Microsoft Flight Simulator

I don't generally like Simulator games and haven't played them at all in the past, I prefer the simulation we call "real life" instead (even though I mostly just sit in front of my screen there too), but I've been seeing people talk about this everywhere lately so had to check it out. Once I did I gotta admit I was pretty amazed by it, I wasn't even aware that the last Flight simulator came out way back in 2006 as it kind of blended in with all those other simulator games.

Before I go into what goes in this game, watch this trailer first to get hyped up.

The trailer from above is pretty old but Microsoft recently had a showing of the pre-alpha of the game and to be honest I can't even believe they call it the pre-alpha considering what it looks like. Before I paste in here more videos I enjoyed watching about the game here's a quick TL;DR.

First game ever that will feature the entire earth as a playable map, I remember thinking the driving game "the crew" started off nicely with this of North America but it turned out not to be a complete map when the game was released. They've used Bing's advanced satellite and drone system which has photo-scanned the entire planet in high detail and will be be uploading data to players in real time depending on where they are located in the game and which data they need. The entire map is apparently over 2 petabytes big (2 million gigabytes) with 2 million cities, 45 k airports and all natural landmarks will be available in the game. Vegetation, traffic, clouds, etc will be rendered through AI and prior machine learning to know how to fill the map up. Super realistic weather and lighting system, winds will affect planes, the clouds, rain and waves on water where the clouds will also be AI generated 3 models that players can fly through or avoid if they don't look peaceful. Satellite imagery will be down to 3 centimeters in precision (that's 1.18 inches for you Americans).

I'd recommend checking out this video for more info and some amazing scenery and graphics from a game labeling themselves as pre-alpha it is seriously unbelievable and makes me really, really excited about photo realism in the future of gaming.

Here is another for you with 4k resolution screens.

Will you be trying this game out just to fly over your house? :)