Could MS/Asobo implement this in the future? Sim would look unbelievable.
I don’t think so and this has been discussed before.
The UNREAL engine is made for stuff close to the player like in an ego shooter. And this will look absolutely amazing. Mainly because the field of view is narrow and the stuff displayed is seldom farther away than 100m.
But if you’re in an airplane you usually have a very very wide field of view and often can see for a hundred kilometres or more. Thus you have to prioritise what you actually display and render. Details like shown in this video are often not relevant (unfortunately) . The MSFS engine may not be quite able to display this level of detail and realism, but it doesn’t have to. Even if you did try to do that in the Unreal engine your PC or XBox wouldn’t be able to cope either.
Also the physics in games that use the Unreal engine are quite different and much more primitive. You have little 3D movement of the player and none of the stuff that’s important for flying - like wind, air resistance, avionics, engine simulation, aerodynamics etc.
In the end the limit mostly isn’t the engine, but the CPU and GPU power available.
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I hope they update our CAE7000XRs as I can’t wait to get the first UNREAL based Full Flight Simulator at our Training Center.
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From what i recall & i may be wrong. MSFS began development in 2014-2016. Of course engines can be improved & upgraded but not to the extent of UE 5 & would require them to essentially start from scratch which isn’t going to happen.
I definitely think certain graphical aspects will improve over time but i think that’ll be more down to general computing hardware improving. As time goes by, people will upgrade their systems meaning improvements could be made to the sim & not affect the performance as they likely would for many people at the moment.
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There is basically no point in switching the engine imho.
Let Asobo proceed in moving to DX12, whenever that is out of beta they may look into RTX effects, shadows and lighting (raytracing is already a variable which is available in UserCFG.opt since release but currently not used) - you likely won’t miss UE5.1 if done correctly 
However this is something way down the road but more close than switching the whole engine.
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Wow that looks amazing!
Not possible to switch engines like that, it would require years of work. MSFS uses already a great engine, state of the art level, from Forza Horizon 5 I think.
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I think it could be done within the current engine at some point. As others have said the base entry performance for computers would need to increase so probably unless they are allowed to stop selling for current Xbox that will be the limiting factor.
But technically, it needs replacement models, and clever use of LOD’s within the models so the closer you get, the more detailed version of each model is swapped in. Of course the terrain would also need to be better defined so either AI would need to be a lot better at interpreting missing detail or globally we needs more higher resolution scanning of the ground at least in more important areas where there will be more obvious object alignment problems if the terrain isn’t exactly matching what the objects are sitting on.
Don’t think this kind of detail is exclusive to Unreal, as long as the hardware rendering it is powerful enough.
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Nope, only when they are planning to make a MSFS version 2.0.
The current version has to be rewritten completely from the bottom so this isn’t going to happen.
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I have to laugh at some poster’s expectations. All of MSFS’s percieved problems derive from being an unfininished non sandboxed wide FOV mimo title playable over a range of platforms and available hardware over extended periods without cut scenes … the Unreal engine is designed for practically every opposite scenario.
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The look of the sim will evolve and improve over its lifespan but its never going to look like a Call of Duty or a GTA. Thats not what its about.
The lighting and graphics engine powering the sim and what improvements we will see going forward is definitely a interesting topic of discussion though. We’ll probably see ray tracing added this year at some point plus seasonal effects. It’ll be interesting to see how all that looks.
I do wander what the sim will look like in 5 years time.
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I can’t help but feel that future generations of Xbox and Azure cloud capabilities will be the main drivers of where MSFS is heading … but that really shouldn’t be a bad thing as online super-computers will be far more potent than even the most powerful PCs currently available.
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MODERATOR EDIT:
This post merged into this topic.
Can anyone tell what this is? It looks like a sim platform developed using Unreal Engine 5.1
Thanks
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Commercial sims for ‘civil aviation, defence and security, and healthcare’
Took me less time to google that than to watch the video
Oh my that’s a lot of cut scenes … and I imagine hardly useful in a sim at 4k resolutions. And comparing this with their real time footage it’s clear that it’s an enhanced promotional production.
I already posted this above. CAE has partnered with Unreal for its next generation of flight simulation products. Prodigy will be used across multiple platforms and eventually supplant the current generation Tropos system in Flight Training Devices and Full Flight Simulators.
What you posted is one of the promotional videos. The Prodigy system will be used in civil and defense and security products. (Many defense and security simulators are specially designed variants of the civil training platforms and must meet the same certification criteria as Level D devices plus additional requirements.)
I also would not take seriously any distracting nay-saying by individuals who have never worked in the commercial simulator industry. This is Unreal in a real commercial flight simulation environment.
However, comparing MSFS to a Full Flight Simulator is like comparing an Apple to a Zucchini. AOPA gave a good article (good for 2011) which I recommend reading. ABCs of Simulators - AOPA The article is dated but still provides a basic overview.
As such saying Unreal works in a commercial training environment where a simulator is run by racks of servers and the visuals are powered by multiple professional (Quadro) graphics cards is a huge difference from someone running a flight simulation video game on a PC or XBOX. Just to get an idea, the blade that runs the Instructor’s Operating Station (IOS) runs on a 32-core Xeon with 32 GB of memory. All this blade does is allow the instructor to interact with the simulator. The least intensive operation of anything that is happing in the simulator.
The servers also run inside an operating environment that is 100% tuned for moving around information that a simulator need. (They run custom operating systems.) It would be like Asobo not just writing MSFS but also rewriting the operating system that runs your PC.
Suffice it to say that happening at the highest level of flight simulation where devices cost tens of millions of dollars is a far cry from seeing it on a PC or XBOX. Then again, I don’t work for L-M so no telling what is up their sleeves. 
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While the Unreal engine is great, the following is made with the MSFS engine.
Not bad either for a flight simulator. 
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The #1 limitation that was preventing the use of UE 4 for flight simulation was its 32 bit coordinate system. Aside from that and some 6-dof camera rotation issues, everything else in the engine was more or less up to the task. Developing a physics based flight model was relatively straightforward in it.
Their coordinate system was based around centimeter precision with six decimal places. This was highly accurate for short range human scale small environments but if you wanted to travel further it required exchanging precison for range.
The end result was that once you approached a distance of 2km from the world origin you started encountering serious rounding errors, which would lead to position and rotation jitter and all kinds of physics problems. That’s not a problem for the average room/level based shooter, but it’s unworkable for an open world with high speed vehicles. The only remedy was to shift the world origin once every 2km of travel to compensate, but this was an absolute nightmare to manage, especially in multiplayer. This is why you don’t generally see UE4 games with extremely large open maps, and those that do exist have invested heavily in world origin witchcraft.
Enter Unreal 5 with, finally, a proper 64 bit coordinate system. The engine can now maintain that original short range position resolution at planet scale with no issue whatsoever. You don’t even need to think about shifting the origin until you’re almost out of the solar system.
It is now very possible to make flight and space games and sims in it, so I’m not surprised to see such efforts already starting. The Asobo engine is very performant though, and in many areas much more so than Unreal, at least out of the box, given that it doesn’t need to cater to a thousand different use cases (including film sets) at once.
The sim is far too developed now to switch engines, it would be a multi-year effort for very little if any gain, but if there’s going to be an MSFS 2 at some distant point in the future it might be a good option.
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Thanks for the explanation. I see you really do know what you are talking about!! Very interesting.
Thanks
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Running MSFS on UE 5.1 is like putting a car engine in a jet airliner. It’s the wrong tool for the job. If you’re concerned about graphics, they don’t need to rewrite or change engines, they just need to add some updated rendering techniques.
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