Following a prolonged period of hibernation, the rebooted Microsoft Flight Simulator, officially available on August 18, could be the perfect antidote to pandemic-induced cabin fever -- or to airplane cabin withdrawal symptoms, for those who've been bumped off their real-world flight plans due to Covid-19.
Getting misty-eyed over the imminent demise of the "Queen of the Skies"? Flight Simulator will let you fly your very own Boeing 747 on that round-the-world trip you had to cancel this year.
Or if looping the loop over the snow-capped Pyrenees is your thing, the new flightsim helps users master the controls of a Pitts aerobatic plane as it slices through snow and wind effects that mirror real-world weather, derived in real time from climatic data sources.
Alternatively, if you didn't manage to get your skiing holiday in this spring break, you could go off-piste and get some digital solace by landing your Cessna Citation executive jet at Courchevel Altiport.
Reality? Check.
Photo-realistic graphics are a given in the world of online gaming, but what separates this sim from its rivals is the facility to fly anywhere in a world reconstructed from high-definition satellite-generated Microsoft Bing mapping imagery.
Bing data is siphoned through Microsoft's machine-learning technology which then builds 1.5 billion houses and 2 trillion trees -- not to mention 37,000 airports, all hand-touched to ensure that each runway has the right length and that taxiways and parking stands are marked correctly.
The colossal quantity of data required to simulate this realistic world in real time is managed using Microsoft's Azure cloud-based platform. Azure does the heavy lifting, so your home computer doesn't need to be of the super-duper variety to deliver a convincing experience.
Take off from London City Airport on a frosty morning, and as you pass the Shard you can even peer through the glinting glazed superstructure into the highly detailed interior of the building -- just one of many architectural icons that have been modeled in geek-satisfying ultra-high-resolution to bring a sense of realism that transcends the norm for digital games.
That's quite a feat for a sim that many fans had assumed, just a few years ago, would never be resurrected, or supported by Microsoft -- given that the last revision was with the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX), its 10th version, in 2006.
In the meantime, other flight simulator rivals had built their own simmer followings, notably Laminar Research's X-Plane 11, which provides over 3,000 airports, an intuitive interface, high-resolution graphics and even pushback tugs and roaming fuel trucks at airports.
Another popular sim is AeroFly FS 2, that offers such features as route planning, an Instrument Landing System (ILS) Omnidirectional Radio Range (VOR), Non-directional Radio Beacon (NDB) plus Virtual Reality support for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive without any additional software.
And for simmers taking their first steps in preparation for a career in aviation, Lockheed Martin's Prepar3D is also well liked, being specifically geared for prospective private, commercial and military pilots, and allowing users to create training scenarios using realistic environments.