How did Microsoft make Flight Simulator seem so real?

(I guess you could use a simulator to help teach pilotage and dead reckoning... but that normally gets sprinkled in with the other lessons along the way.)

On the other hand, simulators are useful for IFR training, when you're focusing on procedures. But you're not looking at the scenery in that case. ;)

[1] "We are making Microsoft Flight Simulator. Emphasis on the word SIMULATOR." https://www.flightsimulator.com/june-20th-2019/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/269950/XPlane_11/

[3] https://www.x-plane.com/pro/

Now, one could argue the differences between X-Plane and MSFS in terms of realism. From a professional point of view (airline pilot or aerospace engineer,) both are very much in the same general field. Truth is that neither of them meet performance requirements to be used in the kind of certified full motion flight simulators airline pilots use on the job, although both products arguably have components that are useable in those. However, both products are also highly extensible. Just because the out of the box models may not be super detailed doesn't mean an add-on product can't come with its own flight and system models--for instance, PDMG and FlightSimLabs produce airliners for the old FSX and Prepar3D that will outperform most everything on X-Plane from a realism perspective. Expect that their products will be on MSFS2020 in time.

Also, it's important to distinguish between flight model realism and systems realism. Both X-Plane and MSFS add-ons can and do come with their own flight and system models which replace out of the box componentry, but arguably it's the flight models that are more dependent on the capabilities of the base sim. Everyone complaining about the lack of realism in the MSFS stock G1000 implementation should just wait 6-9 months, and surely something better will be out.

From my POV, the new MSFS does 2 extremely impressive, arguably revolutionary things, and the aerospace/aviation industry has taken note: a) The photogrammatry rendering of the whole earth in high fidelity 3D detail, and b,) the representation of the real ATC airspace through leveraging ADS-B (i.e. FlightAware and Flight-Radar 24.) Simulating a single airplane to a high degree of fidelity on desktop hardware is easy. Simulating (I mean truly simulating) an airspace of airplanes is not... ATC in most sims--to date--is scripted, not fully simulated. Piping in the real world (and combining it with live multiplayer) is a very interesting alternative.

It's a fantastic game though, and the satellite imagery AI magic they've done is outstanding.

Which is a stark contrast with MSFS2020 where eye candy and visuals are the primary focus, and realism a distant afterthought.

Most older flight sims used a lookup table for aerodynamic forces, which is gives a pretty decent model for most of the flight envelope. Newer sims do model the airflow around the wings but it's still relatively simple.

Tyre models have similar history, most models are empirical and based on the Pacejka tyre model with some adjustments, not quite a lookup table but some very basic math formulae with no physics behind it. Notable exception is iRacing which has a physically based tyre model based.

But the physical phenomena going on in a deforming, elastic racing tyre are much more complex than a wing cutting through air.

If you conveniently ignore the fact that fs has been around since the 80s.

   > MSFS is a game with nice visuals, use X-Plane if you want a real simulator

However, as a kid in the early 90s, we had upgraded from an 8088 to a 80486, and getting time on the shared, single, computer, was difficult while Dad was training for his pilot's license and later IFR rating using the 80s version of Flight Simulator.

The funny thing is that until recently, it never occurred to me that the intention of Flight Simulator[0] was to be "a game". Now, I'm sure 1985 (or so) Flight Simulator on an 8088 left a lot to be desired as simulators go, but even back then it was "far more than a game".

I remember playing with it after my dad purchased it. The pretty picture on the front/box art gave everything the appearance of being a game. But it was missing one, critical, element. Games, I thought, were supposed to be fun. But outside of a small handful of major airports, which had a few lines to represent landscape, the game was basically "make the small airport disappear into large amounts of gray landscape", dial in the frequency, aim the plane, and then the best part -- when you're done, try make it a car[1].

As a child, I flew with my Dad in his Piper Cherokee probably somewhere in high doubles/low triple digits (over about 5 years). As a kid, I remember my Dad saying something along the lines of: Take-off, Landing and Problems are the only time the pilot is doing anything. Most of the time you aim the plane and wait. My Dad used to keep a 500 ct box of Atomic Fireball candies to keep him awake on long, multi-leg flights.

I have only, briefly, played with the latest Flight Simulator, but I felt like they nailed a lot of the physics engine. I used to love taking my friends with us on trips in the small plane. Where we lived, by about my teen years, all of my close friends had been on at least one commercial (jet) flight, and they all acted macho (the boys, anyway) having flown before (none would admit to a fear of heights at this point). The most intelligent of my friends would start to see their anxiety rise shortly after the hangar was opened. My Dad would hand me this pole to attach to the front landing gear -- so that I could pull the thing out of the garage. I was all of 145 pounds soaking wet, so watching me pull a larger-than-a-car-sized object that seats 7 with one arm and no physical exertion is the first sign that it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Shortly after, when my Dad asks for everyone's weight, the new passenger is confronted with the fact that "the plane is so light that everyone's safety partly depends on where I sit in this thing". If they aren't scared, yet, the next chance is about ten minutes after take-off, when my Dad would usually make a comment over the headphones about how smooth the air is -- I'm not sure if he was always being sarcastic, but "a smooth flight" was usually about as bad as the worst turbulence I've experienced on a commercial jet. So depending on how long we had planned on flying that day, my buddy now realizes this is as safe as they're going to feel.

The best description I've heard of it is that it feels like you're sitting in a kite. It's a kite that can be controlled, safely[2], but you feel every gust of wind and you can't help get the feeling like mother nature is getting annoyed with you and might just decide to slap you out of the air, much like we would do to an annoying fly... and that it would take very little effort on her part.

[0] In reference to the original MS Flight simulator from the 80s/90s -- there are many flight simulation games out there, but the point of these games is usually "to use a plane for war/combat/other traditional game purpose". The physics engines of these kinds of games are far simpler and sometimes feel like the plane is flying through loose snow rather than air -- i.e. like a ski/snowboard simulation game that includes "up/down" and reacts more slowly to turns than "being firmly attached to the ground" but not so slowly that you feel completely at the mercy of the wind.

[1] Also known as "landing" -- on that version, if memory serves, a good landing was characterized by a high-pitched "chirp" (implying the wheels hit the ground) and you could roll around on the ground. If you didn't stick the landing, the plane just stopped dead wherever it touched the ground (I think a "game over/start again" screen popped up but I'm not sure).

[2] I've written a few stories about the kinds of fun my Dad has experienced flying -- he was a "private pilot" in that he was not licensed to charge people to take them places, but he flew multiple times per week as a sales manager/owner of his company. He hated flying if he wasn't the pilot (commercial or otherwise) because he'd been through enough trouble in the air (and handled the problems successfully) that he had greater confidence in his abilities to handle problems than "a person he didn't know who was in charge of his life". I had always thought we were trying to save money, but it was far more expensive to fly the small plane (alone) than commercial.

That's bizarre. CIFP has every approach in the country. They'd have to actually remove approaches to be missing any.

To take it to an extreme: If Adobe started from scratch and released a new shiny Photoshop that looked good but had the features of MS Paint would people see it as moving backwards or "give it time, third parties will re-add missing features"?

In normal flight, the models are easy. However, in more unusual flying modes (eg stalls, spins, etc) its very hard to model a specific aircraft behavior vs a generic one. I have experience flying several models and a stall in Citabria (tiny aerobatic high wing) is very different than a stall in much bigger Bonanza. X Plane gets some (not all) of it right while MSFS doesn’t even trying it seems.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/752590/A_Plague_Tale_Inno...

so could be used for flight sims and.... maybe an rts? You're not using that is as for e.g. driving games or fps games, and crunching Street view data into something usable would require processing and storing a lot more data

While I stand corrected on lookup tables, the author does make a point on how his personal experience of flying the same aircraft as he does IRL does not compare to in-sim experience with MSFS, and does with XP. I saw similar feedback elsewhere, Wikipedia mentions it too in their reception section. If they actually implemented a sound physics model, this potentially could be addressed by tweaking it in future updates, so there’s hope.

For the record, I only bought XP11 itself for about $60 (no paid add-ons) and am flying the default Cessna. Most pro simmers appear to be invested in third-party aircraft for both sims, so I don’t know if there is so much unfounded bias.

* It's impossible to snap roll, even in the aerobatic planes.

* It's impossible to enter a flat spin, even with aft CG well past allowed limits.

* Spin recovery is automatic simply by neutralizing the rudder, no PARE needed, ever.

* Single-engine handling is incredibly benign in all the twins, even below Vmca.

I'm not a pilot, but I've spent a lot of time in other simulators. I can't reconcile FS2020's stall behavior with any of what I read in books.

Google Earth is a favorite software, too!

Might Google consider hiring another flight simulator team to compete with Asobo and Microsoft?

Nice article on this topic:

https://www.novatech.co.uk/blog/microsoft-flight-simulator-2...

When FS2020 came out, I had an i9-9900K, 32 GB of RAM, and a GTX 1070. With the detail settings I run at (pretty high, and in 2560x1440), I was getting around 25 fps flying over NYC. The FPS display told me it was taking about 20 ms of CPU time per frame, meaning even with unlimited GPU power, I'd cap at 50 fps.

Sure enough, I upgraded to an RTX 3080, which has well over double the horsepower of my GTX 1070, and I only went to 40-45 fps flying over that same area with the same detail settings.

What kind of sucks about being CPU-bound is that it means nVidia's DLSS technology won't improve framerates at all. At best, they could create motion-smoothing to generate frames between rendered frames, similar to what a TV does, but doing so introduces latency, since the software needs to gather 2-3 frames (possibly more) to analyze for motion and generate intermediate frames. And of course, just like a TV, this could break down badly when the algorithm fails.