Earlier this week, Microsoft Flight Simulator received its latest preview update, including the release schedule for Episodes 6 and 7 of the Feature Discovery Series. Now, one developer for the title has offered an idea of just how in-depth and detailed the simulation will be.
Sven Mestas, Lead Game Designer from Asobo Studio released a diary on Microsoft’s official game YouTube account. According to the developer, the game will feature every single airport on Earth.
We already know Microsoft would roll out the airport red carpet. However, to include every single airport is amazing. 37,000 airports were manually edited with high-resolution Bing Maps scans and Azure tools.
For 80 of the most iconic airports, Microsoft went further and gave them “extra attention”. With these locations, they are fully recreated digitally and have unique properties within the game. For example, extra vegetation around certain airports to mimic how they are in real life.
“In order to reach a new level of reality in flight simulation, we needed a new approach,” explained lead game designer Sven Mestas. “That’s why we decided to innovate by editing airports from real satellite pictures.
“This technique involves editing each airport manually. This means that particular attention to detail has been given to every single one of them to bring them a step closer to reality.”
Recent Update
Last Friday, Microsoft rolled out the latest update for Flight Simulator 2020. Microsoft brough the next two episodes of its Feature Discovery Series to Flight Simulator testers. For Episode 6, Microsoft discusses airports it has developed within the game environment. In Episode 7, the company takes a deep dive into the instrument flight rules (IFR).
It is worth noting Episode 6 will arrive this week while Episode 7 won’t debut until March 5.
