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Productocracy: Microsoft Flight Simulator

Jon L

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I've been a flight simulator 'pilot' ever since my parents bought a Commodore 64 sometime around 1984. Over time, as computer graphics improved, Microsoft improved the quality of the sim. Things progressed until around 2010, when they abandoned the product. At that point, the simulator was decent, but it still looked pixelated, and not all that impressive.

Fast forward 10 years.

Microsoft and their development partner have been working on a new version for the last 5 years, and the result is nothing less than stunning. I'm not sure how they will ever improve on it, honestly. The youtube trailer announcing the product release date (Aug 18) has people salivating. One guy said tongue-in-cheek (I hope, anyway), "I'd sell my right kidney to buy the hardware to run this thing." Several others commented how the video brought them to tears. A few reasons why:
  • 1.5 trillion trees were identified in satellite imagery and placed into the game
  • You can fly in and out of all 40,000 airports worldwide
  • Virtually the entire earth is simulated in such detail that it defies belief
  • Real time weather (clouds, temperature, rain, wind) is fed into the game - if its 60 and raining at LAX in real life, it will be 60 and raining at LAX in the game
  • Real time air traffic also appears in the game
  • 2 petabytes of graphics data are used, and then streamed to your computer as you fly. (thats 2000 normal-size 1-terabyte hard drives)
  • I dare you to distinguish much of the trailer from real life video
I'm not sure what we can take from this that would apply to our size of businesses, but I'd be curious to see your comments.

The trailer:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYqJALPVn0Y


For comparison (Flight Simulator through the ages, starting with version 1.0):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pd-4PouHM4
 
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drahz

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I'm not sure how they will ever improve on it, honestly.

At least one thing they can do - VR.

Regarding productocracy, I was reading some time ago that Microsoft is not really that much profitable on Flight Simulator, it is a very niche thing.
 

Lucky Lu

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Well, Xplane dominated the professional simulators realm for a while. So competition exists in the field.

In any case I agree that MFS is a remarkable product. The realism was impressive even ten years ago if you had the correct hardware to run it.

Xplane was a little more "real life" regarding the aircraft operation in some situations and much more complicated to set up and calibrate.

I did not use the new MFS but it is supposed to be unbelievable good. I hope that is the case!
 

Thoelt53

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Very cool. The last edition of Microsoft FS I had was circa 2000 with the Concorde on the cover.

Since then I’ve put a fair amount of hours into X-Plane. X-Plane is badass and supposedly very realistic, but it does lack the visual nuances that this next Flight Sim appears to have.

I will no doubt be flying in the new Microsoft FS when it comes out.
 
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