It’s a shame that Microsoft Flight Simulator is a flight simulator. Like, yeah, for anybody
wanting a flight simulator then it’s fantastic, but I suspect the there will be literally
DOZENS of people out there -like me- who just want to zoom about the world and to visit
all of their favourite places to see what they look like. And for that, it’s not ideal.
Because it turns out it’s actually really hard to fly stuff. I suppose, given how I
use this program, I expect it to understand me by now and to just let me do what I want,
yet for some reason it still wants to treat me like a budding pilot! No, I DON’T want
that. I just want to use this program like I do Google Earth.
Because while Google Earth is great and all that, it’s constrained by reality! This
Flight Simulator, on the other hand, is not, and is happy to use AI-generated trees and
buildings, trying to find suitable placeholders from what little information it can gather
about a place from a 2D map. Sure, it doesn’t always get it right. But it gets it close
enough that it’s still worth visiting everywhere I know and love, even if I know it won’t
get it quite right. Luckily for people like me, there is a free-view
option in this game, which I’ll explain at the end of this video for those of you
who are interested. But for the rest of you: welcome to a Flight
Simulator video without a plane in sight! Let’s get the obvious out of the way: it’s
not MEANT to be used like this. Provided you behave like a real plane does, flying from
airport to airport, I think… this is it! The graphics don’t NEED to be any better
than they are in this game. That’s a pretty dangerous claim to make,
since I’m sure people were saying that 10 or 20 years ago, and likely in 10 or 20 years’
time. But I think this simulator really IS there- sure, at the moment, the hardware isn’t:
the draw distances could be better, the buffering faster, the lighting, more raytrace-y, the
framerate, less insufferable. I can actually see why Nvidia showcased DLSS 3 on this game,
because it is so VICIOUSLY CPU-constrained that no amount of raw graphics card power
alone will be able to make it playable. But forgetting all the hardware limitations right
now, on the simulator side of things, that detail IS there, ready to be viewed. And there’s
enough of the stuff that a pilot in the air wouldn’t be able to spot its imperfections.
You look down at a city or forest or ocean from the air, and it looks like a city, or
forest, or ocean. There isn’t anything more that needs doing. But obviously, for what
I want from this simulator, there is still some way to go. Drop down to ground level
and does start to make silly mistakes, and it’s clear that it’s all placeholder stuff
rather than handcrafted details. Sure, a place you don’t know well may look convincing
enough. But find your own house and you’ll be horrified to discover it doesn’t look
anything like it- or that it’s been transformed into a block of flats or something instead…
and it’s at this point, that the simulation breaks down.
But first off: let’s answer the question you ALL want to know, which is: what happens
if we go into space?
…this happens.
The sky above us begins to grow darker as we leave the atmosphere and approach the space
beyond. Turns out there is a draw distance limit in this game; it’s a long way away,
but once we reach high enough up, an abrupt cut-off appears on the horizon, with nothing
but sea beyond. This cut-off gradually comes closer, and the clouds begin to fade out.
Curiously, their shadows remain for a while longer. Eventually, all land disappears from
view, from all angles. And we start to view the Earth in its entirety- and that’s when
we discover the greatest graphical mistake of all: Flight Simulator thinks the Earth
is round!
But what’s far more interesting than flying upwards, is to drop right down to ground level,
and to marvel at the detail this game provides. But it’s here where the limitations start
to become apparent, and its clever tricks are revealed.
Trees, for instance, are not real trees! They’re a SIMULATION; computer-generated trees! They
appear to be sprites, with maybe 32 angles drawn, then as you move about them, they fizz
from one to another. It’s all incredibly clever, and virtually perfect-looking if you’re
viewing them from a plane’s perspective... but not quite so much when you get this close-up
to them. Cars, are DANK. They go shooting about the
place, swerving around corners, bouncing off houses… driving over the O2 arena. Some
places, like this ring road around London, are eerily quiet. Meanwhile, the remotest
tracks in the furthest depths of Iceland are totally RAMMED!
But yeah, you’re talking distant vehicles in Cyberpunk 2077-sort of quality, but automatically
applied across the entire world. Which makes it acceptable. Especially for a game about
FLYING. I’m a little sad to see that trains are
being neglected, though. There are some awesome viaducts around where I live, and it just
doesn’t seem interested in drawing any of them. I figured this would be something that
Microsoft’s AI would have been able to figure out, but clearly not.
‘Making AI is a…. MAMAAAYYYYYEH!’
As I was exploring Sri Lanka, or Italy, or Ukraine, I think I grew to appreciate the
sheer scale that was required in simulating the entire world- all these houses and trees
might have been automatically ‘generated’, but they still had to use prefabs based on
which country and location they were from. Sri Lanka has tropical stuff, Italy has those
Italian-style houses and so on. And that surely has to be decided by a person somewhere along
the line. I wonder if they worried about offending people by accidentally rendering one type
of building even though it should have been another, or a church instead of a mosque,
or vice-versa! And simply because it happened to be near a border between different countries.
The insane scale of generating the ENTIRE WORLD dawned on me while flying about this
game. But it looks like they’ve dodged the religious
building issue by simply… not having any of them!
It's just a shame, because churches and cathedrals practically define many of the towns and cities
in England. Salisbury cathedral is so famous that people
from all over the world come to see it! Even from Russia. Yet all that remains of its spectacular
spire here is its shadow. I visited Wells the other week. You know,
that place that’s on all the blocks of cheese, and where Hot Fuzz was filmed. And again,
this beautiful structure has been digitally painted out of existence.
I visited Truro, capital city of Cornwall… but only because it has a cathedral. But here,
it doesn’t. Though I spotted some floating houses just here. Valve pls fix.
It’s not like I’ve looked too extensively, but so far, the ONLY cathedral I’ve found
is the one that’s in Cologne… and even that one looks weird in that it’s about
a million times shinier than it should be. Oh and again, right next to it is the famous
train bridge which has been left, unbridged. What are you DOING, Microsoft?
So yeah, it seems like they’ve gone out of their way to reduce almost all religious
and train-related structures to being little more than 2D stamps on the ground. Even the
Cathedral of Counter-Strike is discriminated against, crushed flatter than a silver 1 in
a faceit level 10 game. Even in big cities, don’t expect more than
a handful of iconic buildings to be properly rendered. Visiting London, the Shard looks
stunning, with parallaxed interiors and lots of polygons. Lots of love went into this structure.
Yet the city completely lacks St Paul’s Cathedral and any of the other iconic skyscrapers
in these locations. Even the bridges near the Palace of Westminster are disappointingly…
unbridgey. But then, there are some cities like San Francisco,
where it ALL looks right. I noticed billboards advertising stuff, and hand-crafted embankments
and I felt like something was up. My suspicions were confirmed when I found a church: they
are using 3D scanning for some cities! THAT’S why San Fransisco looks so good. Problem is,
the data must be quite old because it doesn’t feature the city’s newest, tallest building.
I found where this 3D-scanned stuff joined with the rest of the world and… I’ve got
to say, I’m impressed. Google Earth’s quality takes a nosedive when the 3D data
ends, but the fact I had to LOOK for this joint is testament to Flight Simulator’s
ability to make the whole world look fairly good.
But just know that, unless a place is 3D scanned, even major cities lack many of their major
landmarks, so don’t hold out hope for the small village where you live getting much
of value. When it comes to England at least, Google
Earth seems to contain a lot more places with 3D-scanned information. Even my home city
of 300,000 has been given this special treatment! Meanwhile, Flight Simulator doesn’t even
do this with places as big as London. But it’s when you get out of the cities that
Flight Simulator really shines- especially with mountains and countryside that Google
has utterly neglected. Flying over the glaciers I visited in Iceland give me a renewed respect
for just HOW BIG these things are, and in a way that Google Earth simply can’t.
Now to show you how to fly like me™. Click on the world map, pick a start location like
so,
Change the time of day down here,
Change the weather from up here…
Click the weather button again to get back here…
…and then click FLY.
Once it’s loaded, start it down here, Then immediately press PAUSE on your keyboard
before you crash your plane!
You can enter drone view by pressing INSERT,
And from here, you can navigate using WASD, and can look around using the numpad 8462
buttons.
Go higher with R, lower with F,
Speed up with F6 and slow down with F5. Though sadly, these buttons aren’t as responsive
as I’d like them to be.
Going back to the numpad controls, 7 and 9 will bank your view, + and – will zoom your
view in and out. If you find yourself all lopsided and stuff, then spacebar is a quick
way to return your view to looking straight ahead again.
I’d also recommend disabling T and numpad 5, which are the two buttons which will really
mess up your free view adventure. Numpad 5 is particularly insidious because that’s
the one that returns your view to your aeroplane, which you’ll never want to do cos by the
time you want to explore somewhere else, you’ll simply return to the main menu and repeat
this guide again.
And just like that, you can use Flight Simulator the way it’s not meant to be used!