The multiplayer mode allows groups of friends to fly together and naturally this has become competitive. Users are also creating their own challenges and activities in the sim. I’m somewhat surprised no one has fully recreated an entire movie yet.” In the Oceania trailer, there’s one shot I took of the volcano on the South Island in the rain – it looks just like Mount Doom. “I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, so I flew over New Zealand and filmed every location used in the films. Microsoft Fright Simulator /gP1NRbo9gX- Petri Levälahti September 1, 2020 Flight Simulator is now an experimental performance space. People have been recreating historic flights and famous movie scenes such as the chase in North by Northwest they have developed a mod to put Godzilla in the San Francisco bay they have been investigating Area 51 and other forbidden areas. Pilots will tell you this: yes it’s technical, but it’s fun.”Īnd this jocular, sportive approach to Flight Simulator has continued. “That’s the thing with flying and flight sims – they’re sometimes perceived as super serious, but flying itself is fun. “I thought that was delightful,” says head of Microsoft flight simulations, Jorg Neumann. Soon after the Australian monolith was discovered, pilots were attempting to land on the rooftop – it became a landmark challenge, a way of showing extreme handling abilities. After our initial shock we realised people understand that the perfect world isn’t possible.” Our system works pretty well but sometimes you have glitches. “It would take 14 years to fly over the surface. “You can’t do quality assurance on the entire Earth,” says Bossard.

As a species, we love myths, we love the idea of mysterious, uncanny places amid a global pandemic that has seriously restricted people’s ability to travel, here was a game that allowed travellers to share fresh experiences and to create new mythologies. Most people weren’t reporting sightings of strange buildings or land formations to complain they were enjoying their discoveries, the sense of finding things in the world that no one else had ever seen. What would serious sim enthusiasts make of these data-driven oddities?Īs it turned out, they loved them. So the Airbus A320 flies like an Airbus A320, and, if you disengage the many pilot assists, you’ll need to be an experienced simmer to take off and land it. They worked with aircraft manufacturers, pilots and researchers to get the details right. French studio Asobo had spent several years on the project, with the aim of making the most authentic flight simulation ever constructed. “Our first reaction was, oh my God,” recalls lead software engineer Martial Bossard. Roads depicted as rivers, palm trees as eerie stone monoliths, vast chasms with landing strips at the bottom. Very quickly, other anomalies were discovered on the virtual planet – and shared around the community.

Flight simulator x cold and dark