Microsoft Flight Simulator Players Are Flying Into Hurricane Laura (theverge.com) 53
CodeInspired shares a report from The Verge, adding: "This is pretty incredible. We're seeing the beginning of next-gen gaming come to life!" From the report: Microsoft Flight Simulator players have turned into virtual stormchasers this week, hunting down Hurricane Laura as it approached the US Gulf Coast. While Texas and Louisiana brace for what is being described as an "unsurvivable storm surge," the real-time weather inside Microsoft Flight Simulator is providing a surreal spectacle for players.
Virtual strormchasers have gathered in the skies above the Gulf of Mexico to fly directly into Hurricane Laura. The results demonstrate the incredible realism in Microsoft Flight Simulator, just as Hurricane Laura threatens catastrophic damage in the real world. Players have been flying directly through the eye of the storm, around the outer edges, and even so far up that planes have frozen over and needed to be de-iced. The virtual views have allowed players to track Hurricane Laura during the moments before it made landfall as a category 4 hurricane with 150mph winds. A YouTube user also captured the virtual experience of flying through Hurricane Laura, showing just how well the storm cloud formations are depicted in the game.
Virtual strormchasers have gathered in the skies above the Gulf of Mexico to fly directly into Hurricane Laura. The results demonstrate the incredible realism in Microsoft Flight Simulator, just as Hurricane Laura threatens catastrophic damage in the real world. Players have been flying directly through the eye of the storm, around the outer edges, and even so far up that planes have frozen over and needed to be de-iced. The virtual views have allowed players to track Hurricane Laura during the moments before it made landfall as a category 4 hurricane with 150mph winds. A YouTube user also captured the virtual experience of flying through Hurricane Laura, showing just how well the storm cloud formations are depicted in the game.
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Re:Unsurvivable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Coincidentally they haven't released a new MSFS in decades: it's been 14 years since the previous one.
The game uses real-time real-world weather, physics based on weather interaction with terrain features, air traffic (putting all real-world flights into the simulation in real-time), calculating stuff on their cloud service and streaming it to the clients. It also streams the world texture/geometry itself, as the total data set for that is ~2 petabytes in size. It's basically a combination of data from Bing Maps with procedurally generated terrain/cities on top of that data with manual corrections and manual constructions for areas of interest. There is offline fallbacks for everything (the game install is still ~127GB), but it's one of the first games to demonstrate using cloud computing/storage in a "game" for something that you simply can't do locally.
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they haven't released a new MSFS in decades: it's been 14 years
No 's', that's only 1.4 decade.
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1.4 is a multiple. So it's 1.4 decades.
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Personally I round it to the nearest century so in reality Flight Sim 2020 and Flight Sim X actually came out at the same time.
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Is it like an MMO where other player's planes are there?
Re: Unsurvivable? (Score:4, Informative)
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Can you kamikaze other planes?
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So, I haven't played MSFS in decades, does it get weather data from real world sources and add that as physics now?
Flightgear has been doing that for many years. I've not used MSFS since it was just plain FS but I'd be surprised if it hadn't been doing it too.
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They're just trolling because they're too stupid to admit it was the National Weather Service which used the term [star-telegram.com] to describe the storm surge.
Remember, when the local sheriff tells people who didn't evacuate to write down their name, address, social security number and next of kin and put it in a plastic bag in their pocket so the body can be identified [go.com], it's those unbelievable media just hyping up distress for no reason.
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It was exactly as strong as predicted, but a shift of just a few miles to the east caused the population center (Lake Charles) under most threat not to get the 20 foot storm surges that were possible. There were in fact parts of Louisiana where the storm was pretty much "unsurvivable", but it turned out to be mostly unpopulated areas (Rockefeller wildlife refuge). The few people in the areas that were inundated areas got out before the storm hit, in part because of the warnings.
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Wind?? (Score:1)
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Probably not the TNT2 Ultra, its performance was in the same ballpark as the Voodoo 3, since they were directly competing products, and they were both D3D 6 cards. The TNT2 Ultra was faster in some scenarios, the Voodoo 3 was faster in others. Maybe you're thinking of the GeForce 256. That was a clear and significant win, and the first D3D 7 card to hit the market.
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Ask for proof (Score:5, Interesting)
I've flown into Laura in MSFS 2020 multiple times, the game doesn't handle the weather physics correctly. The game shows constant aloft winds at 3-5 knots, even in the hurricane. Microsoft continued on with the spirit of beta testing using the public, MSFS 2020 wasn't ready to be released and the game shows it.
The known issue list keeps growing and growing....
https://forums.flightsimulator... [flightsimulator.com]
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Proof? Like...a YouTube video or something? You know - like the one linked to in the summary?
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Condor gliding simulator simulates weather (Score:2)
Condor is fairly old, not that flashy, but does a pretty good job of simulating gliding weather, and specifically the details of thermals etc. It does feel like flying for real. Many pilots use Condor to get their fix when the real weather is to bad to fly. It also has a wonderful panic button that will raise you a few thousand feet when thing go bad -- would be really useful on real gliders!
The weather info from the Govt would not be too much data -- kilobytes. Mainly estimated wind velocity at differe
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the earth is 510 square kilometres
You're missing like six zeroes there.
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The 7 people on the planet would like 9 words with you ...
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Microsoft continued on with the spirit of beta testing using the public, MSFS 2020 wasn't ready to be released and the game shows it.
Yes precisely. No one is enjoying this and the world would have been better off if MS didn't release it. /sarcasm
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I can't even open that link because it requires me to authorize some app to access my profile and I clicked "no".
Really? (Score:4, Funny)
Come on guys, its not that bad. Flying into a hurricane? I can tell you from experience... Flight Simulator 2020 is just a little rough around the edges, Microsoft will release a patch for it soon, I promise you. It's not that bad, you don't need to take drastic actions like that...
Amazing (Score:2)
do they have Hurricane hunters in it? (Score:2)
do they have Hurricane hunters in it?
Accurate flight simuation on the cheap (Score:5, Funny)
I don't have MSFS, nor do I have a powerful enough computer for it probably.
But I can do flight sim alright: I put Four Wedding and a Funeral on TV, set a hard kitchen chair very close to the wall, sat in it with a knees against the wall and my laptop on my lap, asked my daughter to kick the back of the chair for as long as she could, asked my wife to bring me a very small cup of thin, lukewarm coffee every once in a while, and stayed there until I the laptop's battery ran out and then some.
Best Ryanair flight simulation ever!
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You missed the "chillax" message (can be simulated by wife with a glass and some ice cubes), the "we landed on time" message (just set all your clocks four hours ahead beforehand), and the clap by the foreign idiots when you come in to land.
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I don't have MSFS, nor do I have a powerful enough computer for it probably.
But I can do flight sim alright: I put Four Wedding and a Funeral on TV, set a hard kitchen chair very close to the wall, sat in it with a knees against the wall and my laptop on my lap, asked my daughter to kick the back of the chair for as long as she could, asked my wife to bring me a very small cup of thin, lukewarm coffee every once in a while, and stayed there until I the laptop's battery ran out and then some.
Best Ryanair flight simulation ever!
Not very realistic at all, you didn't catch COVID-19
Balloon (Score:2)
Is it flat? (Score:4, Funny)
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...thought I'd just throw that out there
Here comes, the curve ball.
Wait a second...are they really curved? What kind of fast one are you trying to pull...
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Jealous (Score:3)
I Was One of Them (Score:5, Interesting)
My plane did not “freeze” over, but my windows accumulated a layer of ice because I forgot to flop on the de-icing, I turned it on, and things were good again. This is normal, by the way, so I’m not sure why they stated it so dramatically.
Second, it didn’t actually look like a well-defined hurricane, and last but not least, there was a complete lack of turbulence. I flew in two places, a single engine turboprop and a 787. The air was smooth as glass the entire way. I use max-realism settings since I’ve been “flying” for a long time.
I don’t know if they didn’t model turbulence yet, or what, but it was way too easy to fly into.
Don’t get me wrong, the graphics are very impressive. I loathe Microsoft but I’m impressed with what they did graphically with this sim. It’s closer to real as I thought I’d see in my lifetime. You can literally fly over your own house, and it looks like your house ... assuming you live near a large city. I get that it’s just Bing satellite imagery with 3D buildings, but still, it works well in the sim.
The main drawback is the flight model. Whereas sims like X-Plane fly by modeling the airflow around the aircraft, and nothing is scripted, per-se, MS Flight Sim flies by charts. Basically lookup tables of what it should do given various variables. Ie “I am at 24,000 feet going 250 knots, and I pull back the stick ... the charts say to climb at 1500 FPS”. You could be flying a brick, and it would perform like a Learjet if the software was told that it was a Learjet. In X-Plane, it would drop like a brick because it has no wings to provide lift.
It’s new, and maybe they didn’t have time to add turbulence parameters. I’m sure it will come later.
Anyway, it was cool to fly into a storm where a hurricane was supposed to be, but it didn’t look so much like a hurricane than a generic storm.
At least the parts I saw.
Extreme realism? Not so much (Score:1)
Fancy & fantastic graphics yep, but the weather isn't properly simulated it seems when a prop plane can fly through 250mph winds without being affected by them all that much.
https://youtu.be/QqqUiXztuws [youtu.be]
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Yup, that's my initial reaction watching the video. It looks great, but really shows off how poor of a job Microsoft has done with the physics part of flight simulation.