Being able to zoom above rolling landscapes once again was almost a relief. While watching the two-hour demo of the game given by its lead designers, I realised with a visceral lurch how much I missed visiting new places.
This was impressive last year, but now, given the current pandemic, it feels genuinely wholesome. Fly over Seattle, for example, and you’ll recognise almost every building. However, another 400 key cities have been closely replicated by hand, using detailed photogrammetry. It knows the types of buildings that dominate a French city and how they differ from those in an Indian equivalent, but the artists go in and add specific landmarks that locals and tourists will recognise. Most cities are procedurally generated by the AI, based data from OpenStreetMap and an algorithm that provides architectural rulesets for the program to work from. The statistics involved are mind-boggling: there are 37,000 airports in the game, 1.5bn buildings, 100m lakes, two trillion trees. Using two petabytes of geographic data culled from Bing Maps, together with cutting-edge, machine learning algorithms running on the company’s Azure cloud computing network, the game presents a near-photorealistic depiction of the entire planet. When the latest instalment in Microsoft’s decades-old Flight Simulator series was first shown at the E3 video game event last year, it drew gasps from the audience. In real life, I have not seen the ocean for five months and, although I’m just sitting in my kitchen watching a virtual presentation of a video game, I feel a surge of emotion. Then, on the horizon, the landscape gives way to rugged coastline, and, as the plane flies closer, we glimpse the rippling waves glinting in the evening sun.
A Cessna 172 Skyhawk flying low over a rural landscape dotted with fields and farmhouses, a copse of tall trees casting shadows over the swaying grass, a winding country lane.
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