Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is (science!) sort of like a piping bag, the place all kinds of information – satellite tv for pc imagery, elevation date, stay climate information, and so forth – will get shoved in at one finish then squirted out the opposite to type an impressive aeronautical entire. However it seems certainly one of its sources is a reasonably stunning one, with Asobo having now revealed it is festooned its latest digital world with animals borrowed straight from Frontier Improvement’s marvellous Planet Zoo.
Since its launch again in 2019, Planet Zoo has amassed fairly the menagerie throughout its base sport and its post-launch DLC, with greater than 190 species at present represented, from the common-or-garden Aardvark at one finish of the alphabet proper by means of to the Yellow Anaconda. And as Plant Zoo gamers will know, Frontier’s artist and animators have achieved a sometimes sensible job infusing them with life. Which is to say they’re a fully excellent match for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s astonishingly lovely digital world.
And Flight Simulator boss Jorg Neumann clearly reached the identical conclusion. “I’ve labored with Frontier Developments for a very long time,” he defined to PC Gamer. “And I referred to as my good friend, the CEO. His title is Jonny [Watts], and I mentioned, ‘Hey, Jonny, I am engaged on Flight Sim, can I’ve your animals from Planet Zoo?’ And he is like, ‘Yeah, why not?’. We really grabbed all of the Planet Zoo animals and caught them into our world, which is cool, you understand?”.
Neumann’s revelation got here as a part of a chat about Flight Simulator 2024’s developments at floor degree, the place he defined the workforce’s aim was to make the environments seen on foot “nearly as good as an everyday first-person shooter” this time round. To attain its formidable goal, Asobo marked up 28,000 100m by 100m tiles of satellite tv for pc information, in accordance with Neumann. “That is sand, that is pebbles, that is little rocks, that is asphalt, that is grass, that is tall grass,” he defined. “After which we fed that into the system.”
Having explored a lumpen mountainside village someplace within the Alps this morning that seemed prefer it had been original from clay by an impatient four-year-old utilizing an image of the nuclear apocalypse as reference materials, it is clear there are nonetheless a bit of labor to be achieved on the highway to visible perfection, however there’s completely no denying Asobo’s efforts have made Flight Simulator 2024’s pure environments look unimaginable.
Asobo’s newest iteration of Flight Simulator has, after all, acquired off to a little bit of a bumpy begin, with launch day – in an nearly actual repeat of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020’s launch – seeing gamers expertise stalled downloads, prolonged queues, and all kinds in-game mayhem. Asobo later blamed the troubles on “the server liable for dealing with information requests [getting] overloaded, inflicting delays and errors”, and issues do appear to be settling down as we speak. Even when these horrible AI voices do make me need to pull my ears off.
