I find it very hard to believe there are over 2 million cities in the world. What defines a city? For example there are 21 cities in Togo with a population over 7,000 people. There are 30 in Papua New Guinea with a population of over 3,000. Many would consider such small populations as towns or villages. The USA has less than 500 cities with a population over 100,000. Would love to know where all the other hundreds of thousands of cities are....

Wildfires is an interesting one

 

I suppose the benefit of running scenery in the cloud, is they could also calculate events in the cloud.

 

Rather than the home computer trying to calculate and  update an on going wildfire azure can do these calculations.  Then if your in that area and are using live streaming the fire data could be streamed to you.  I wonder if they would do this with animals and trains too.

 

It would save complex calculations on the home computer and would mean each pc if they are running live streaming mode would get all the same data

 

Earth simulator 2020

1 hour ago, Shug said:

I find it very hard to believe there are over 2 million cities in the world.
[...]
Would love to know where all the other hundreds of thousands of cities are....

It's hard to believe because it is not correct. It sounds more like the total number of settlements.

There are only approximately 4,000 cities worldwide with a population of 100,000+.
https://brilliantmaps.com/4037-100000-person-cities/

Alternatively, per a United Nations report on 'World Urbanization Prospects':
"5,334 cities or urban agglomerations were considered (including 1,428 cities of less than 100,000 persons in 2014)"
https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Methodology.pdf
 

5 hours ago, Raymond.Groenendijk said:

Don't you know how big the world is? It would take a really long time to see all the airports (48.000?), let alone the over 2 million cities. If one would visit 10 each day you would only visit 3650 in a year.

Based on the U.N. figure of 5,334, it would be a more manageable 5 cities per day, everyday, for nearly 3 years 😉
 

Edited November 26, 20196 yr by F737NG

7 hours ago, Raymond.Groenendijk said:

Don't you know how big the world is? It would take a really long time to see all the airports (48.000?), let alone the over 2 million cities. If one would visit 10 each day you would only visit 3650 in a year. Nobody would be able to visit all the cities in the world in a realistic manner (by flying to each one). And then you would not only want to visit cities do you? You'll also want to visit mountain ranges, peaks, deserts, atols, bears sleeping in caves, fly along with migrating ducks in your ultra light, fly next to your real live flight in real-time on your laptop... Yeah I can understand his impatience, this sim will probably have more to offer than you may yet understand 😉

 

I'm sorry - but I have no idea what you're talking about and how it relates to the amusing 'banter' we were having about age and patience... 😕

Oh well - maybe I'm getting old...

4 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

This is the most important line in the interview IMHO:

"Basically, we're not doing a flight simulation, we're doing a platform."

 

Agreed!

11 hours ago, Claviateur said:

Very interesting interview... And the planet's animal integration is the best part 🙂

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

 

11 hours ago, bonchie said:

I think a summer 2020 release makes a lot of sense.

It's hard to keep the hype up for a game. With the alphas already starting and hype at a high, I can't see them taking another year to get it to the public. At the very least, we should see an early access release.

They said, they wanna release the SDK half year before release. And next month they wanna release it, so MSFS should be released somewhere in summer, if nothing goes wrong. Ya I think you are right. 🙂

Animals, wildfires etc. OK .

But one thing is regrettably missing In their plans. What about the FBO lounge to shoot the breeze between avatars  ? 

29 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Interesting interview but repeats much of what we already know ... reduce graphic settings to get better FPS but lower visual quality (that's how it is in every other game/simulator).

5-10 years from now it is likely we will not need to stream world terrain/building/geo data at all. 

Technology does change with 20TB HDs (WD and Seagate) in 2020, 30TB 2023, 50TB HDs in 2026 with 100Gbps switches/NICs very cheap, ISP's now say 10Gbps in homes with 100Gbps near future (obviously not everyone on the planet) ..

 

Streaming is not only a technological approach to distribute enormous loads. It is also a means to protect the company against the most common forms of software piracy, is it not ?

40 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Interesting interview but repeats much of what we already know ... reduce graphic settings to get better FPS but lower visual quality (that's how it is in every other game/simulator).

5-10 years from now it is likely we will not need to stream world terrain/building/geo data at all. 

Technology does change with 20TB HDs (WD and Seagate) in 2020, 30TB 2023, 50TB HDs in 2026 with 100Gbps switches/NICs very cheap, ISP's now say 10Gbps in homes with 100Gbps near future (obviously not everyone on the planet) ... so that 2 Petabytes of world data could indeed be available on one's own NAS setup for a consumer affordable price making Azure redundant.

 

While I agree with the speed and HD capacity (if we have HDs at home) in 5-10 years from now, have in mind that 2 Petabytes will be 200 Petabytes in  that very same space of time. Bing, Google earth and apple will continue to expand their earth data to the point that will probably mix with "street view" terms in quality (if they don´t add 360 video at some point).

Cheers

Carlos

18 hours ago, Baber20 said:

Wait. Ray tracing ?? Now that is news. They never confirmed it before.

Every game uses raytracing to some extent; I would not take this as confirmation of raytraced lighting in the sense of RTX.

In a shooting game, what happens when you fire the gun? A ray is traced along a vector in the direction your gun is pointing, if that ray intersects with the position of an enemy, then a hit is registered.

RTX provides specific hardware that can do the vector math for tracing these rays very quickly.

The clouds we have seen in the videos and screenshots, the way to accomplish this is volumetric path tracing. Asobo have stated before they are using DX11 therefore they cannot be using RTX hardware so it would be very computationally expensive. This comment may be refering to an option to turn off the pretty clouds and use the 2D billboards we are used to in current simulators.

Consider the naunces of the word "raytracing" may have been lost in translation.

If seasons are not in FS2020 on release (which hopefully they will be in some format), then I reckon it will be a Summer 2020 release date. It would make less sense without seasons to release a permanent summer flight sim in winter for example. 

1 hour ago, Ikaro said:

Asobo have stated before they are using DX11 therefore they cannot be using RTX hardware so it would be very computationally expensive.

During the interviews at the September preview they made a comment that the game doesn't use raytracing but instead uses an approach that simulates it. I can't remember the details at the moment. I think this mention of raytracing is either a bad translation or a slip of the tongue to mean the "raytracing-like" approach the game is using.

But if they feel there is a 10 year development lifetime for the game, I suspect full raytracing implementation is on the cards once it becomes more consumer gamer mainstream.

2 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

so that 2 Petabytes of world data could indeed be available on one's own NAS setup for a consumer affordable price making Azure redundant.

Azure is also used to extrapolate Bing data and offers you a sim with "Augmented Bing autogen"

3 hours ago, Anders Bermann said:

I'm sorry - but I have no idea what you're talking about and how it relates to the amusing 'banter' we were having about age and patience... 😕

Oh well - maybe I'm getting old...

Ah yes I'm sorry, I guess it didn't come over correctly then, it was meant to be a bit amusing too and should not be taken too serious.