Is Flight Sim US-centric?

That's a criticism we hear quite often. It's unfortunate, because we do go to great effort to ensure adequate global coverage for many features of our product. Of course the last version, A Century of Flight, provided many opportunities *not* to appear globally aware. The aircraft list was a prime example. We have limited resources for aircraft productions and there were many, many different historically significant aircraft we could have chosen. For example, consider the 'first' aircraft. We selected the Wright Flyer because it is general accepted as the first documented case of controlled, powered flight but in truth the early years of aviation were dominated by the Europeans, especially the French, with significant contirubtions made by designers from Russia and Brazil. If you're interested in this I'd highly recommend a recent book, Wings, by Dr. Tom Crouch, senior curator at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. You can read about how the French practically invented the aerospace industry while the United States practically ignored powered flight altogether.

 

One thing about Flight Sim is undeniably global, though. We ship the planet. To do so we've developed a number of data-driven systems for representing geographic diversity. Take our system for populating the work with 3D objects, AutoGen, for example. A recent blog comment asked when we are allow region-specific AutoGen textures. Well, in fact we do--and have for several versions. The key to this system is a regional map. This divides the world into a number of regions that have somewhat unique characteristics. This enables use, for example, to create ground textures for small towns that look different depending on what part of the world you are in. And, since AutoGen objects are defined by the underlying textures this allows for regional variation in 3D objects (buildings and trees) as well. Now, you might notice that the map is fairly course, consisting of only 10 regions and disallowing for greater variation within a region. Europe, for instance, is only represented by a single region so you can't have apartment buildings in southern Spain that look different that those in Norway. We'd like to add more variation but that means creating more content--more terrain textures, more trees, more buildings--and that takes a lot of time. So, we'll see how far we can get with the next version.

 

This just scratches the surface of the global elements of FS. If you want the nitty-gritty details of how it works check out the Terrain and AutoGen SDKs on our web site.