In a world where real aviation and air travel has become a scarcity, there’s an irony in the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the brief span of time we’ve been adapting to a global pandemic, so much of our world has gone virtual. Before COVID-19, a flight simulator would be an exciting augmentation, not a replacement for one’s exploration. In many ways, the platform’s availability, and its beauty, is a melancholy reminder of how much of the world — the real world — has become off limits to us as travelers.

在现实的航空和航空旅行已变得稀缺的世界中，新版本的Microsoft Flight Simulator具有讽刺意味。 在短时间内，我们一直在适应全球大流行，因此我们的世界已经变得虚幻了。 在COVID-19之前，飞行模拟器将是令人兴奋的增强，而不是替代人类的探索。 在许多方面，该平台的可用性及其优美之处令人忧郁地提醒着我们，世界上有多少(现实世界)已成为我们旅行的禁区。

Yet, in the middle of the most severe downturn global aviation has ever seen, the cultural underpinnings of the aviation community globally need Flight Simulator now more than ever before.

然而，在全球航空史上最严重的低迷之中，全球航空界的文化基础比以往任何时候都更需要飞行模拟器。

Thankfully, Flight Simulator, which goes into wide release on August 18 — one day before National Aviation Day — is no substitute for the real thing either, and that’s a relief. Sitting behind a desktop simulator is great fun — as I’ve done countless times over the last two and a half decades — but, like any great simulation, it only stokes the desire to fly that much more.

值得庆幸的是，Flight Simulator于8月18日(美国国家航空日的前一天)广泛发布，也不能替代真实的东西，这是一种解脱。 坐在台式机模拟器后面真是太好了-在过去的两年半中，我已经做过无数次了-但是，就像任何出色的模拟一样，它只是激发了更多飞行的愿望。

The Air Current: Exploring the vast Earth Microsoft has created for Flight Simulator

气流： 探索微软为飞行模拟器创建的广阔地球

For almost the entirety of the last year, I have been hands-on with Flight Simulator as part of the final phase of Microsoft’s multiyear development by Asobo Studio, the French game developer working with the Redmond, Wash. technology giant. Late last summer, The Air Current, the aviation publication for which I am Editor-in-chief, was part of a small group that got the first public look at the new platform at the new platform during an event at Renton Municipal Airport.

在几乎整个去年的整个过程中，我一直都在使用Flight Simulator，这是由微软游戏开发商Asobo Studio进行的微软多年开发的最后阶段的一部分。AsoboStudio是与华盛顿州雷德蒙市技术巨头合作的法国游戏开发商。 去年夏末，我担任总编辑的航空出版物The Air Current是一个小组的一部分，该小组在伦顿市立机场举行的活动中首次在新平台上对新平台进行了公众关注。

“The visual fidelity is expletive-worthy,” TAC wrote back in September, when we detailed the ins-and-outs of the platform built on a two petabyte database (it’s a 91 gigabyte initial installation) of two and three-dimensional imagery that lives inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

TAC 在9月份写道： “视觉保真度极具推销价值”，当时我们详细介绍了在两PB数据库(初始安装大小为91 GB)上构建的二维图像和三维图像的详细信息。驻留在Microsoft的Azure云中。

In December, Microsoft made available a pre-alpha build and a half dozen major updates on which to provide feedback and find bugs. In July, the alpha program became a beta test preview as Microsoft moved closer to release. For the sake of full disclosure, Microsoft provided some hardware to evaluate the software along with a copy of the final release at no charge — on which this review is based.

十二月，Microsoft提供了一个pre-alpha版本和六个主要更新，以提供反馈和发现bug。 7月份，随着Microsoft接近发行版，alpha程序成为beta测试的预览版。 为了进行全面披露，Microsoft提供了一些硬件来评估该软件，并免费提供最终版本的副本，该软件是此评估的基础。

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By any measure, reviving Microsoft’s venerable title after a 14-year hiatus since its last full release with all the trappings of modern graphics processing, cloud computing and artificial intelligence is a moonshot-level of technical aspiration. It’s an unequivocal visual feast with endless possibilities for exploration. Its release represents the largest contemporary expansion of aviation enthusiasm in years, if not decades, and brings that interest in flying to a larger audience than ever. Every word of the superlative set of initial impressions from September remains true today.

无论如何，自上次全面发布以来，微软已经中断了14年的停滞期，重新获得了微软的尊贵头衔，这套图形技术，云计算和人工智能的所有陷阱都是技术追求的登峰造极。 这是一场明确的视觉盛宴，有无穷的探索可能性。 它的发行代表着数年来(甚至数十年来)对航空热情的最大的当代扩展，并带来了对飞行的兴趣，这一兴趣比以往任何时候都大。 从9月起最高级的初始印象中的每个词在今天仍然是正确的。

Though like a commercial airplane program that has staked a claim as a “game changer”, Microsoft’s new version of Flight Simulator has enormous potential to transform the world of virtual flying — both for the virtual and licensed pilots alike. But also like a new commercial airplane program, its game changing potential also faces some teething issues that take some of shine off of its promised capabilities.

微软的新版本“飞行模拟器”虽然就像一个声称可以“改变游戏规则”的商业飞机计划一样，却具有巨大的潜力，可以改变虚拟飞行的世界，无论是对于虚拟飞行员还是持牌飞行员而言。 但是，就像一项新的商用飞机计划一样，其改变游戏规则的潜力也面临着一些令人毛骨悚然的问题，这些问题使它的承诺能力失去了一些光彩。

The involvement with industry has been extensive. Companies like Garmin, Airbus, Textron, Boeing, Daher, Robin, Diamond, Pipestrel and Icon have lent their products and planes to be replicated in the virtual world. And increasingly this virtual world is having an impact on aircraft development and training in the real world.

与行业的联系已经很广泛。 Garmin，空中客车，德事隆，波音，Daher，Robin，Diamond，Pipestrel和Icon等公司已借出其产品和飞机，以便在虚拟世界中复制。 这个虚拟世界越来越多地影响着现实世界中的飞机开发和培训。

演示地址

Jeorg Neumann, the Microsoft executive that has led the platform’s development since the middle of the last decade said that the visual system that Microsoft has created is being looked at for inclusion in professional simulators, that are part of a 2019 estimated $4.6 billion market, according to Grandview Research. Even with the pandemic and the seismic changes within the industry, the need for training (and retraining) will still be enormous.

自上个十年中期以来一直领导该平台开发的微软高管Jeorg Neumann表示，正在考虑将微软创建的视觉系统包含在专业模拟器中，该模拟器属于2019年估计的46亿美元市场的一部分。到Grandview Research。 即使行业内发生了大流行和地震变化，培训(和再培训)的需求仍然是巨大的。

TAC: Airlines stare down simulator logjam once pilot furloughs hit

TAC： 飞行员休假袭击后，航空公司凝视着模拟器的僵局

“The manufacturers are talking to us about powering their Level-D simulators,” said Neumann. “The manufacturers obviously have really good control over their avionics, they have all the telemetry that they ever want for their particular planes, but they are sure are attracted to other things we have that they don’t have. Oftentimes they have simplistic renderers, they’re not modern, and they’ve with jealousy looked at that this games group over there doing because their stuff looks better than our $4 million simulator.”

“制造商正在与我们讨论如何为其Level-D模拟器提供动力，” Neumann说。 “制造商显然可以很好地控制他们的航空电子设备，他们拥有特定飞机想要的所有遥测技术，但他们肯定会被我们所拥有的其他东西所吸引。 通常，他们使用的渲染器过于简单，不是现代的，并且嫉妒地看着这个游戏小组在那做，因为他们的东西看起来比我们400万美元的模拟器更好。”

Neumann reiterated that the company’s focus was first on completing the consumer release before moving toward commercial applications of its visual system.

Neumann重申，该公司的重点是首先致力于完成消费者发布，然后再转向其视觉系统的商业应用。

驯服狂野西部 (Taming the Wild West)

Since Microsoft disbanded its own development effort in 2009 (three years after releasing its last iteration of Flight Simulator and later selling the code to Lockheed Martin), the global community continued on as an extremely active and passionate, albeit decentralized and disorganized, subculture. What Microsoft had abandoned was dragged forward by the community of third-party developers that were committed to making ever-more realistic simulations of aircraft of all shapes and sizes. To take an aviation metaphor, the flight simulator’s users and developers flew in uncontrolled airspace, attempting to deconflict, with no central organizing force. Microsoft’s return is a welcome, if not somewhat jarring, force for a community used to playing by no rules at all.

自从Microsoft在2009年(发布其最新版本的Flight Simulator之后三年，后来将代码出售给洛克希德·马丁公司)解散了自己的开发工作以来，全球社会继续保持着极为活跃和热情，尽管分散和杂乱无章的亚文化。 微软放弃的产品是由第三方开发人员社区推动的，这些社区致力于对各种形状和尺寸的飞机进行更加逼真的仿真。 用航空的比喻来说，飞行模拟器的用户和开发人员飞入不受控制的领空，试图在没有中央组织力量的情况下进行冲突。 微软的回归是一种欢迎，即使不是有点刺耳，也迫使过去习惯于完全没有规则的社区。

“It was the wild west before prior to what we did,” said Martial Bossard, Lead Software Engineer and co-founder at Asobo in an interview with TAC. “We would like to bring a simplification. At the end I think it will be the best for everyone to get adapted to the new systems. We’re trying to make a solid platform for the long run.”

Asobo的首席软件工程师兼联合创始人Martial Bossard在接受TAC采访时说：“在我们开始之前，这是荒野的西部。” “我们想简化一下。 最后，我认为对每个人来说，适应新系统将是最好的。 从长远来看，我们正在努力打造一个坚实的平台。”

Robert Randazzo is chief executive and founder of Precision Manuals Development Group, which is widely considered to be the “Microsoft” of third-party developers, and has been developing high-fidelity Boeing replicas for desktop simulators for the last 23 years. (I interviewed Randazzo whenI was a beat reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2013 when the company released its Boeing 777 simulator, a product licensed by the plane maker.)

Robert Randazzo是Precision Manuals Development Group的首席执行官兼创始人，该组织被广泛认为是第三方开发人员的“微软”，并且在过去23年中一直在为台式机模拟器开发高保真度的波音副本。 (我在2013年成为《华尔街日报》的当选记者时采访了Randazzo，当时该公司发布了这架飞机制造商许可的产品波音777模拟器。)

Because of Microsoft’s long hiatus from this world, the company’s return has caused some discomfort from those who have been using a platform incrementally adapted, but tethered to, a piece of software that was released 14 years ago and itself based on years of legacy code.

由于Microsoft长期以来对这个世界的犹豫不决，该公司的回报给那些使用逐渐适应但被捆绑到14年前发布的软件的平台的人带来了一定的不适，该软件本身基于多年的旧代码。

“Simmers have always struggled to adapt to change, and I think watching MSFS roll out is going to be a master-class in change management,” wrote Randazzo in the company’s public forum. “Some users will leap right in, adapt to the new environment and delight in all that the sim has to offer. Others will get lost in decades of expectations about how things should work and will become frustrated by the newness and the change.”

Randazzo在公司的公开论坛上写道：“新手们一直在努力适应变化，我认为观看MSFS的推出将成为变化管理的大师班。” “一些用户会立即加入，适应新的环境，并且对SIM卡所提供的一切感到满意。 其他人将在数十年来对事物应该如何运作的期望中迷失方向，并因新颖性和变化而感到沮丧。”

PMDG was one of the roughly 300 developers that Microsoft worked with extremely closely during the creation of the simulation to ensure they’d endorse and build for the new platform, along with the community involved during the last year of testing

PMDG是Microsoft在创建仿真过程中与之紧密合作以确保他们认可并为新平台构建的大约300名开发人员之一，以及在测试的最后一年中与社区相关的人员

“The earlier you can embrace the core of your consumer, and listen to what they want the chances are you’ll make a better product. And games, in particular, are often done in this ivory tower thing,” said Neumann.“People like hold on to their story, and hold on to their world…they don’t have the access to what we had the benefit of having access to: Lots of passionate people who have lots and lots of insight and have tons of experience and they give it to you freely.”

“您越早拥抱消费者的核心，并听听他们想要什么，就有机会制造出更好的产品。 尤其是游戏，通常是在象牙塔里完成的，”诺伊曼说。“人们喜欢坚持自己的故事，坚持自己的世界……他们无法获得我们所拥有的收益访问：许多充满激情的人，他们有很多洞察力和丰富的经验，他们会免费将其提供给您。”

While the initial excitement around the platform is red hot at release, the platform’s full capability will be necessarily limited until those like Randazzo’s PMDG, combine the extraordinary visual realism with the technical realism that so many inside and outside of the aviation industry crave.

尽管发布该平台时最初的兴奋是炙手可热，但在像Randazzo的PMDG这样的平台将非凡的视觉逼真度与航空业内外许多人渴望的技术逼真度相结合之前，该平台的全部功能必将受到限制。

充满希望的世界，变得更加紧密 (Promising the world, and getting close)

It’s admittedly unfair to a team of 200 developers spread across two continents during a globe-disrupting pandemic and point to what has been missed, but while Microsoft has quite literally promised “the world”, there are limitations inherent to its effort. Take for instance an area where older satellite data lacks an airport, for which the AI engine is unable to infer.

在一个全球性的大流行中，分布在两个大洲的200名开发人员组成的团队承认这是不公平的，它指出了人们所错过的东西，但是尽管微软确实承诺了“世界”，但其努力固有的局限性。 以一个较旧的卫星数据缺少机场的区域为例，该区域的AI引擎无法进行推断。

Last week, a photo was posted on the aviation photography site airliners.net from Bosaso, a coastal airport in Somalia. The now modernized field on the north coast of the horn of Africa re-opened in 2016, as one of China’s numerous aviation infrastructure projects across the continent. The airport lives inside Microsoft’s world, but it’s an unpaved dirt strip according to the AI-interpreted satellite data streaming from Bing Maps.

上周，从索马里沿海机场博萨索(Bosaso)在航空摄影网站airlines.net上发布了一张照片。 作为中国在非洲大陆众多航空基础设施项目之一，如今非洲之角北海岸现代化的场馆于2016年重新开放。 该机场生活在微软的世界之内，但根据必应Maps的AI解释卫星数据流，这是一条未铺砌的土条 。

TAC: Mapping China’s expansive African aviation infrastructure projects

TAC： 绘制中国广阔的非洲航空基础设施项目

Neumann said Microsoft’s maps team is “flying overhead right now in various places on Earth. We’re happily waiting for new data because it’s going to make our sim better.”

诺伊曼说，微软的地图团队“现在在地球上的各个地方飞来飞去。 我们很高兴等待新数据，因为这将使我们的模拟更好。”

These are small nits to pick when you consider the expansiveness of the world built from the ground up, but there are also major commercial airports missing from the initial release. The new Daxing International in Beijing and Istanbul International are both absent. And other long-established commercial airports are missing altogether like Norway’s Svalbard in the arctic circle, for example.

当您考虑从头开始构建的广阔世界时，可以选择这些小巧的选择，但最初发布的版本中也缺少主要的商业机场。 在北京和伊斯坦布尔国际都没有新的大兴国际。 例如，北极圈内的挪威斯瓦尔巴特群岛(Svalbard)等其他历史悠久的商业机场就完全消失了。

While fully customizable with hundreds and hundreds of commands and options, the user interface can be disjointed and out of the box lacks a consistency that has taken considerable tweaking and modifying to understand over the preceding months. Take for example, something as simple as zooming in or out, changing the height of your eyes inside the cockpit, outside the aircraft or controlling an external “drone” camera are all inconsistent sets of commands on the keyboard.

尽管可以使用数百个命令和选项进行完全自定义，但用户界面却可以脱节，并且开箱即用的缺乏一致性，在过去的几个月中，需要进行大量的调整和修改才能理解。 例如，诸如放大或缩小，改变驾驶舱内部，飞机外部的眼睛高度或控制外部“无人机”摄像机之类的简单操作，都是键盘上不一致的命令集。

And there are numerous instances of controlling systems like the autopilot, flight management computers that are inoperative or buggy. Manipulating these avionics (even when working) simply isn’t able to be performed while “flying” an aircraft. The user interface is still the aspect that will require the most polishing and gets in the way of experience that Microsoft wants users to have.

而且有许多控制系统实例，例如自动驾驶仪，无法运行或有故障的飞行管理计算机。 在“飞行”飞机时根本无法执行这些航空电子设备(即使在工作时)。 用户界面仍然是最需要完善的方面，并且会妨碍Microsoft希望用户拥有的体验。

Yet, even with these headaches, perhaps the most important thing to know about this new simulator platform is really about the title — or rather what’s absent from it. While many have called it Flight Simulator 2020, in the tradition of many of the predecessor versions, the “2020” has been appended as a community descriptor. It’s easy to joke that being associated with 2020 is a yoke (think cattle, not flying) around its neck, but the absence of a year in its moniker is significant. Microsoft has created every inch of a world that won’t remain static and that is something to behold.

然而，即使有这些令人头疼的问题，关于这个新的模拟器平台，最重要的信息可能实际上就是标题-或者更确切地说是标题。 尽管许多人将其称为Flight Simulator 2020 ，但在许多先前版本的传统中，“ 2020”已作为社区描述符附加。 开玩笑地说，与2020年相关联的是其脖子上的锁(认为是牛，而不是飞翔)，但是在其绰号中缺少一年的意义重大。 微软创造了世界上每一个不会静止的世界，这是值得一看的。

“It’s just the beginning of the journey. We have a product that’s ready to go to the public, and that’s a huge step for us but that’s only a beginning,” said Bossard. “It’s not like a box that you put on the shelf and we’ll never touch it again. [Release is] a milestone for the project…but we’re already thinking about what’s coming next.”

“这仅仅是旅程的开始。 Bossard表示：“我们已经准备好向公众发布产品，这对我们来说是迈出的重要一步，但这仅仅是开始。” “这不像是您放在架子上的盒子，我们再也不会碰它了。 [发布是该项目的一个里程碑……但是我们已经在考虑下一步的发展。“

Jon Ostrower is editor-in-chief of The Air Current, a news and information service on the technology and strategy of aviation, a veteran aviation journalist and a 25 year flight simmer.

乔恩·奥斯特罗(Jon Ostrower)是 The Air Current 的主编， 这 是一家有关航空技术和战略的新闻和信息服务，是一位资深航空记者，并且从事了25年的飞行训练。

Write to Jon Ostrower at jon@theaircurrent.com

写乔恩Ostrower在 jon@theaircurrent.com