Microsoft Flight Sim X

[Wilfred]

Microsoft Flight Sim X

 

25-Sep-2006 It's chocks away as we formation fly with Mike Gilbert, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft's ACES Game Studio

 

Flight Sim is one of the oldest games in the world and, as the venerable series approaches its twenty fifth anniversary (it's nearly as old as CVG), Microsoft's Flight Sim X is preparing to take to the skies and it's going to be one of the flagship titles for Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system and DirectX 10.

 

So it was with great pleasure that during a recent big flying day out, we managed to catch a lengthy word with Mike Gilbert, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft's ACES Game Studio to discuss the relaunch of the much-loved aviation classic.

 

Herein Capt Gilbert has much to say on the fascinating return of the series, including Microsoft's plan to broaden the appeal of the game to catch a new, more casual audience, as well as trying to satisfy its many true hardcore fans. You can read on to learn more about the new mission-led game design which includes events like the Redbull air race, how the title has expanded to encompass a real authentic living aviation world and all the goods on the much expanded mulitplayer component of the game, including an excellent new co-op mode so we can all learn to fly together.

 

There's even time for a late dispatch on whether we might see a return of the much-loved classic Combat Flight sim. So without further ado, it's chocks away and Capt. Gilbert, you have the controls...

 

Could you start us off with an overview of Flight Sim X, its new features and major areas in which you feel that it has expanded and improved?

 

Mike Gilbert: It's been one of the longest releases for us for quite some time - over three years since the 2004 edition came out and we took the extra time to really re-think our approach to designing the produce from the customer's point of view. For a long time I think rightfully criticised, we were very pilot or enthusiast orientated, focussing on the realism of the aircraft and the instrumentation and procedures and air traffic control, that sort of thing that works really well for a lot of people.

 

But there are a lot of folks with a passion for aviation that find that a little bit daunting and not their cup of tea so we actually went and did quite a bit of research on the users of the product, we did customer satisfaction surveys in the UK and France to get an international feel.

 

What we learned were a couple of key things: that the product as it existed was hard to approach from a novice perspective and also it didn't provide a lot of direction for how to get the most out of the product. So, the key investments we made for the new version were around three areas, one is something we call the 'dynamic living world', and that you can think of as an evolution of the core technology, the core engine if you will, which makes the world look better with higher resolutions, scenery, graphics and better looking skies.

 

The dynamic component, which is a new feature for us this time, is moving traffic on the roads and busy airports with moving jetways and fuel trucks and baggage loaders. That's really the foundation of the product and provides the long-time users with another reason to upgrade.

 

The other areas are focussed at the different ways that other people use the product. The structural experience of missions, is the one that speaks most directly at that group, a little bit of direction on how to get the most out of the product. They cover a variety of different facets of aviation from training or tutorials through general aviation and sport flying, aerobatics, airline flying, search-and-rescue and so on and so forth.

 

There's a skill ramp as well, so you can enter at a novice level and learn the basics of flying and take some easy fun missions and work your way up to things that are more challenging because they're more complicated aircraft or scenarios - anything from the RedBull races to engine failure over the ocean to piloting a DC3 in Alaska through the clouds to make a delivery. There are 55 missions in the deluxe product and we think that third-parties will use the mission editing tool also included in the deluxe product to create missions that suit them as well.

 

The third area is something we call 'shared skies', and that's really an evolution of our multiplayer, which frankly in our earlier versions we have neglected. It's always been very popular in the combat space and the GA space and it's been fairly specialised with some of the virtual airlines and virtual online play that have really evolved outside of the product.

 

For Flight Sim X we've completely overhauled the multiplayer engine. We're using GameSpy as a matchmaking service now for people to find each other online. Then in addition to traditional flight sim where everybody is in their own plane, we also have two key components, new gameplay features, one we call 'shared aircraft' which is a way for two people to connect through the internet and fly in the same aircraft handing off control although both are able to manipulate switches and dials and so forth, and then there is our new tower controller feature, a deluxe version feature, that puts users in an air traffic control tower with a radar display and radio communications. So for the people who want to fly with their friends or fly with other people online that's going to be a key part of the new product.

 

The mission based gameplay is one of the new and more interesting features. How did you decide on what kind of missions to put in?

 

Mike Gilbert: Well, a couple of different factors to the mission design themselves, first off we wanted to retain the spirit of our tagline "as real as it gets", starting from simple real-world scenarios from private pilot or commercial pilot or airline pilot, we obviously use game scenarios that lend themselves to that. And of course, we wanted to have things where we were a little bit more creative with the scenarios to add a little bit of excitement because one thing I've found that with people approaching Flight Sim their impression of what flying is doesn't come from flight instruction, it comes from movies and television shows so they have an image of what flying is and should be.

 

So we added a few missions that spoke to the spirit of that as well. A good example would be the RedBull air-racing mission. People see it on television and wonder "wow, what would it be like to do that?" so we don't bog them down in procedures, and let them get out there and have some fun. That was a big emphasis as well, and thirdly is to bring people into the product through tutorials, so we have between 12 and 14 tutorials from your first take-off all the way to helicopter flying. For those we used a lot of in-depth user-research - we have a user-research facility where we can bring people in and watch them using the product - to see how people approach the interface, the assumptions they make about the controls, the camera system - we took a lot of those lessons and tried to integrate them with the tutorials.

 

Another big part of it is the 'dynamic living world'. Can you go into a little bit more detail on how that will work and what it will bring to the flying experience.

 

Mike Gilbert: There's a couple of different aspects to that. First is what I call 'ambient life', which is road traffic and boat traffic - things that aren't directly aviation-related. We have a system now where we can put road traffic on major highways, on a regional basis so that it looks correct - so they drive on the correct side of the road and so forth. We also have ambient boat traffic, and this is also, like the road traffic, based on population density data. So if you have lakes and inland bodies of water near population centres you'll have pleasure boats and sail boats meandering about.

 

We have also modelled shipping traffic as well, so ocean liners and cargo ships where are data team has researched real routes from port to port and have created schedules for the large ships, so you could be on a trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific flight and look down and see a cargo ship heading to a destination and that's all modelled on real world information.

 

You worked with several mapping and data group to get authentic scenery and environments?

 

We get a variety from a myriad of sources. We have worked with our partner Navtech for high resolution road and scenery data in the US and Europe. There's another company called Pasco based in Japan which we've worked with. We have also gotten high resolution data from the Australian government, and the US government. We've used the space shuttle mapping data to do high res terrain so a huge variety of sources.

 

And from what we've seen you also borrowed some of the Zoo Tycoon team's assets?

 

Yes we borrowed some of Zoo Tycoon assets for some other parts of the world like the elephants on the African plains. But the other pieces of the living world are the aviation specific stuff; that's the moving jet ways, fuel trucks, baggage loaders and airports. As I have mentioned there's 1200 airports in the world with jet ways and all of those will have the vehicles standing by to service your aircraft. When you come in and open your cargo doors the baggage loaders will pull up. That's another big investment as well - makes the world feel alive.

 

What's particularly interesting is the multiplayer aspect, the more social parts of Flight Sim X. Perhaps you could give us more detail about those?

 

We know from third-party add-ons to Flight Sim that have been developed externally that there is a market for online play - there are virtual airlines, virtual air traffic control networks - they tend to be specialised and contain a requirement in terms of an investment.

 

What we wanted to do is provide something more aimed at the causal online user, something that is approachable, simple to get into. That's why we've partnered with GameSpy to provide the match-making service where you can see who is online. We have an integrated friends list so if you meet people or have friends you can add them to your list and see when they are available. You can send them text messages, we also have integrated voice chat in the game as well - sort of an Xbox Live concept, so you can actually communicate either in a social setting in one of the game lobbies to see whose there and what there is to do and once you are in the game you can communicate either in a casual way, like a full broadcast but if you want a more realistic approach you can use the aircraft radios to dial up frequencies and do it that way as well.

 

We think that as people explore that and are intrigued by working with the tower controller or virtual flight instructor to help them learn to use the product that online play will become more and more important as time goes on.

 

How important has the FS community been in the development of the product, and how do you anticipate people supporting it with the tools your going to release post-release?

 

The community has always been very important to the franchise and frankly we think we've been successful in spite of our lack of attention to be honest in terms of our tool support. We've released SDKs but they've come out after the product and maybe weren't the easiest to deal with and didn't provide a way to support people as they used them.

 

What we've tried to do this time is to transform the whole experience round our development community and our user community. So one of the first things we did we made a commitment to ship our software tools with the core product this time so users will be able to get the SDKs and crack them open as soon as they have the product in their hands. We've also invited a number of key third parties to be involved in the development of FS - they've been on the betas, they've been able to interact with our developers. We have a whole new programming interface called 'sim connect' this time around, so people can write code add-ins a lot easier.

 

Moving forward after launch we are going to be devoting a lot more effort to our community presence in terms of our re-launched website FSinsider.com we've already had some of our team blogging and interacting on the forums. We're hoping to do a lot more in terms of sustained information with new articles and ways for customers to interact with the team. We now for the first time have a dedicated community team within the studio who is thinking about how do we allow people to get the most out of the product over the length of their tenure, because unlike a lot of games that peak and then fade rather quickly, FS has a long shelf life.

 

We've developed relations with customers over many versions - we have people still using the product after 25 years and we'd like to be around another 25 years so you can imagine we'll reach a point where we'll have customers who have interacted with the product for the bulk of their lives, which is very atypical for a lot of games so we have to maintain that relationship, we have to make people feel involved, we have to provide avenues for them to send their feedback and see how it shapes the product. We're reinvesting in that commitment with FS X.

 

FS X will obviously be one of the showcase titles for Windows Vista and DirectX 10, In terms of the game engine, what new features will you be bringing in there?

 

Good question. We made a decision some time ago to align ourselves with the Vista launch knowing what we knew at the time in terms of schedules, and we committed to delivering integrated Vista features such as game explorer presence, parental controls, but as you know Vista has moved out, so we have had to make a decision as to how we were going to approach some of the other features specifically around DirectX 10.

 

The other complicating factor was the lack of hardware availability. So what you'll see when we release is a product that works on Windows Vista, our core product that we'll be releasing in October - it'll work on Windows Vista and game explorer and parental control functionality, but then we'll follow it up hopefully some time early next year with a free update to take advantage of the DirectX 10 features.

 

That will give us time to get the hardware, integrate the features that we want and we believe that we will focus mostly on the environmental features, so things like clouds, water, high dynamic range lighting for the atmosphere, light scattering, volumetric clouds, potentially mesh-deformation with the water so you can actually get visible waves. A lot of the DirectX10 APIs will facilitate that so it'll be a two-stage process: the initial release will have the core features and then a DX10 update will have enhanced environmental features and visuals for those that have the hardware.

 

We're huge fans of Combat Flight Sim, any chance we might see another version of that again?

 

We never say never - we like to say it's on hiatus. So right now we don't have any version of it under development but we definitely recognise the interest in the market and we have a lot of vocal users who are always asking.

 

But what I will say is that beyond what some of the things that end users will notice about FS X, we're striving to evolve a simulations platform that can be applied to different uses down the road. So as the developers look under the hood to see some of the architectural decisions that we've made they'll see that we're thinking beyond just civilian flight sim. We'll see what the future holds.

 

Out of all of the new aircraft that are going to be in FS X what's your favourite to fly and where do you like to go flying in the game world?

 

I'm kinda partial to a couple of the tail-draggers. I learned to fly in a J3 and I used to own a Mall so those are near and dear to my heart. In fact I have a total of one and a half hours of tri-school gear time in my log book, out of some 250 something hours. I love bush-flying, I love remote areas, scenery mountains, Alaska is a great place, the Alps in Europe is another fantastic location. Occasionally I'll break out the Beaver and head down to the tropics and kick up some spray on the beautiful water down there. But I'm a GA pilot - I like flying low and slow looking at the scenery watching the cars drive by.

 

Many a day in the real world I'd be flying a J3 along a highway - it barely goes faster than the cars anyway, and look at the wing and pick out a truck and follow it along and I found myself doing the same thing in FS X.

 

 

[pylon500]

After looking through the text of this advertisment, I couldn't find an explaination of the pictures depicting the Cessna with the assymetric flap deployment?

 

Any ideas?

 

Arthur.

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

I just got this the other day. Quite an improvement on the past ones. I will need to upgrade my video card however as it is freezing frame by frame. Quite annoying really seeing as though I had FS2002 installed and uninstalled it to make way for this new FSX. I currently have the NVIDIA G Force video card. Anyone know of any better ones and where I can get them? Reasonably priced would be preferred.

 

 

[Guest ozzie]

I bought the deluxe edition last week and am enjoying it. much more entertaining than fs 04. i too have some freeze frames happening. i changed the settings and it was ok until i changed locations or aircraft. i have a g force 5000 i think. i am enjoying the glider at the moment at Narromine. OZ

 

 

[Admin]

I've got FSX sitting here still boxed as I haven't had time to install it yet but I believe it is much better graphically then FS04 - it will even get better when Windows Vista comes out as FSX is designed for it.

 

My PC has twin 504 meg overclocked GForce 7900's, 2 gig ram, twin HDD in Raid0 and an overclocked AMD 4800+ so with FS04 I can run with sliders maxed out to get every bit of scenery detail so it will be interesting to see how FSX impacts my system.

 

Don't forget to set your Frames to a max of 25 in your settings as your eyes can't tell the difference over that and you are just using extra resources that can be used for your scenery.

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

Ok I shall try that Ian and see how it goes. Thanks for the info. If anyone else has any other suggestions on settings/graphics cards/anything that will help here, I'm keen to hear;)

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

You may have some trouble Chris as it is very CPU and graphic hungry.

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

That's it Chris. Save save save buddy!;)

 

 

[Guest Sabre]

Yeh, I think it realy needs 2gig Ram minimum to get good performance. I'm running a P4 2.8 256meg G force 1 gig Ram and I still get some sticky scenes...annoying but the graphics and sim play are great.

 

Still, the designers are asleep when it comes to Oz scenery. Can't wait for the add-ons though

 

Happy Flying

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

Yeah you notice that don't you? I wish they would get Australia right for once. There is hardly anything there! Atleast they got some of the ATC freq's right this time.

 

darrenmasters

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

Anytime Chris:laugh:

 

 

[Guest Redair]

Help! Is my flying really that bad, or do I have a bug in my system? FSX Deluxe runs fine, but after about the third lesson with Rod Mac' he started terminating my sessions, saying, "That things don't seem to be going too well" and then I get a message on screen, informing me that I seem to be distracted! I'm doing what he asked, honest. Has anyone else tried the lessons and had these problems?

 

Also, and this is just being picky, if you go to UK, Bristol, Filton and then fly out over the river Severn, you will see the 2 Severn bridges, (old and new) only trouble is, the traffic is driving on the wrong side of the road as it comes from Wales to England!! This will cause chaos on the M4.

 

Redair.

 

 

[Guest bateo]

WOW redair, Sounds like you have way too much time on your hands mate to pick that out while you should be concentrating on flying the damn thing... Although the old saying 'never rely on your gauges, always look for somewhere to land' may come into the situation on noticing which way the traffic is going haha

 

Sounds like your having fun though mate...

 

 

[Guest Sabre]

Don't get me wrong...the game is still payable but just not as smooth as I would have liked...still a great sim.

 

Keep your eye out for VOZ sceries of add ons...........Austrailain scenery package for FSX

 

 

[Guest Redair]

WOW redair, Sounds like you have way too much time on your hands mate to pick that out while you should be concentrating on flying the damn thing... Although the old saying 'never rely on your gauges, always look for somewhere to land' may come into the situation on noticing which way the traffic is going haha Sounds like your having fun though mate...

Yep, you could be right... too much time! I am wondering if anyone might know of an add-on for FSX, and where to get it, my wife and some friends have all mentioned it when I talk about FSX. I understand it's called "A-Life", well at least that's what they said it was called. I've looked in all the usual places, but can't find it, yet they all seemed so sure when they said, "Get A-Life".

 

Ah well, got to go, there's a baby elephant lost in the scub somewhere and that zebra stiped microlight won't sim itself!

 

Redair.

 

 

[Guest Fred Bear]

Yes, it is a good adventure that one!:)

 

 

[Guest Sabre]

I just landed on a dirt airstrip at Enoggera, Brisbane ...lol....interesting

 

 

[Guest Redair]

Look, I don't want to picky... much, but has there been a major earthquake in the UK thatI haven't heard about?

 

It's just that Kemble airfield seems to have moved! No longer does it have runway 27/09 but now has 26/08... strange though, as 31/13 has remained the same, spooky or what?

 

Redair.

 

 

[Yenn]

On FS04 I tried the instrument training and not having all the goodies I was way behind the plane as I looked for ways to change pitch on a twin and reduce throttle (not in that order) and I was told to turn left when that was the wrong direction. I think it wants you on the runway heading even if you are not on the centreline.

 

Frustrating. But of no consequence now as my video card has packed up again at less than 6 months since it was replaced, and it has been waiting for nearly 2 weeks for the replacement. It is NVidia FX5200, 256MB card. Not good in my opinion.

 

 

[ChangeMan]

FSX is running quite useably on my P4 Mobile 1.59 Ghz Toshiba portable with 512Mb RAM. I intend to increase the memory but it is ok for now. I did invest in a Saitek Cyborg Evo Force feedback joystick from Harvey Norman ($109) and it made all the difference. Have flown all flown all 20 beginner missions successfully. Must get back to real flying although this in an inexpensive way to have some fun as well.