PCGamer conducted an interview with Jorge Neumann, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the game sounds incredibly ambitious.
In an extensive interview, PCGamer spoke with Mr. Neumann, the head of the franchise, about the improved technology that makes this 2024 version of the title worth its price. When asked about bugs, Mr. Neumann said:
“(MSFS 2020) is built in layers, that’s basically how I think of it. We get aerial imagery, typically in the form of satellite imagery and aerial imagery of the whole Earth. We update that every three years, basically the whole Earth is updated because it all comes from a collaboration with Bing Maps. And then we have something we call the digital elevation map, which is essentially the elevation field.
“You get that from LIDAR scans. You fly airplanes over the surface and you get a LIDAR image. And that elevation data is often 50 centimeters or a meter, so you get a point for every meter. So you get a really good representation of the Earth, and that’s the basis. And we fix those errors.”
For those of us worried about client size, the team has put a lot of work into making the initial installation easier as long as you can stream from the cloud:
“In 2020, the initial install is 130GB. Then we have 17 world updates. If you extrapolate that, we’re at 500GB. And then there are 5,000 add-ons that people have created, which I think is two terabytes. So if you really want all that stuff, that’s a pretty big install.
“For Flight Simulator 2024, we’ve changed all that. We’ve basically decided to go with a thin client architecture and we’re not done yet. We’re shipping in November, but we think we’ll be… I’d say 50GB or less, but with tons more data because we’re moving more to the cloud.”
The interview contains much more and is worth reading: HERE
