“That’s the thing with flying and flight sims – they’re sometimes perceived as super serious, but flying itself is fun. “I thought that was delightful,” says head of Microsoft flight simulations, Jorg Neumann. Soon after the Australian monolith was discovered, pilots were attempting to land on the rooftop – it became a landmark challenge, a way of showing extreme handling abilities. After our initial shock we realised people understand that the perfect world isn’t possible.”
Our system works pretty well but sometimes you have glitches. “It would take 14 years to fly over the surface. “You can’t do quality assurance on the entire Earth,” says Bossard. As a species, we love myths, we love the idea of mysterious, uncanny places amid a global pandemic that has seriously restricted people’s ability to travel, here was a game that allowed travellers to share fresh experiences and to create new mythologies. Most people weren’t reporting sightings of strange buildings or land formations to complain they were enjoying their discoveries, the sense of finding things in the world that no one else had ever seen. What would serious sim enthusiasts make of these data-driven oddities?Īs it turned out, they loved them. So the Airbus A320 flies like an Airbus A320, and, if you disengage the many pilot assists, you’ll need to be an experienced simmer to take off and land it.
They worked with aircraft manufacturers, pilots and researchers to get the details right.
French studio Asobo had spent several years on the project, with the aim of making the most authentic flight simulation ever constructed.
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“Our first reaction was, oh my God,” recalls lead software engineer Martial Bossard. Roads depicted as rivers, palm trees as eerie stone monoliths, vast chasms with landing strips at the bottom. Very quickly, other anomalies were discovered on the virtual planet – and shared around the community.