Flying Over Austin in Microsoft’s ‘Photorealistic’ New Simulator

Image: Microsoft / Asobo Studio

The 2020 edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, released for Windows last month by developers Asobo Studio, sets a new bar for realism and visual fidelity in the world of simulation software. Providing a 3D representation of the entire planet (and 37,000 airports) using Microsoft’s own satellite imagery and other visuals from Bing Maps, the simulator’s detail is such that you can find and buzz your own house in one of its 20 flyable aircraft, though the realism stops there — the program just goes to a black screen and resets your plane if you try to crash it through your own wall. Oh well.

The simulator’s realistic weather effects do a lot of the heavy lifting when visuals are concerned, but the stuff on the ground often looks nice too. Image: Microsoft / Asobo Studio

With all the raves about the program’s accuracy — “so realistic,” quoth the New York Times, “that it suggests a new way of understanding the digital world” — we wondered how well its version of Austin held up, considering how rapidly skyline-altering towers tend to rise around here. To that end, we asked some friends with gaming setups worthy of the simulator’s system requirements to capture two flyover videos of downtown Austin and its surroundings — and what we found was surprising. The game, though it looks fantastic by pretty much any measure, is woefully out of date in terms of how it shows off our central city, with much of the satellite imagery used to construct its 3D representation of our skyline dating back as far as 2014.

The first indication that something’s amiss hits at the 0:55 mark in the above video, when we notice the Rainey Street District is missing not only 70 Rainey, completed in 2019, but the Hotel Van Zandt, completed all the way back in 2015 — if you look closely, you can see it in an early phase of construction to the right of the Shore Condos at 1:18, just below the plane’s left wing. At 1:24, we’ve got a pretty good view of a half-built J.W. Marriott, which was completed in early 2015. At 2:04, you can see the empty field and construction sites behind the plane that would eventually become the Northshore, the Seaholm redevelopment, and the new Central Library, among other projects transforming the former Green Water Treatment Plant site — confirming that this simulator’s version of downtown is mostly trapped sometime in 2014.

The second video keeps us in the cockpit, and towards the end you’ll discover that the Pennybacker Bridge sadly doesn’t make it to 3D, with a generic highway bridge taking its place — it would obviously take several lifetimes of man-hours to accurately model every bridge on the planet, even the ones we love, and the software can’t quite do it with satellite imagery alone. Even with our quibbles, the visual fidelity of the simulation’s pretty good — stick around to the end of the above video for our pilot’s flawless landing on the grass at the Austin Country Club.

Image: Microsoft / Asobo Studio

Though disappointing for anyone hoping to fly laps around the Independent, it makes sense that the imagery is out of date — when you’re simulating the entire world, photos from five or six years ago would get the job done for 99 percent of the planet, and there’s going to be wrinkles here and there. The bottom line is that Austin’s growth actually managed to outpace the simulation’s development, which has been in the works for many years at this point. Microsoft apparently plans to keep updating the program’s visual data over time, so we’re confident they’ll bring Austin up to speed soon enough — still, probably wouldn’t hurt to send a friendly tweet their way.

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