INTERVIEW: Shawn Firminger, ACES Studio Manager

PCPP: The last flight simulator already gave you a massive range of flight options. When you approached number 10, what did you know that you wanted to add?

SHAWN FIRMINGER: We knew that for Flight Simulator X, we wanted to engage a wider range of people with the experience and help many that may be unfamiliar with Flight Simulator to explore their personal curiosity or passions for flight. We also wanted to give the loyal and long time users some new things to help them to explore a wider range of the product, and to be able to share their experiences with other Flight Sim users anywhere in the world. And speaking of the world – given that we ship one "in every box" we also wanted to increase the degree of global support around the experience.

With these (and other) premises in mind, we organised the main new and compelling features of Flight Simulator X across three main areas:

· The Dynamic Living World
· Structured Experiences (Missions)
· Shared Skies (Multiplayer)

In addition to these three fundamentals come the usual new introductions for aircraft and technology.

The Dynamic Living World:
Flight Simulator is an amazing product. It's about flight, but it doesn’t just give you a few airplanes and a few places to fly. Flight Simulator ships you the world... with every airport (over 24,000), every approach, and a full terrain and climate environment. Every release we try to "up the detail" but for Flight Simulator X, we are going to blow away the out-the-window experience over previous versions by as much as a factor of 16! We will achieve this in large part by going to a DVD-only release, giving us a greater data storage capacity on the media for starters. The exciting aspect of the Dynamic Living World is that users will now be part of something larger than just their aircraft. We’ve increased the scenery objects, the AI entities such as vehicles, boats/vessels, and airport ground traffic and activities to fully immerse the user. And for more fun, we've worked with the Zoo Tycoon team here at Microsoft to introduce animals in our world. You'll see them in some of the missions.

Structured Experiences (Missions):
The classic Flight Sim experience starts you inside an airplane, on some runway at some airport, and leaves the rest up to your imagination. For many, this is enough to launch into a world of rich immersion, entertainment, and exploration. But many people have really been looking for more help, ideas, or guidance from the product on things to do, places to go, and different things to try and learn. Missions will provide all users (new or experienced) with fun and challenging "things to do" across a wide range of locations, aircraft, and objectives. The Mission functionality will also serve to support tutorials (as opposed to more formal lessons) making the learning process both fun and less intimidating. Missions will cover a wide range of skill sets (beginner through expert) and different challenges (fun flight, challenges, and airline/commercial oriented) to appeal to all users!

Not to worry – for those that love the free flight freedom and flexibility that has been the hallmark of Flight Simulator for over 25 years – this will still be a primary experience in the box!

Shared Skies:
We will continue to support the free form "16 player" free for all, but we are going to introduce several new features to make the experience easier to access and more fun for a wider variety of users. We will be using the GameSpy environment to handle the lobby and meeting aspects of the experience. GameSpy is a leading and trusted online environment many are already familiar with, which makes it a natural for Flight Simulator. We are introducing a new feature called the "Shared Cockpit" which will enable two people anywhere in the world to occupy the same aircraft and share the duties and the fun! For some, they will emulate the two-crew experience, others will take on the Instructor – student roles, and others can just share in the excitement of flight in different aircraft over unfamiliar parts of the world. The last new and exciting component to Shared Skies will be the ATC Tower Controller experience. Users with the Deluxe edition of Flight Simulator X can now play the role of Tower controller or Air Traffic Controller complete with a fully functional radar screen and tower views.