneries (revamping a default airport or entirely from scratch) and to share them or just to keep them for themselves. It is a creative and wonderful pastime. Today, adding one's masterpiece 😉 to the scenery library is pretty straitghforward. To have to go through the hoops of a certication process would kill this side hobby.

I posted this in another thread, but thought it warranted a thread on its own as I think it's an important piece of news (and talking point) that others might miss. I decided to do some digging and this job posting pretty much confirms a central, curated "marketplace" for MSFS. (We can only assume for DLC / add-ons / call them what you will). https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/672404/Marketplace-Producer?jobsource=indeed&utm_source=indeed&utm_medium=indeed&utm_campaign=indeed-feed "Marketplace Producer, Microsoft Flight Simulator" "we are looking for an experienced Marketplace Producer to partner with our Executive Producer in the Mark…

In the night lighting post, Noooch observes that : apart from the Courchevel scene, we didn't see any sloped runway. Courchevel could be handmade because it is famous but the rest of the airports runways didn't look sloped to me . Well observed ! A remark first. The word sloped implies a constant angle. Shouldn't we rather speak of an undulating runway ? Then, I wonder whether we don't set our expectations a little high. It is really feasible to make them for some 24 000 airports as it would mean an extremely sharp mesh for all of them, the world over. Such a mesh does not exist to my knowledge. I would at least settle for an easier way to make the…

I wonder if someone would be kind enough to explain the scenery (specifically the terrain, rather than buildings) rendering technology that we believe is going on here. I have been googling photogrammetry but there seem to be different implementation options. Is it the same as ortho/satellite scenery or is it some sort of hybrid using dimensions extracted from images and used to define areas which are then filled in with artificially tiled texture? Or is it a mixture of the two? I have been flying Aerofly FS2 for a couple of years so I’m used to ortho but haven’t spent much time in the other sims.

What would cause you not to buy MSFS 2020, based on what you've seen so far? I only have one, and that's lack of VR support. Pretty much everything else I could overlook as the visuals are just so good, in certain areas at least. Are most people at the "shut up and take my money" stage, or is there something you want to see before having a clear purchase intention?

Hi everyone, I am a flight simulator customer since FS98 and thanks to that tiny bluish CD-rom my passion for flight began. In a few months I will start my ATPL and all i have to say is thank you Microsoft (and thanks daddy who bought me FS 98 while I was still 9 years old and didn't know anything about flight 🙂 ). Years passed and FS 2000, Fs2002, Fs2004 and FSX came...I bought all of them and made flights over flights, i had sleepless nights flying and i felt good. Suddenly I started noticing that some addons made flight simming experience much better, so I started buying things...my first airport was NICE (LFMN) for FSX, then I bought PMDG 737 and a few othe…

I've been considering what types add-ons might be popular after MSFS is released. (Partly as I'd like to develop some). It seems to me that there will inevitably be less development opportunities for 3rd party developers. That's probably good for consumers (don't have to spend much to get things looking great) and not so good for devs. Of those add-on types: Weather - Probably none existent. You're not going to do a better job of clouds than MS have done here Orthophoto Scenery - (Like TrueEarth). Hard to see the value. Streaming Bing satellite data will be good enough for the vast majority. Photogrametry areas will look better than models placed by OSM dat…

A German website (heise.de) had the chance to interview Microsofts General Manager Aaron Greenberg on the Gamescom. The article (in German) can be found here: https://heise.de/-4503079 Content: Most talk is about the next generation of XBox which to me also gives hints with regard to FS2020. Also a little talk about Flght Simulator: After all, he confirmed that Flight Simulator 2020 should also continue to be installable locally and playable offline. However, Greenberg limited: "But to maintain full performance and functionality, you will want to be connected to the internet." (My translation) What ever that means... Many happy landings, DocBird