Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail? Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?

The cities they picked to hand model are bizarre as hell. Major ones like London and Paris are missing but completely unknown ones are in.

It’s based on Bing so it already exists.

The results are super iffy, if your area matches the designed solution it’s great otherwise you are in for the weird version of the place. Which seems par for the course with these AI based solutions. There’s some obvious funny issues that have cropped up in the media but in general the results are mediocre from the perspective of actually representing places you know. Iceland for example has a loooooot of trees and the height data is just bizarre in a lot of cases.

It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it’s great fun.

Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright:

First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.

Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.

Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.

Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:

- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.

- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.

I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.

(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)

Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.

Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)

Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.

Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.

Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...

Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.