Basically, if you ever want to train bicycle kicks or something like that, it’s a very fun tutorial. Instead, the new console tutorials are designed to be shorter and more focused, he says.
“I would say they’re pretty long, kind of complicated, and in the end, people did them, but when we asked them a bunch of questions about how much they actually remembered, it was pretty low,” says Neumann of the original PC tutorials. On top of introducing Discovery Flights, Neumann says the team has retooled the eight tutorials that were in the PC version while adding 14 new ones. Discovery Flights were tested “quite a bit” with a newcomer audience and proved quite popular, notes Neumann. Ideal weather conditions will also be applied for smooth flying. He likens this to driving a car, except you “just have the steering wheel, but nothing else you don’t brake, there’s no gas or anything.” Instead, players can simply jump into curated locations, such as Mount Everest or Rio de Janeiro, to get a feel for flying. Basically, if you ever want to train bicycle kicks or something like that, it’s a very fun tutorial.” “Basically, you walk up to some sort of airfield, there’s a flight instructor, they sit next to you, and they say, ‘okay, we’re taking you on a flight,’ and they literally put your hands on the steering wheel and say, ‘off you go.’ And then you take off, and like two minutes later, you’re in the air and you’re having this awesome feeling of swimming - it’s very much like swimming in the air.” To address that, Neumann says the team recreated the initial “discovery flights” that flight instructors take aspiring pilots on in the real world. “Because that’s really what it is - the regular folks who are not pilots or simmers, they look at an airplane sort of like it’s a spaceship and are like, ‘Yeah, that looks scary, I dunno!'” “We took a step back and said, ‘Okay, how do we make people comfortable?” explains Neumann. With that in mind, Neumann says the team is expanding on what it learned from introducing newcomers to the PC version of the game last year to help welcome even more people on consoles. Of course, this being Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s console debut means that there will be many first-time players. “We’re super happy with where we landed.” We looked at the threading model, we looked at the terrain system, how we stream, what we stream, we put up more stuff into the cloud…” he says. “We spent 10 months and optimized literally everything.
He says the team’s mandate for the console version was that it “needs to look as good as it does on PC and needs to obviously play as good or better.” In practice, this means that the game supports native 4K on Series X, 2560p on Series S, and a locked 30 frames per second on both. We’re basically making heavy use of Azure we store two-and-a-half kilobytes of data up there, we do a bunch of comput, we do streaming… So when you look at the world, a lot of the world is actually streaming.” “And this particular product uses the cloud a lot. In my view, they’re much more PC-like than previous versions,” explains Neumann. “Basically, the Xbox Series X and S are really powerful consoles. It’s a wonder, then, how the development team - which consists of both internal Microsoft employees and those at the French studio Asobo - managed to bring the game from a PC rig to consoles.
But now you can do it on a few-hundred-dollar console.” Bringing the full Flight Sim experience to XboxĪs Neumann notes, “one of the attributes of the franchise is that it always pushes the PC as hard as can.” In other words, the latest Flight Sim offers luscious, photorealistic visuals leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing tech alongside real-world data to simulate real-time weather and effects. “It used to be that you had to have a pretty powerful computer, like a few-thousand-dollar computer.
It’s the oldest thing we have at Microsoft - it predates Windows and Office, which is kind of crazy,” Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, says with a laugh. “I always that it’s a got 40-year history - it’s one of oldest franchises in gaming.