Flight Simulator 2020 – New Development Footage | Hacker News Reader

Flight Simulator 2020 – New Development Footage

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I was a child on a Commodore 64 with Flight Simulator. Before school one morning I took off from Chicago, leveled off, and pointed my cesna towards my city - New Orleans. When I got home, to my surprise, it was some 50 - 100 miles away. I took it in for a landing and... nothing. Nothing happens. Still, that was the best nothingness and I remember it to this day.

Looking forward to this version.

Addendum: When my parents took me to purchase my first pc - an ITT XTRA, I got to choose one piece of software to take home with it. Of course it was MS Flight Simulator.

I was introduced to MS Flight Simulator at the same time as my first "PC", the IBM PC jr. Your description of "nothingness" hits home quite well.

Take off was scheduled from boston each night after dinner. Before bed, level off and head towards LAX. Wake up in the morning to find nothing, and nowhere. Rushing home from school to frantically try various radio frequencies until I could find the location on the included maps. This went on for months, because most days the computer would be shut off by my parents before leaving for school.

It would happen that there was one magical day when the plane touched down at LAX, taxied off the runway, and the bliss of pure silence was gifted when the engines were cut off.

Such is an amazing thing.

I had a few friends that all owned MSFS back in DOS days. We used to speculate about flying NY to LA which would have required a refueling stop in Chicago. One guy finally did it. He left the PC running all night and when the plane arrived near LA, the disk drive spun up loading scenery and it woke him up in the wee hours of the night.

Wow, that was a wave of nostalgia. As a younger lad it was a fun game to fly to specific destinations just to see if they were modeled in-game. as I upgraded my flight simulator versions, more and more stuff got added, and it was so much fun to find a location with actual 3D models!

Ah, those days when I was young and there was this veil of mystery to computers I still remember those days. When I was in school my mind was at the sinclair spectrum clone I had at home back then. I remember a similar story on a flight simulator where I was expecting to discover something mapped from the real world and was not aware how limited the simulators were. The mystery was real

I checked the minimum required specs advertised for FS2020 and it made me sad. I have a pretty decent used dell M6800 workstation at home (gen 4 i7, K3100M graphics, 32GB RAM) and I don't know if I'll be able to run it.

Laptop, you have a laptop. Dell calling this a workstation doesnt change reality. Im blown away by someone expecting to play modern games using 7 year old weak laptop GPU. Quadro K3100M is slower than mainstream desktop medium speed GTX 460 from 10 years ago.

Definitely too early to judge, as the product team will eventually optimize the game for the 90th percentile user base recoup the development costs of building this game and maximize sales numbers. If they overshoot the requirements, the available market becomes smaller, which means the price of the game will need to be significant. Another thing to consider - these demos are crafted to be at the highest settings. Expect other rendering options in the final product.

They have not released the minimum specs but I doubt they are targeting people with 20xx RTX cards and an i9. Only the "1%" would be able to use it and they'd lose a ton of money.

Also keep in mind this is designed to run at 60 FPS at 4K on the XBox One X apparently, so you can check what the specs on that box are.

The Xbox One X specs are at [1]. It's basically a custom RX580 and custom Athlon 5370 sharing 12 GB of GDDR5. That gets you a bandwidth of more than 300 GB/s. The parent's mobile system 'only' has 4GB GDDR3 and 100 GB/s graphics memory bandwidth. Bandwidth and capacity will be key to buffer up the high-resolution tile images. You can get a desktop card with similar capacity for around $200, but it looks like you'd either going to need to be the 1%, have an old crypto card, or have a newer PC build.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Hardware_comparison

Remember that even Flight Simulator X was pretty hard to run reasonably at it's release time

This is a game where streaming makes a lot of sense. Necessary specs are very high, storage requirement also for tiles, and latency to the ms isn't a huge concern.

>I checked the minimum required specs advertised for FS2020

I thought there where not yet?

You should check out Geforce Now then! I have been playing on there for more than a year and it's just amazing being able to play on a GPU that powerful. They just released today and it's only 5$ per month.

I just realized that a flight simulator is the perfect kind of thing for the "lower" latency of something like cloud based gaming.

Why even build a PC if you can stream it all? The only issue will be customizability (the modding community).

Looks like it's currently in Alpha though, so hopefully by release those requirements should come down at least a bit assuming they optimise it.

Isn't it coming out for the XBOX One?

It's great to see this great franchise come back from the dead. Will they have a 737 MAX simulator?

Out of stock, unfortunately

It's the Boss Level.

Too soon, my friend

To be honest, I would pay good money for a simulator that could have scenarios for common Air Disaster episodes.

You're in luck -- that exists today!!!!

With the combination of a professional P3D license, weather add-ons, and quality add-on aircraft from companies like PMDG, you really can recreate a lot of those scenarios with exceptional detail. Throw in a high-end VR headset and you can really feel like you are there! Here's an example of me playing around at home ignoring a windshear alert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04FeelpjzvE

Wow, that's pretty cool. Does P3D have native support for VR or are you hacking it in somehow?

Yes, it does in version 4.5, and it is really good.

it looks like it's not natively supported in P3D, but possible with the additional FlyInside [1] software

[1] https://flyinside-fsx.com

that is incorrect; it has native VR support in the current version.

FSX had a couple missions with scenarios like this. "Limited Options" (see: https://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=FSX_Default...) simulated a dual-engine failure on a 737 over the ocean, which required a glide to one of a couple small islands near the Maldives.

Similarly, I enjoyed a mission that required landing a 747 in Singapore during a monsoon. I'm really looking forward to FS2020 and what it'll look like to do the same thing with the graphics enhancements and new weather simulations.

I loved both of those missions! The Singapore mission is so satisfying when flying ILS and then coming out of the clouds right in front of the runway.

I wish ATC/your copilot was as interactive in free flight as it was during the Singapore approach. It made the missions feel much more real when you have some feedback other than text scrolling by in a window.

Many paid and free mods existed to do exactly that. There was even a $20 mod that turned FSX into an airline tycoon game where you purchased aircraft, ran flights, and dealt with emergencies and maintenance of those aircraft

That's in rather poor taste unless you want to use it to learn how to prevent such catastrophes. You wouldn't need to completely replicate a real scenario for that.

Yeah, I bet you if this was available, we could learn more from past accidents.

Maybe challenge scenarios could be included?

"Successfully take off in this helicopter in adverse weather/terrain conditions"

The "too soon" bit gets to me... maybe that's how some people cope.

Flight Simulator 98 (or 95?) already had these. I remember playing one where a small aircraft had to recover from being flipped upside down from following too closely behind a heavy airliner on a landing approach, with limited fuel available. They weren't associated with particular historic disasters, but these days no doubt you'd be able to create and publish your own.

I believe I recall seeing the Gimli Glider scenario in one of the previous versions (Maybe Century of Flight, or FS X?)

If the mission/scenario scripting engine is capable enough, there would probably be lots of scope to build famous (and fictional) failure scenarios.

This is so exciting but the biggest question in my mind is what hardware you'll need to drive all this stuff.

Are they using 3 Nvidia cards in SLI for the demo, or something similarly insane? The 32 GB memory isn't that crazy given how cheap memory is these days.

It is launching on Xbox One as well as PC, and it only has 8GB of RAM and a fairly slow CPU.

The Xbox One version won't look like this, though.

It looks amazing of course but the ocean/lake water looked really off to me, like it was a static texture map and not dynamically moving with waves/currents. I would think it would be easy enough to simulate this in a low cost way with some demo-scene type display hacks so I'm surprised they don't do something like that.

When you're that high, the individual waves and currents are simply not that visible. What you see on the video IS how it actually looks in real life.

As always, whenever you find yourself saying something along the lines "I'm surprised they haven't thought of it...", the odds are they actually have thought about it and that you're wrong. After all, it would be comical for Microsoft to spend so much on dynamic, volumetric clouds and then just throw in the "fluid simulation engine" a.k.a. static textures from Flight Simulator 98.

I noticed that too but also doesn't the ocean just look weirdly static from great heights? Haven't flown in a while, can anyone else confirm that observation?

3mins into the video you can see waves flowing. The narrator mentions the team implementing currents.

I have been a casual flight sim player for a long time, starting in the late 80's with a 286 and Flight Simulator 4. cd c:\fs4, then fs4. In my memory forever.

Back on Prodigy, then AOL, some of us kids partook in what became the first Virtual Airline. I had a knack for coming up with custom planes that flew what we thought the real thing would fly like, and we had a lot of fun. Today the VA hobby is still going, much to my own surprise.

I still fire up FSX with my HOTAS and have fun. I fear my meager GT740 will not run FS 2020, but I guess I'll have to bite the bullet on that. I have to have it. 14 year old geocrasher demands it!

So it's looking like the 2020s are the decade that video game graphics become indistinguishable from real life video.

It's amazingly photo-realistic, but my eye can notice uncanny things. In this case, I notice a grid-like regularity in all the water-wave patterns seen throughout the video. But, still amazing :D

Example: https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=165

Same water when zoomed out: https://youtu.be/Wu4CySB2E6s?t=183

That's pretty realistic IMO. I was up in a float plane in Alaska and remarked at how fake reality looked.

I'm terrified of how excited I am for this. I got huge into aviation and Flight Simulator X, and now I'm worried this will be a huge deviation in design despite looking amazing and exciting. Will I still be able to design and modify custom terrain? Will I have to subscribe to some expensive add on service just to get their streamed ground textures? They say you can cache them for frequently used or favorite areas, what if you let that theoretical subscription lapse? Would you lose all your locations?

Always great to see obsidian ant content get shared. I enjoyed his Elite Dangerous videos a few years ago. Looks like he's branched out a bit.

The clouds kinda looks fake.. too consistently feathery.

I suspect it's more the contrast with the visible aliasing in the textures than the clouds themselves

Flight Simulator was what convinced my father to pull the trigger on an Apple ][+ with Monitor // and disk drive. Only one, but.

Oh those flat mountains. Oh that ziplock packaging. A tear for the old skool!

I've been into various flight simulators since I was a kid. This looks super cool, but I have always been disappointed by how much more effort it seems like goes into pretty graphics than realistic flying (including detailed and realistic aircraft controls). I would prefer rudimentary graphics with extremely accurate flying and controls than the other way around, but I guess I'm alone in that because they always get the flying to "good enough" and then blow out on graphics.

So, X-Plane 11 is pretty detailed for some of its default aircraft (such as the included cessna), including details like fuel mixtures and exhaust gas temperature to consider.

For either prepar3d or X-Plane, you can get addons from third parties with much more detailed planes. Most of them are similarly priced to the simulators themselves (with some, particular the Flight Factor ones for XP11 and PMDG for P3D, being more so), but there are a couple of good pieces of freeware like the Zibo 737 for X-Plane and some decent budget plane addons like the Aerosoft A318/A319/A320/A321 for p3d.

Crashing could be more realistic too. I get the feeling no one else feels this way or no one else should feel this way. They could at least play sad music and give me a lecture a la Police Quest after each crash.

They are working directly with the manufacturers on this simulator, and there is no way Boeing is going to allow "realistic crashes".

This is a flight simulator not a crash simulator.

Very VERY few people buy a Flight Simulator to crash into something. However, failures, like an engine flaming out or gear not extending are perfectly simulateable even in current gen simulators

Well, back in the day, when Flight Simulator was mainly Meigs field and a few other locations, crashing into things, particularly the Sears Tower, was one of the more interesting things to do with it. That and flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. But a crash would just draw a zig-zag line across the windshield to indicate broken glass.

I think part of it is an idea you should be flying "properly" and not making crashes exciting, and part of it may be the same problem licensed racing games have where the licensors don't want their vehicles portrayed as beat up ever.

Maybe a subgame in the genre of Porrasturvat (stair dismount) and Rekkaturvat (Truck dismount)? My 12 year old self would have loved that.

IIRC they removed the crashing post 9/11. You just clipped right through buildings. Have they added that back in?

Maybe have a look at X-plane, or even flightgear. MS flight simulator has always been more on the arcade side of the flight simulation.

https://www.x-plane.com/desktop/how-x-plane-works/ https://www.flightgear.org/about/features/

Not this time around, they have an entire video on the aerodynamics work, it's beyond impressive and beyond X-Plane's "blade element theory".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-opH4f8Qg

Thank you, this is honestly really impressive! However, I must note that the aerodynamic simulation shown at https://youtu.be/Bw-opH4f8Qg?t=405 seems quite close to Xplane's :)

I agree that X-Plane is now better, but I wouldn't say that MSFS were arcade. I don't think they made physics deliberately less unrealistic. FSX engine was sold to Lockheed Martin, which continues development of it as Prepar3D.

Aerodynamics episode from the preview discovery series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-opH4f8Qg

I tried DCS World last week and gave up after 30 minutes, crashing and accidentally ejecting from the planes.

Will I make it more than an hour with this new game?

It depends what you want to do. FS2020 is not going to likely have any kind of combat in it.

I fly both FS2020 alpha and DCS World fairly regularly, obviously the former a lot more in the past little bit. If you'd like help with anything DCS world I'd be more than happy to help out.

This looks amazing and I truly hope it comes with an API. Back in a day when I was working on drone autopilots we were using X-Plane to develop Hardware In The Loop (basically a drone autopilot piloting a simulated aircraft).

Fun times on the tuning side (especially helicopters were tricky) and having a Blackbird fly in an automatic mode was pretty good too!

This is great stuff! I really hope Kids interested in airplanes are fascinated by this and get the same amount of joy I got when I played this through my high school years some 20 years ago. My adventures with Flight Sim ended with FS98 and now it seems the simulation has come a long, long way!

The raindrop effects on the canopy are really impressive. Took me back to my gliding days.

Ran FS X up to a couple of years ago, FS98 before that, all the way back to C64 Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and the Sublogic Flight Simulator.

This looks awesome but CYAC is still my all time favorite. I need a Win10 compatible flight stick, though.

Nice review of the latest update to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Where did the video creator get the original footage from? Can someone point me to an official Microsoft footage?

Seems like he put together the video from small videos off of the official channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqONzeACDBaF6FfKjh7ndAQ/vid... which is linked in the video description.

Thanks!

I've had a lot of fun playing the alpha so far, it runs really nicely on my computer (can't say exact specs but it surprised me how well it runs)

What is the best flight simulator for Linux, today? I read that previous versions of MS Flight Simulator did not work well in Wine.

X-Plane 11 runs on Linux.

I think flight gear is probably the best open source one.

A strong cloud simulation is key here.

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