Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is (science!) kind of like a piping bag, where all sorts of data – satellite imagery, elevation date, live weather info, and so on – gets shoved in at one end then squirted out the other to form a majestic aeronautical whole. But it turns out one of its sources is a fairly surprising one, with Asobo having now revealed it’s festooned its newest digital world with animals borrowed straight from Frontier Development’s marvellous Planet Zoo.
Since its release back in 2019, Planet Zoo has amassed quite the menagerie across its base game and its post-launch DLC, with more than 190 species currently represented, from the humble Aardvark at one end of the alphabet right through to the Yellow Anaconda. And as Plant Zoo players will know, Frontier’s artist and animators have done a typically brilliant job infusing them with life. Which is to say they’re an absolutely perfect fit for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s astonishingly beautiful virtual world.
And Flight Simulator boss Jorg Neumann clearly reached the same conclusion. “I’ve worked with Frontier Developments for a long time,” he explained to PC Gamer. “And I called my friend, the CEO. His name is Jonny [Watts], and I said, ‘Hey, Jonny, I’m working on Flight Sim, can I have your animals from Planet Zoo?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, why not?’. We actually grabbed all the Planet Zoo animals and stuck them into our world, which is cool, you know?”.
Neumann’s revelation came as part of a chat about Flight Simulator 2024’s advancements at ground level, where he explained the team’s goal was to make the environments seen on foot “as good as a regular first-person shooter” this time around. To achieve its ambitious target, Asobo marked up 28,000 100m by 100m tiles of satellite data, according to Neumann. “This is sand, this is pebbles, this is little rocks, this is asphalt, this is grass, this is tall grass,” he explained. “And then we fed that into the system.”
Having explored a lumpen mountainside village somewhere in the Alps this morning that looked like it had been fashioned from clay by an impatient four-year-old using a picture of the nuclear apocalypse as reference material, it’s clear there are still a bit of work to be done on the road to visual perfection, but there’s absolutely no denying Asobo’s efforts have made Flight Simulator 2024’s natural environments look incredible.
Asobo’s latest iteration of Flight Simulator has, of course, got off to a bit of a bumpy start, with launch day – in an almost exact repeat of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020’s release – seeing players experience stalled downloads, lengthy queues, and all sorts in-game mayhem. Asobo later blamed the troubles on “the server responsible for handling data requests [getting] overloaded, causing delays and errors”, and things do seem to be settling down today. Even if those horrible AI voices do make me want to pull my ears off.