What a flight simulator. What a flight simulator

But that’s not all, simulating flight is a very expensive hobby and requires many other peripherals such as a good track IR, joystick, throttle and rudder pedals.

10 reasons why Microsoft Flight Simulator is a complete game changer

One sim to rule them all, one sim to bind them? TIM ROBINSON FRAeS is taking a critical look at the latest 2020 reboot of Microsoft’s long-running Flight Simulator series. Why is it so important?

Recommended system specifications (high graphics):

  • Operating system: Windows 10
  • Processor: Intel i5-8400 | AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 | AMD Radeon RX 590
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Memory: 150 GB of free space

Steam £ 59 Standard / £ 79.99 Deluxe / £ 109.99 Premium Deluxe

The big news is that PC flight simulation is that after 14 years the software giant Microsoft has returned to flight simulation – a genre it first launched in 1982.

Its latest offering, developed by French game studio Asobo, includes 30 Premium Deluxe edition planes, from the Zlin Savage Cub and Cirrus SR22 to the A320neo and 787 Dreamliner. Meanwhile, more than 37,000 airports and airports around the world are modeled – with 40 handcrafted ones, including global hubs such as JFK, Heathrow and Dubai in Premium Deluxe, as well as smaller but iconic ones such as Courchevel, Gibraltar and Aspen.

But why is this version causing such confusion? Let’s look at the top ten reasons why.

1) The entire world to explore in VFR flight

Athens and Acropolis in MSFS – notice how autogen’s AI gives buildings typical Mediterranean whiteness.

Microsoft’s last flight simulator, FSX, was released in 2006, and despite the additions and spin-offs (FSX: Steam Edition, Lockheed Martin P3D and the ill-fated Dovetail Games entry), a leap in PC graphics, computing power in the past 14 years meant Asobo was able to produce a really new flight sim that is not only the best looking simulator available, but also arguably the best looking video game out there. Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish from the real photo in screenshots.

The key to its attractiveness is the way it handles scenery that allows low-level VFR flights anywhere in the world, but using Microsoft Azure Cloud AI, Bing aerial and satellite imagery, and Black Shark AI to create an immersive and highly realistic world – it is so detailed that you will be able to find your street and home.

The photo or satellite scenery is not new, but it used to be limited to 2D overlays on 3D terrain meshes. In recent years, simulators like FlyInside and social add-ons like X-planes OrthoXP have tried to combine generic autogenous buildings with satellite imagery, with varying results as one style of architecture looks completely out of place in other parts of the world. By using AI, you can teach your Sim to interpret, recognize, and render their shape, not only houses, apartments, and factories, but also to know that the Middle East apartment will be different from the Los Angeles suburb and apply the details. The result is captivating with red tiled roofs in Italy, slums in Mumbai, chalets in Switzerland and so on.The night lighting has also been carefully color-matched, so that the British city at night looks different than, for example, Singapore.

About 300 cities (such as New York, Las Vegas) also use additional photogrammetry, which uses low-level oblique aerial photos taken from different angles to construct a virtual 3D model of the city. This means that in New York, for example, if you fly low enough, you can recognize billboards on the sides of buildings.

However, the biggest obstacle to the use of high-resolution satellite imagery in flight simulations to date has been disk space on human computers. A solution (also used by FlyInside) is to stream data directly from cloud servers – allowing simulators to fly over any part of the world in incredible detail. There are two petabytes of satellite data in Microsoft’s cloud system that cover the entire planet. (One petabyte equals 100,000 GB). This of course requires a persistent online connection to work properly, but the simulation can be run offline, in which case it falls back to an FSX style “autogenize” scenery.

However, this doesn’t mean the scenery is perfect and you can have fun finding glitches in the terrain and rendering, including the giant Melbourne tower, vertical roads and buildings that AI renders as vegetation. Artificial intelligence in particular seems to have difficulty recognizing bridges, cranes, antennas and vertical objects – church towers are lacking in, for example, the UK and northern Europe. There are also greater oversights. The date of the photo means some very new big airports like Istanbul and Beijing are also missing – until developers or third parties add them.

In this virtual world, users can customize countless criteria including flight control sensitivity, time of day, weather conditions, and the view of the plane and its surroundings.

January 13th, 2022 Development Update

january 13, 2022 | Published by Microsoft Flight Simulator Team

Have a question for the development team? There are two important questions and answers coming soon, and now it’s time to submit your questions. See the dates for our upcoming questions and answers.

January 6th, 2022 Development Update

january 6, 2022 | Published by Microsoft Flight Simulator Team

Happy New Year is cooking! It’s great to come back. We hope you enjoyed your vacation. For early 2022, this morning we released build 1.21.18.0, now available for PC and Xbox. If you participated in the public beta, click here to learn how to exit the preview smoothly.

As you can see, there’s a flight sim that is perfect for you no matter what your budget or type of experience you’re looking for. From stunts to warfare to flying games, there is a flight simulator to suit every taste and style.

13th International Symposium on Process Systems Engineering (PSE 2018)

Punitkumar Bhavsar,. Rajagopalan Srinivasan, in Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, 2018

2 Experimental methodology and data analysis

We conducted an experiment with two participants who voluntarily participated in the study and acted as a flight simulator pilot. Participants are graduates who have no previous experience with a flight simulator and its operation. The simulator consists of one training task followed by actual experimental tasks. Participants can repeat training tasks until they are ready to perform actual experimental tasks. The experimental tasks include the take-off phase, the flight phase and the landing phase of varying degrees of difficulty. The difficult tasks consist of landing in a hilly area (task 2 and task 3) or in an urban area with a quiet position of the runways (task 4), while the easy task is landing in the coastal zone with a relatively lower requirement of adequate height control (task 1). Each participant completed all four tasks five times using eye tracking. A standard nine-point calibration is presented prior to the commencement of the experimental tasks to ensure the quality of the gaze and pupil data collection. Eyesight and pupil data are collected at 120 Hz using the Tobii TX300 eye tracking system.

the pupil diameter collected as a time series is first processed to remove blink artifacts. Subsequent invalid pupil size entries for more than 100 ms are treated as batting and removed for further analysis. This is followed by the computation of the spectrogram of valid student data entries using Matlab. A moving window of 720 samples with an overlap of 700 samples is selected for the calculation of the spectrogram. The values ​​of the power levels at different frequency components in each time window are taken into account to calculate the area under the power spectral density. The power levels in the frequency bands 0 to 0.7 Hz are added to manipulate the metric value for each window. The measure is then normalized with respect to its maximum and minimum values ​​in all tasks performed by the participant.

Motion Analysis

Kuang-Hua Chang, in e-Design, 2015

8.6.3 Driving Simulators

Multiple measurements can be made cost-effectively. Scientists and engineers believe that the resulting measurements could help them predict equivalent real-world measurements that lead to a better understanding of the complex driver-vehicle-road interaction in critical road situations. The results of such studies will ultimately lead to a reduction in the number of road traffic deaths and injuries on national highways.

The high-fidelity audio subsystem completes the driving experience. The driver is immersed in the picture, sound and movement so real that impending accident scenarios can be convincingly presented without the driver being put at risk.

Figure 8.38. National Advanced Driving Simulator: (a) a dome on top of a rails-mounted movable platform, and (b) a vehicle cabin and image projection inside the dome.

The key technology in the driving simulator is dynamic vehicle simulation in real time (Bae and Haug 1987). The driver’s interaction with the system via the steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals is registered by sensors and electronics. The signals are converted into inputs to the underlying dynamic vehicle model. The equations of motion of a dynamic vehicle model must be solved faster than in real time so that the actuators under the Stewart platform can perform thrusts or pulls that mimic different driving conditions. Meanwhile, the simulation results produce large longitudinal and transverse deviations which are used to provide the driver inside the vehicle with acceleration and motion cues. Without real-time dynamic simulation, the driving experience cannot claim

In this section, we’ll go over the airplane types in Microsoft Flight Simulator and give you some ideas about when and why you should use them.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there’s a flight sim that is perfect for you no matter what your budget or type of experience you’re looking for. From stunts to warfare to flying games, there is a flight simulator to suit every taste and style.

So while we may not all be able to jump on a plane now, you can boot up your computer or video game console and go to new places around the world.

And until we can travel again, these simulated flying experiences will have to suffice.

Frequently asked questions

What are flight simulators?

The flight simulator is a kind of simulation video game that tries to mimic the real experience of piloting and aviation. Players can take over the cockpit of their favorite aircraft to practice air maneuvers or take part in combat exercises, all with extremely realistic graphics with original cockpit interfaces and air terrain.

How much do flight simulators costs?

Overall, the games themselves can cost you anywhere from

16 comments

There is also a small combat flight sim called DCS World that you did not include in the combat flight simulators.

Yes, a little thing is easy to forget 🙂

In fact, it seems the age of really good flight simulators is over.
I’m old enough to remember the Red Baron and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, now ancient DOS games that required the creative use of the precious 640KB of conventional RAM.
They were primitive but fun.
In my opinion, the first real breakthrough game in the combat flight simulator was IL2 Sturmovik. Undoubtedly, a great deal of its charm was that it introduced a hitherto unknown field to Soviet aircraft, but otherwise it was so far stunning.
But, unfortunately, everything is falling apart.
I remember getting what I thought was a descendant of IL2 with Cliffs of Dover, but I was never able to get the game running properly on any computer (and my systems, even now, are solid enough to meet the system requirements). Perhaps in my youth, I would have spent thousands of hours of research tweaking my system to get the software running, but time becomes more valuable as I get older. I was hoping the next iterations could turn out to be better by buying the CLoD Blitz, but even there I found that it doesn’t handle the joystick easily.
Simply put, the whole flight sim thing has gotten more of a hassle than it should be. And subsequent games like War Thunder and World of Warplanes just come out as cheap arcade versions.
I would turn all the great graphics into pure SWOTL fun in the DOS version.

SWOTL is a real benchmark. The cartoon graphics were amazing! The way you could change positions in the B17 to fend off enemy interceptors was brilliant! The sounds were made right. The gameplay itself sets the bar (for me) in terms of simulating air fights. You are the first and only one I’ve seen talking about SWOTL. I was 14 at the time. Do you remember the wheel decoder? I lost mine and rode my bike to Office Depot, fully prepared for a fork of over $ 20. The seller actually opened the box and gave me a code wheel for free. The funny thing is my dad suspected I stole it. He had a hard time believing that a stranger who was an employee opened the game and gave me the decoder itself for free.
Today I am 44 years old and a father of two boys. They’re good, but if they came with a story about open goods and a seller who broke the product just to help .. yes, I understand my dad’s disposition…
Sorry to keep bothering you. You talked me into that scream. I feel happy knowing this story because I have never talked about it before.
PHANOTEK’s FYI GUNSHIP III on the playstore and GUNSHIP SEQUAL WW2 are at your fingertips.

I remember spending time in RS. I was amazed to see the DOS based FS1 flight simulator. I bought it right away even though I didn’t have a computer to run it finally got a computer and enjoyed this wire frame simulator for hours. I was at least and bought a lot of flight simulators after that, with lots of purchases of newer and faster computers. I love this hobby.

I played the Janes f18, which in my opinion was the best flight sim in the late 90s after playing the others, but the DCS world takes a lot of detail from the Janes f18 and takes hornets to a whole different level of detail, graphics and realism. I can’t get enough of the DCS world. Best of the Best and probably by a good margin. Continue the excellent work of Eagle Dynamics. I believe that I am speaking on behalf of the majority of flight sim enthusiasts.

up to $ 80. The price is primarily determined by the level of authenticity and expansiveness that the game provides. With that being said, there are some other costs beyond the game itself that aviation enthusiasts choose to purchase for a more realistic gaming experience. These devices include joysticks, virtual reality headsets, and home dashboards.

What is the best flight simulator?

It really depends on what kind of experience you are looking for and the price you are willing to pay for it. Many aviation and flight simulation enthusiasts claim that X-Plane 11 is the best all-in-one flight sim, but the game offers no combat experience. If that’s what you’re looking for, then maybe you prefer a sim like War Thunder or one of the other combat simulators we’ve listed.

What do I need to play a flight simulator?

Flight simulators can be played on many different devices. Depending on the platform the game is running on, you will need a video game console such as Playstation 4 or Xbox One, or a PC / Mac with a sufficiently powerful graphics card and processor (depending on the complexity of the simulation).

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About Jarrod West

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The simulator has the potential to inspire not only pilots, but also engineers, designers, AI experts and those who were captivated by this flight presentation.

Hori HOTAS Flight Stick

Hardware peripherals for PlayStation seem to be slightly different than their Xbox and PC counterparts. It is no different in aviation poles. From Hori, the makers of great sticks, this HOTAS Flight Stick allows PS4 owners to put their hands on the stick and joystick. It is also PC compatible, so it might be the only flight stick that will meet all your needs. Just remember that you cannot play Microsoft Flight Simulator on your Sony PlayStation.

Best for the Thrustmaster midrange

Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X

For a slightly more affordable Thrustmaster price, consider the T.Flight HOTAS X midrange. While it’s made of plastic, it’s hard to worry about as you like turning the Z-axis to steer the rudder (something the HOTAS Warthog misses unless you have external pedals) and a clever, detachable throttle for a more convenient setup.

Best for skill games

The game features realistic cockpits of dozens of different airplane models and detailed 3D scenery for over 13,000 “live” airports around the world.

Fly Like an Eagle

To create high-fidelity Flight Simulator, Asobo scanned the actual airframes, inside and out, relying on the Artec Leo 3D scanner, which provides a half-millimeter resolution. Players see versions of these actual planes, right down to scratches on the windows and cuts on the levers. Asobo also captured the full spectrum of the aircraft’s interior and exterior acoustics, including cockpit echoes caused by falling rain or snow. The team carefully studied the aerodynamics of each aircraft, simulating air interactions with 1,306 aircraft surfaces, and developed a flight control system. “All planes have been checked with professional pilots who have flown these planes for many hours or test pilots from manufacturers to make sure they are inspected exactly as they should,”Asobo Studio founder and CEO Sebastian Wloch said in the Flight Simulator episode” Discovery Series “on the aerodynamics of virtual airplanes. In other words, when sim-pilots try to yank and tilt the A320, they will get exactly the same response as if they were flying a real plane.

flight simulator control

Many third-party add-ons – yokes, throttles, and joysticks – are available to help gamers go beyond the old mouse and keyboard.

Simulating the World

Like Asobo scanned individual planes, the team used high-resolution satellite imagery, aerial imagery and, in many cases, detailed photogrammetric data from Bing Maps to recreate the globe. The size of this dataset, which is constantly updated and expanded, is now three petabytes (and growing). Most of the data is vertical (looking straight down), but some are diagonal and all are two-dimensional. To present this information in three dimensions and ensure visual continuity, the Flight Simulator team decided to use the services of the Austrian company Blackshark.ai, which employs 50 computer specialists who developed proprietary machine learning algorithms that they introduced to Microsoft Azure cloud computing service. Initially, he helped along with human input, Blackshark’s systems have finally learned to render and color all aspects of the planet, including determining the height of trees (all 1.5 trillion), removing cloud shadows from aerial photography when appropriate, and providing accurate colors. The end result is Earth, a planet rendered to a resolution of at least three feet, with the most populous 300,000 square miles, even more accurate, with a resolution of 3 to 10 inches, including 58,000 square miles (mostly a city) rendered in such detail virtually walkable in the streets, 000 square miles rendered even better, with a resolution of 3 to 10 inches, including 58,000 square miles (in most cities) rendered with such detail that you can practically walk the streets. 000 square miles rendered even better.

VR headset flight simulator

For a truly immersive experience, users can play Flight Simulator with a virtual reality headset.

(The word must also include fantastic exterior and interior graphic models of all included default planes – which in some cases are indistinguishable from the real thing.)

How to fly anywhere

One of the most exciting aspects of Microsoft Flight Simulator is the ability to fly anywhere in the world. Taking to the skies over some of the world’s most beautiful views – and even over your home – is simple, but there are a few things you should know first.

Most of the world’s most important landmarks are POIs. If your goal is to check out famous places or natural wonders, just search for them in World Map / Free Flight.

Searching for a landmark in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Photo: Asobo Studio / Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

If your destination is a famous landmark, you can easily find it using the search function on the map screen in Free Flight mode. Once the location has been found, the map will zoom in on it, allowing you to set it as either your departure point or your arrival point. In our guide to finding famous landmarks, we recommend setting Points of Interest as arrival points and locating the appropriate departure airport.

How to use Active Pause

Active Pause is a feature you may have seen on the loading screen, but it’s not tied to any key, so you may not know how to use it.

The active pause information screen in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Photo: Asobo Studio / Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

An active pause allows you to stop the movement of the plane and look around. Hitting the normal pause menu by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard or pause on your controller brings up the options, obscuring everything else. However, if you want to pause the action and look around, you need to associate the Active Pause function with a key.

The Control key works fine as the game doesn’t use it and is located at the bottom of the keyboard for quick and easy access.

Great Pyramids in Microsoft Flight Simulator

I was only able to take this photo from Active Pause Image: Asobo Studio / Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

We directed the above shot with an active pause. With this feature enabled, we oriented the external camera (by pressing the View button on our Xbox One controller) and set the sun’s position to the correct height by changing the weather settings in the toolbar.

This feature is also great if you’re trying to find your home and need to take a moment to look around to locate it.

Have fun with the ATC options

Be sure to check ATC Options before you set off on your flights. Changing these air traffic control settings won’t have much of an effect on your flight, but they will allow you to have a bit of fun with the radio messages you hear while in flight.

ATC options in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Photo: Asobo Studio / Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

Whatever you write as the tail number will appear on the back of your plane. Here you can add some letters or numbers. It doesn’t make any difference, but it’s nice to see your name or favorite numbers stamped on the side of the plane.

Your call sign is usually a set of identification marks that the air traffic control team will use to identify you by radio. Any letters you use in your callsign will be called using the phonetic alphabet, but if you write in a short word, chances are they’ll say so instead. Short names and words work great, although we’ve found that bad language is replaced with a generic callsign.

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