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I just watched the trailer and holy goat shit that looks amazing. Great job!

• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  I agree. It looks like they make full use of assets they would have access to for Bing maps. A lot of the progress in e.g. x-plane in recent year has been the use of map data, satellite images, and other geospatial data to generate highly detailed scenery. I have close to half a terabyte worth of auto generated scenery with high resolution satellite imagery, 3d meshes, and open streetmaps based positioning of roads, buildings, trees, etc. For a small company like x-plane it never was feasible to curate detailed scenery world wide and even MS back in 2006 only had auto gen scenery in most parts of the world. X-plane v10 was the first version to include open street maps based scenery and they vastly improved this with v11. Nowadays, Microsoft of course has access to lots of data; their scientists have developed lots of cool algorithms to synthesize detailed 3d models from photos and other sources, they have access to essentially unlimited hardware infrastructure to process this, they have lots of experience building 3d graphics libraries such as directx and have lots of experience working with hardware vendors to deliver VR. Speaking of which, flight simulation and AR could be an awesome use case for e.g. Hololens. Putting this all together, they should be able to produce some really detailed scenery and a modern rendering engine to go with that. The only question is why they ever walked away from this. It's such a great show case for a lot of stuff they have.
  • ecmascript 7y ago
    Yes I would love an explaination on how they actually solved it technically, it would be very interesting. Microsoft has really, really upped their game recently in terms of quality. Sadly they also have upped their tracking but but, it is still pretty awesome.