"When you have a picture in 2D, and you want to make it 3D, you actually have to figure out how the roof is structured," he said. There were various challenges in automating the creation of Earth's digital twin-some unexpected.
In short, this procedural tech uses data from Bing and crams it through an algorithm that takes 2D imagery and erects 3D landscape features such as buildings with stunning accuracy. Keep in mind, Flight Simulator launched in summer of 2020. The solution would be cloud-based procedural construction technology that didn't really come along until 2018 or 2019, according to Neumann. That means from way up high, buildings would look ok, but getting in closer-not so much. "The thing that probably was the least expected was the amount of work we're doing to actually process the data," said Neumann, "because basically what Bing has is photogrammetry cities, like a few hundred, and they're super cool, but beyond that, literally everything is just a height field with nothing on it." "But it did during the course of the development."Īs for the pre-processing driving the machine learning that renders buildings, trees, and removes images of clouds in order to make way for real-time weather, that was also a cloud-dependent challenge.
"There was a point in time where we said, 'Maybe is just regional' and we have to wait for the infrastructure to actually catch up," said Neumann. Storage wasn't so much of an issue-there's plenty of room in the cloud-but the efficiency of processing and streaming would depend on future expansion of Azure datacenters. Neumann said at the start of development, there were three main challenges: storing, processing, and streaming the world of Flight Simulator. "The infrastructure to get it to people at low latency was actually foremost on my mind."
"When we started, I would say, it might have not been possible," said Jorg Neumann, head of Flight Simulator at Microsoft. It's a complex process with many moving parts, and what's more fascinating about this technical feat is that Microsoft and development lead Asobo Studio in France were relying on cloud infrastructure that did not fully exist when work on the game began in 2016. Combine that with satellite data that reflects real-time ground conditions, and on-device processing that renders seasons, time of day, aircraft, and player interaction, you get an incredibly convincing flight experience. Through partnerships with companies like Meteoblue which follows weather conditions, and FlightAware which relays air traffic, Flight Simulator pulls data to reflect what's happening in the world in real-time. Here's basically how it works: via Azure, the game draws 2.5 petabytes of world data from Bing and combines that with vector data from OpenStreetMap, then uses machine learning that identifies and processes buildings, trees, grass, clouds, etc.
Top 3 flight simulator pc 2016 series#
The big selling point for the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator, released on PC in August last year and headed to Xbox Series X and S later this month, is the way the game maps out an impressively accurate and detailed planet Earth using cloud computing techniques with Microsoft Azure. The Microsoft Flight Simulator series has been a vehicle for technological innovation since its introduction as Microsoft's first packaged product in 1982.
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