Ok, but scale comes at the cost of detail. Very little of the world in MSFS is highly detailed. Get up close and personal with the roads and buildings and it’s flaws become instantly obvious. The detail is set at a level whereby it looks fantastic flying 500ft or above, but becomes quite low quality below that (hand crafted scenery not withstanding).
Do you have any examples of what you believe it could be used for, in terms of games?
Which is why this game will never be a driving/train simulator.
The detail just isn’t there for close to the ground adventures.
Nobody is going to want to race cars on green roads with trees growing through the pavement.
And buildings that are half melted, while the river beside you starts flowing up the side of the mountain.
And apart from a fairly basic water wave animation I don’t think much of anything about the water body or anything below the surface is modelled, so it’s a long way off from making a decent boat/sub/diving sim either.
The visions being painted here are great and all, but are more akin to how people were thinking about the future internet in the 1980s. We’re a long way off relatively speaking from that future, but the potential is definitely there.
I have a couple 
- all need massive changes to functionality and layers on top but the core is there?
Something like Myst but on a global scale, using real locations and landmarks but with added fantasy. As eluded earlier some kind of Indiana Jones affair - following clues and meeting key people from around the world, we discover that the pyramids in Egypt are connected to a mechanism in Machu Picchu and hidden in a system of underground caves and tunnels deep underground is an ancient alien life form that still exists to this day… what are they doing here, why couldn’t we find them before and more importantly what have they been doing with us all this time?
Populous 3. Could be either an overlord God game, where we terraforming the planet, plant forests, create rivers, mountains and volcanoes to influence the weather and make the planet balanced. Life forms evolve, eventually humans, then villages and cities grow programmatically from conditions we have nurtured…
OK that’s enough lol. There really isn’t anything without huge changes to the system. All you’d be left with is the weather and the potential AI for generating foliage and buildings dynamically. But that would need to be done on local PC’s, not the “same for everyone” on cloud servers so it’s not really possible now I suppose.
With a static world there isn’t much except air races haha
I appreciate the effort you put into build that list. I’m not sure any of those examples would be better in the MSFS world over something handcrafted for that particular task. As you say, the static nature of MSFS doesn’t lend itself well to it. I’m not sure you can do much about that when you’re using static satellite images…
I do like the idea of the 3rd game on your list though of becoming world leader and saving the planet, and by extension us. I admit, I get a lot of eco-anxiety. So much so I try not to read about the latest environmental or climate science too much these days. It’s all far too depressing!
You might like this (fairly old) strategy card game on Steam then:
I expect all this will slowly imporve over the yearsr as better data and internet connections become available.
They are already at 4PB of data and counting.
Nothing quite like this has been attempted previously. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Yup. See my previous post with link to the YouTube video of MSTS2 - based on the same core technologies of ESP / FS11. The MSTS2 team showcased other videos at the time (they may still be available on-line, I have not checked). A huge number of custom buildings along the routes were created. I do remember one comment by an indignant viewer that the rail-ties between the tracks of the German route were “wrong”, to which the lead PM at the time promptly uploaded a pic of the actual ties that showed that, in fact, they were modelled correctly. The team was very focused on creating accurate, detailed routes.
The detail shown in the video is now based on data that is 14 years old. Today’s imaging data is far more detailed, and the photogrammetry data ten years hence will, IMO, be even more accurate. For example: coastal communities planning for flooding due to global warming need high-resolution photographic & elevation data at the level of a meter or less. Mapping companies will create this data because of this global demand - at will happily license it to MS too (at a price, of course).
FS2020 users are just one type of consumer of the data Microsoft has (& licenses) in the cloud. Just as FS2020 users have custom data specific to a flightsim, so trainsim users would have custom data specific to a trainsim, rallysim data specific to a rallysim, etc. etc. These other consumers might use little - or no - flightsim-specific data in their games / apps.
FS2020 is just a game sitting on a globally distributed information platform hosted in the “cloud”. We are experiencing lots of bugs & glitches that need to be solved, but I see nothing stopping MS expanding the uses of this platform, providing that a compelling case can be made for return-on-investment.
Don’t think of this future as FS2020 plus trainsim or rallysim or some-other-thing, but Platform+FS2020, Platform+Trainsim, Platorm+Rallysim, Platform+some-other-thing. The platform is the heart here. FS2020 is just one of many potential revenue streams of the platform.
It’s not going to happen in the next month, or year. But five years? Seven? A definite possibility, IMO.
Jon
Edit: Also see this YouTube video if you are interested in the history of MSTS2.
That is likely a bit too optimistic depending on the use case and scale you’re talking about. I am not even sure we’ll have cleared the many fundamental challenges facing MSFS alone in that timeline, setting aside some much broader platform vision that you’re talking about. A very similar discussion is happening about the “metaverse” and VR applications elsewhere, where there have been false starts going back decades. I think this is very similar in that there is great promise, but we shouldn’t underestimate the time it’ll take to get it there.
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