It's a dumb question but I was just wondering after watching the latest trailer is the whole map a 1:1 scale of planet Earth?
How do they get that much detail into a game? I remember seeing a video that its data is streamed to your game online, because the whole Earth can't fit into 150gb right? I'm so confused lol, is there also offline play? Thanks ahah.
Flight Sims like this have had the whole world in them for over a decade. The whole world can fit into 150GB, the full X-Plane 11 install is smaller than that.
The size of the global data depends on several things. Most flight sims have layered scenery.
At the bottom you have the terrain mesh, this creates the bumpiness of the land. In the past it would be fairly low resolution. But third parties would offer more detailed higher resolution mesh that would make the land detailed.
On top of the mesh is in X-Plane and older MS Flight Sims is landclass data. This tells the sim stuff like "this is an area with housing", "this area is industrial", "this area is tropical sea" and the sim would no what to put there.
And what would be put there? Well generic textures for housing, industry and sea. And on top of that would be appropriate 3D models.
There's also a vector layer with roads and rivers and coastlines.
And there would also be bespoke objects placed in the right position - The White House for example.
And yes, you could get the whole world like this in a download smaller than the latest Call of Duty.
And one could buy more detailed scenery - separate things like terrain mesh, better textures, updated landclass etc. You could buy photo textures and these took up huge amounts of space. You could also buy scenery packages that combine all these things - photo scenery, detailed mesh, and all the right buildings. There's even free software for X-Plane that helps you download photo map textures from google maps.
Now what the new Flight Sim 2020 does is a combination of these past techniques and some new things too. I don't know exactly what is in the final download but it's likely to be global generic terrain mesh, generic seasonal textures, 3d object, and vector data. So offline you can fly around the world and it will be pretty close to the real thing - certainly compared to older sims - but not photoreal. And yes this will fit in a 120GB download.
But when connected online (or using the rolling caching system that stores online data for use offline) the generic ground textures are replaced with high resolution detailed photo textures - what's really there. The generic download scenery is replaced by higher detailed photo and photogramatry data sourced originally from Bing maps.
So yes, you'd be surprised how much of the world they have been squeezing to Flight Sim releases for quite some time.
