Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is out now, and a senior developer on the project has said the game needed to embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to come to market. Jorg Neumann said in an interview that it would not have been possible to create the game’s map data “by hand.”
“We would have spent our entire lives and then some just marking up terrain, which is not really the core of the thing. So it’s just a tool that helps us,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun of machine learning and AI.
One major fear is that advancements to machine learning and AI will lead to job losses, but for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, this was not the case. “The only thing we’ve done is grow,” Neumann said.
A team of 100 people made 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator. For this new release, 200 people at Asobo worked on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with another 600 people at support studios for a total of 800 people working on the game.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 uses machine learning to generate terrain detail. The team marked up around 28,000 “tiles” that were representative of Earth–these included textures meant to replicate the forests, deserts, rivers, and so on. This data was then fed into a machine learning platform that creates a potential asset, which is then reviewed by a human, and then the system is re-trained.
“You basically say: ‘Oh, OK, got this wrong.’ And then you retrain it. We did that in four different stages,” Neumann said.
Before this, EA Sports management said it wouldn’t have been possible to release EA Sports College Football 25 on time and up to quality without the use of machine learning and AI to generate all manner of assets. EA CEO Andrew Wilson has said advancements to AI will lead to job losses in the short term but he believes the game development labor market will grow due to newly created jobs.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched on November 19 and was quickly beset by server issues and other problems due in part to how the developer “completely underestimated” demand for the game.
The game is available to buy now on Xbox and PC, and it’s also part of the Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass libraries.