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Flight Simulator 2024's huge ambition means 'you can now exit the plane, walk around… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment'

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/flight-simulator-2024s-huge-ambition-means-you-can-now-exit-the-plane-walk-around-you-can-land-on-every-ship-and-it-looks-like-a-first-person-shooter-environment/

Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorge Neumann talks about the tech behind MSFS 2020, and some astonishing-sounding features coming in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

Flight Simulator 2024's huge ambition means 'you can now exit the plane, walk around… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment'

16 comments

executivechimp

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Simulator 2024.

tiredofsametab

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Scope creep: this time we're sure it won't be a disaster at all.

Really neat if they could pull it off and have it not ruin anything else in the game, though I think I'd want any social stuff to be optionally enabled rather than always on.

EasternLettuce

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MSFS has been a resounding success so I see no reason for this pessimism

danekrae

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And it will only take up one measly petabyte.

narc0tic_bird

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According to the article they're expanding on their cloud-based streaming tech, aiming to reduce the local base install from >100 GB to ~50 GB.

So what's actually downloaded is probably just the airplanes and a very low detail version of the planet, streaming data in over the internet as you fly (or now also walk I guess).

Blizzard

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This means it requires constant internet connection for a single player game.

PonyOfWar

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It'll likely be like 2020, you can play offline but it'll be a much less detailed version of the planet. They pretty much have to use streaming for the high-detail environments, as nobody would have the disk space for it otherwise.

akwd169

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Well I certainly have several hundred GB to spare for a game like this. Why don't the common folk? You mean not everyone has more than 16tb total storage in their PC nowadays?? Why not??

Seriously though, all that space for activities, it's liberating, yet somehow I still manage to fill it up quite fast

Edit:

For MSFS 2020 -

In 2020, the initial install is 130 GB. Then we have 17 world updates. If you calculate it up, we're at 500 GB. And then there are 5,000 add ons that people have made, which I think are two terabytes. So if you really want to get all this stuff, it's a pretty big install.

Wow I would have to dedicate almost half an entire 4tb drive to 2020... I'm still down for that but I'll have to shift some stuff around heh...

lolcatnip

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For most games that's a ridiculous requirement but it makes a lot of sense in this case.

ohwhatfollyisman

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wouldn't those funds be better invested into developing a hard mode that makes you fly only boeing aircraft?

MegaUltraChicken

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"This new mode lets you rescue stranded astronauts in space"

MossyFeathers

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Next they need custom player models.

Imagine if Flight Simulator 2024 ended up being the sleeper killer social app of the decade. How surreal would that be? Like, if you showed me that screenshot without context, I'd think I was looking at a new hitman or second life: third life or something.

Edit

"The way I think of this now, it really just comes down to, how good is the data we get, and how much are we throwing at it. I mean, for example, I'm currently on the, I call it the living world. We added hundreds of species of animals that run around. I worked on things like Zoo Tycoon…we have tons more animals than the native zoo game, and it's just a tiny little feature in Flight Simulator, but it feels like, oh yeah, we can do that.

"Right now, we have every ship on Earth, right? Every ship on Earth sends us a transponder signal… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment. I think we're in a new era of making games that I think are going to break new ground, from a scale and complexity perspective."

Dude, what are you actually trying to make right now? Like, this isn't flight sim stuff anymore.

notabot

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Dude, what are you actually trying to make right now? Like, this isn't flight sim stuff anymore.

It'll only be done when you can get out of your plane, walk around, find a computer and start playing Flight Simulator 2024.

PoopDelivery

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Sounds ambitious as fuck but it would be amazing if the pull if off and it's fun to play.

rc__buggy

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Whatever. Fix VR.

jerkface

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Oh, so it's like Flight Gear several years ago. Well, keep working!

Etterra

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Oh I can't wait for the YouTubers to play this with combat mods.