Microsoft is using Flight Simulator to create a “digital double” of Earth, the head of the franchise Jörg Neumann shared in an interview with Polygon. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, developed by Asobo Studio and published by Xbox Game Studios, is scheduled for release on November 19, 2024. The game will be released on PC and Xbox Series X/S.

In a conversation with Neumann, Polygon editor Charlie Hall said he had already heard of the idea of ​​creating a “digital double” of Earth, citing Microsoft Flight Simulator. This concept has now received more details. For example, the game will feature more than 900 oil rigs, a million vertical obstacles, including antennas and wind turbines, which will be displayed in 3D.

Hall recalled the developer’s statement about the actual accounting of approximately 80,000 helicopters, as well as every gliding airport in the world.

The latest installment in the Microsoft Flight Simulator series released so far is based on the Zouna game engine developed by Asobo. The game uses information from Bing Maps, providing access to more than 2 PB of cloud data.

When asked by Hall what value Microsoft Flight Simulator represents to Microsoft as a whole, Neumann said that the team was able to bring Bing to life. According to him, Bill Gates said that Neumann’s team took two franchises that were losing popularity and brought them back on trend. In fact, when the team creates objects for the game, they immediately appear in Bing.

Thanks to a new partnership with Spire, the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 team now receives an updated position of every merchant ship on the planet once every 30 seconds. The developers will use this data to manage a fleet of 600 game ships.

Neumann has aircraft for data collection in Africa, South America and Asia. He flies these flights himself. Bing is engaged in other tasks, so the Microsoft Flight Simulator team shares collected data about cities with the search service.

The “digital double” of the Earth is a kind of intermediary, Neumann notes. He added that many things can be done with this project, but first it needs to be built. Flight Simulator can handle this. The game team always wanted to have the entire Earth as real as possible.

Neumann says the project is inspiring others at Microsoft. Employees of the corporation in China call Neumann and consult about opportunities, the head of the franchise notes. Game developers from Microsoft, for example, Activision employees, also come in the same way.

Microsoft Flight Simulator was released in 2020. While rendering the game world with billions of buildings located in the right places, Microsoft and Asobo Studio worked with many partners. One of them was the small Australian startup Blackshark.ai, which was able to recreate every city in the world with the help of artificial intelligence and huge cloud computing resources.

Microsoft claims that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has been tested by more than 15 million users over the course of a lifetime, who have completed more than a billion flights in the game. In the last 12 months alone, there were 300 million such flights.