It would be amazing if they could turn Flight Simulator into a "game engine", so that other developers can build specific scenarios/games on top of it!
Imagine Flight Simulator with all the creativity of Minecraft. That would be awesome.
https://cesium.com/blog/2021/03/30/cesium-for-unreal-now-ava...
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
Something _similar_ happens for Digital Combat Simulator in that third party developers can develop modules for the base game engine (so far it is mostly aicraft but there are 1st party ground units and a 3rd party has indicated interest in building a relistic Integrated Air Defense Network simulator on it as well).
Not quite "A world simulator you can do whatever you want with to minecraft levels" though.
That's already the case. There's a huge ecosystem of hand-crafted airports, airplanes that are true to every little switch, etc.
Microsoft's flight simulators are an open platform like Windows and are meant to be extended. Hundreds of products have been already released (example[1]) for the new Flight Simulator, and there's a thriving freeware scene[2]. You can of course only use Paint and Internet Explorer, but then you'd be missing out. This also negates criticism towards the simplicity of included airplanes. Not happy with the A320? Install open source A320 expansion[3] and enjoy the ridiculous level of detail[4] it brings.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPO5_ky0xJk
They did, back in 2007 in a product called Microsoft ESP, which became Lockheed-Martin's Prepar3D when Microsoft's ACES Studio was shut down in 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Loc...