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posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 03 2020, @01:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-forget-your-preflight-checks dept.

How Microsoft Flight Simulator returned to the skies:

Let's play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the '90s at least, I would have immediately answered "Flight Simulator." Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad's lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. It is one of Microsoft's all-time iconic brands.

It's also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received.

In just a few weeks, though, Microsoft is releasing perhaps the biggest upgrade to the series in its 38-year history. The new title, developed by French studio Asobo and simply called Microsoft Flight Simulator, is an ambitious attempt to leverage Microsoft's Bing Maps data and Azure-powered procedural generation technology to render our planet in unprecedented detail.

I've been playing a pre-release alpha version for a couple of weeks, and it's frankly astonishing. This is a full-throttle effort from Microsoft to re-create the natural world and the magic of flight. And while it carries the weight of an iconic series, it feels like it came from nowhere. Why is Microsoft reviving Flight Simulator now?

So my dear Soylentils, how many of you have played Microsoft Flight Simulator and if so, what did you think?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @05:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2020, @05:02AM (#1030584)

    It was vector graphics with either no outside traffic, or some fighter planes that mostly showed up as dots on the screen. It had much more interesting taxing and airport behavior compared to other sims, but much less 'fun' activities, as I remember it. Ace of Aces, Battle of Britain, and a few others were all much more impressive both during the same era and a few years after.

    Ace of Aces did a lot more with the limited capabilities of the C64 than Flight Simulator did, but it was still quite an impressive piece of work for the era. The sound of the engines in particular, while low fidelity still causes me flashbacks any time I hear the right pitch of engine flying above me today.