The offline mode, we're not demonstrating it yet, but it looks great." And there's no requirement to be online, at all. "Obviously, we are tied to those two main pieces of technology and services – but Bing is not going anywhere, and Azure is just expanding, it's doing great. "I'm not worried about it," says a confident Neumann. Can 2020's Flight Simulator guarantee it won't suffer a similar fate? However, 2012's Microsoft Flight – the company's last attempt at a new generation flight sim – also relied on online features, but when it failed to find an audience, servers were switched off a mere ten months after launch. While Neumann says there will be an offline mode, it will undoubtedly be truncated – the 'full fat' version of Flight Simulator is set to tap into Azure AI systems, utilising real-time weather data and constantly updated satellite imagery to deliver the most accurate and realistic experience possible, with two petabytes and counting of information to draw upon ruling out a fully offline experience.
One concern flight sim fans may have with the upcoming title is that it's set to straddle the line between always-online service and offline solo experience. After that, we started to form the partnerships we needed to really get this going. After modelling an accurate Seattle into the software, Neumann was "confident we had the technological chops to actually do this, that the tools exist, that the technology exists. Development began in earnest in 2016, as a boutique project with a meagre team of three. Pursuing a photogrammetric 'real world' of the calibre of HoloLens' Machu Picchu tour was the key for Neumann, tapping into the satellite imagery available to Microsoft's Bing. It made me wonder, can we do this across the whole planet? I sort of kept that in the back of my mind, then I went from the HoloLens team back to the Xbox team, I basically said, 'let's just go try it'. "I've never been to Peru, but felt I was actually in that place, because you heard the wind and it was visually perfect photogrammetry. "I worked on a HoloLens project – the experience was going to Machu Picchu," explains Neumann. Although the augmented reality headset still doesn't have a consumer model available, its ability to blend physical and virtual reality thanks to pass-through displays and transport wearers to real locations was an inspiration. The origins of the revamped Flight Simulator date back to around "2014 or 2015", when Neumann was working in Microsoft's HoloLens department.