Microsoft Flight Simulator is actually inspired by two cosy Nintendo franchises
WHEN the team at Microsoft were thinking about how to make Flight Simulator more immersive they were immediately drawn to the animals.
Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, called up his former colleagues from Frontier, and asked if he could use some of their animals.
Frontier counts Planet Zoo among the games in its library, and those zoo animal models will help bring the world of Flight Simulator to life.
Not only have developer Asobo Studio used the models and behaviours of the animals from Planet Zoo, but it’s studied the migrations of animals to make their representation scientifically accurate.
But why has so much effort gone into making accurate animals in a game that is supposed to be about flying planes?
Neumann explains to GLHF: “The games I based that on were Animal Crossing and Pokémon Snap.
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“I love both. I collected every fish [in Animal Crossing]. It's really just about finding the details and delight.
“I had a producer call me the other day from Asobo because they’re all like, ‘Why are we doing all these animals?’ And later she said ‘I found a giraffe. It was awesome.’
“It makes you happy – that’s why we’re doing it.”
Neumann has a point. Simulator is right there in the title, and one of the greatest joys when flying is looking out the window during take off and landing, and seeing the wildlife scurrying around below you.
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But all of this detail comes at a cost, and that cost is the size of the data.
Microsoft’s simulation of the Earth takes up two petabytes, or 2k terabytes of data and that’s before everything else is added to it.
The 2020 release of Flight Simulator was 100GB, and after all of the various updates this ballooned to 500GB, which is more than an Xbox Series S can store.
Asobo is more than aware of how precious storage can be with external hard drives adding even more costs to what is an already expensive hobby.
That’s why we were shocked to hear that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will come with an install size of under 50GB, with everything else up in the cloud.
This may sound like a step back to physical fans, but the truth is that Microsoft has been doing this for years.
The Earth is just too big for one computer to hold, but with this smaller install size, at least more people will have a chance to play.
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