Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: In the new part, you can go out and roam

Thanks to an interview with the folks at PC Gamer, some new details about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 have been revealed and they don't just look impressive, they're almost paranoid.

Colleagues computer gamers I spoke a little bit with Flight Simulator 2024 boss Jorge Neumann, and what came out of it is simply insane and far surpasses its already impressive predecessor.

In the new installment, you have the opportunity to land and leave your plane to tour the area. “You can now get off the plane and walk around in 2024,” reveals Newman. “You can literally walk down your favorite mountain trail to your favorite cabin in the mountains. Sit by the lake and watch the sunset.”

But the new installment in the series should also push some technical boundaries, not least thanks to Microsoft’s Azure AI. Just listing the features sounds almost crazy. All airports have been revised and new ones added. Every oil rig and every lighthouse in the world plays its part. Every ship in the world will be simulated via transmit and receive signals and you can even land on ships.

There are also hundreds of animal species roaming the world, and even trees are a problem. Newman says Microsoft Flight Simulator is now able to image every tree on Earth. “We have a machine learning system that looks for it, and then we know what the tree is, to the point where we know what species it might be… and then we plant trees, literally trillions of trees,” he explains. “And all of that is in real time, and it’s very accurate.”

The cloud has to ensure that all of this can be done quickly and doesn’t clutter your hard drives. “In 2020, the initial install size is 130GB,” he explains. “Then we have 17 global updates. If you extrapolate that, we have 500GB. Then there are 5,000 add-ons that people have created, which is 2TB… For Flight Simulator 2024, we’ve changed all of that. We’ve decided to go with a thin client architecture, and we’re not ready yet, and we’re shipping in November, but we think we’ll have… I would say 50GB or less, but with a lot more data because we’re outsourcing more to the cloud.”

Sorry. It looks like Asobo wants to create a full simulation of the entire world with the help of Azure and Microsoft. We’ll find out if and how well this works on November 19, when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is released.