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Unfortunately only a simulation: Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva
Photo: Microsoft
With the new edition of the Flight Simulator presented in 2020, Microsoft has apparently hit a nerve.
Two weeks after the start of sales, the company reported one million players, and by Christmas it was already two million.
Market researchers sensed a billion dollar business, Microsoft is trying hard to keep gamers and fans of the simulator engaged with updates.
The core of this strategy are the so-called world updates.
About every two months the group publishes such a software package that improves the representation of a world region and updates extraordinary buildings and sights in great detail.
The USA made the start, followed by Great Britain, Japan, France and the Scandinavian countries.
World Update 6, with Germany, Austria and Switzerland, will now follow suit at the start of the Gamescom game fair.
In an interview with SPIEGEL, the development chief from Germany, Jörg Neumann, said that new satellite images and altitude data are the basis for the update, which is supposed to completely change the look of the region in the flight simulator and make it much more realistic.
A number of cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, including Frankfurt, Wuppertal, Basel, Vienna and Graz, as well as around 100 sights and several airports were recreated on the computer by a team of 30 to 40 specialists.
The secret is in the data
Sometimes, however, third-party companies also helped, albeit not always on purpose.
When planning the Germany update, Neumann noticed that the German software company Aerosoft, which offers airplanes and airports as add-ons for the flight simulator, is working on a 3D version of Stuttgart.
On the spur of the moment, he convinced the company's managing director to develop the digital city for Microsoft instead and to integrate it directly into the software with Update 6.
He doesn't talk about the cost of it.
But it is about the fact that a large part of the work was simply done by integrating improved data sources.
Among other things, the representation of the Alps should benefit from this.
With the new data, however, the display is accurate to within one to two meters, which should make flights through the mountains more realistic than before, says Neumann.
Apparently it was helpful that Switzerland put its terrain data online for free use in March 2021.
Bush trips and landing challenges
Often, however, 3D designers also had to lend a hand.
For example, cranes that have been incorporated into the digital model from satellite images have to be repaired by hand.
Neumann says that one employee per depicted city spends about a month doing such fine work in 3D.
In addition to the improved display of the three countries, the update also brings new so-called landing challenges.
These are competitions in which simulator pilots try to land as perfect as possible at certain airfields under given conditions.
One of these challenges will be to land on the Helgoland-Düne airfield.
In addition, there will be four new so-called Bush trips, pre-planned flights where amateur pilots can get to know a country on long, multi-part flights with small propeller planes.
A classic car moves in
He himself started planning the Germany update a year and a half ago, says Neumann.
A big problem for him was to choose which objects should be reproduced in the simulator in particular detail.
He calculates that there are 18 Bundesliga teams in Germany, as well as 18 second division and 20 third division.
Of which of these should the stadiums be reproduced in detail?
It was apparently easier to clarify the question of which aircraft Microsoft will use to keep its promise to bring historical aircraft into the simulator.
It starts with the Junkers Ju 52, a three-engine machine with corrugated iron planking, which was put into service in the early 1930s.
Neumann promises more oldies will come with later updates.
Gigantic updates
However, the update will not be released until September 7th.
Normally a world update is two to three gigabytes in size, but for the last update with the serial number 5, flight enthusiasts had to download up to 40 gigabytes from the network.
Depending on your internet connection, this can take hours or days.
That update was so big, however, because the entire database was optimized for it in order to improve the performance of the software.
He doesn't think future updates will be that big again.
Another factor contributing to this is that 3D cities, for example, are not included in the updates, but are loaded from the cloud when flying.
For this to work smoothly, however, you need a fast internet connection.
