Flight Simulator

I finally got around to watching the Channel 9 video tour of the Flight Simulator team, which features my old college friend Steve Lacey.

It’s an interesting and enjoyable tour. A few things that occurred to me:

• There’s some hard-core obsession with realism going on. Of course, this is a good thing. It’s funny to hear that the Boeing simulators have worse graphics than Microsoft’s version.
• What happened to Steve’s accent? He used to sound normal. I have to confess that when we sat next to each other in lectures about eighteen years ago Steve would often translate what I said into something that the lecturer could understand, so perhaps it’s my accent that we should be worrying about here :-)
• The video quality is, overall, pretty poor. It’s not so bad when the subject is mostly fixed, like the talking head sections. When there is any movement involved, such as walking down the corridor, it becomes really bad. I’d guess that the low quality is a result of wanting to both reduce the bandwidth required to watch and also reduce the bandwidth required at the server end. Maybe a higher-quality video could be put in place once the story has dropped off the front page of the site? That way people who come back later can get good quality and Microsoft can keep a lid on the bandwidth bills.