Microsoft Flight Simulator is taking to the skies in 2020, but the publisher is sharing details about the current state of development beginning today. Microsoft launched the game’s Insider Program, and you can sign up for it right here. Insiders get regular updates about the studio and Microsoft Flight Simulator as well as a roadmap for what the developers are working on next.
For August, the Flight Simulator team is running an internal alpha test. In September, it will update fans about that technical alpha and likely when you’ll get a chance to try it yourself. The company previously promised that it will run test builds of the game. Also next month, the studio will talk about how it plans to implement feedback from players. Then, in October, the developer will have a timeline for the second tech alpha.
You can see all of that and more in the roadmap below:
When does the Microsoft Flight Simulator technical alpha test open?
When it comes to the technical alpha tests, Microsoft hasn’t provided a lot of details. The roadmap for September just says “Build program — tech alpha timeline.” But since the company is saying that it will talk about the “Build program — tech alpha No. 2 timeline” in October, the first public test could begin next month.
I’ve reached out to Microsoft to ask for clarification. I’ll update this story with any new information.
Microsoft announced its new Flight Simulator at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in June. The game is using modern visuals and satellite imagery to build a realistic-looking world for you to fly around. This is the first Flight Simulator release since 2006, and it’s part of Microsoft’s renewed dedication to PC gaming.
Flight Simulator is also coming to Xbox One, and you can get it as part of a subscription to Xbox Game Pass for either the console or PC.
Nvidia announced that Microsoft’s Minecraft will be the latest game to support Nvidia’s real-time ray tracing graphics on the PC.
The game is one of a number that Nvidia will show running on Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards at the Gamescom game event in Cologne, Germany this week. Other games that will include RTX support at Gamescom include Dying Light 2, Synced: Off-Planet, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Cyberpunk 2077, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, Metro: Exodus — The Two Colonels, Control, and Watch Dogs: Legion.
Minecraft has sold more than 176 million copies to date, and now it will look dramatically more realistic through RTX.
A free game update will provide Minecraft players with visualizations of their self-created worlds, with more realistic shadows, lighting and vibrant colors.
“We are incredibly happy with how fast and how broad the adoption of this technology has been across the ecosystem,” said Jason Paul, general manager for software and technology at Nvidia, in a press briefing. “The biggest video game of the past decade is supporting RTX.”
Nvidia and Mojang are adding a form of ray tracing known as path tracing for the Windows 10 version of the game. Path tracing simulates the way light is transported throughout a scene. It presents a unified model for lighting calculations for many different types of effects that have traditionally been implemented separately using rasterized or hybrid renderers.
“Ray tracing sits at the center of what we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, franchise creative director of Minecraft at Microsoft, in a statement. “GeForce RTX gives the Minecraft world a brand-new feel to it. In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”
The new effects include:
Direct lighting from the sun, sky and various light sources, including emissive surfaces such as glowstone and lava
Realistic hard and soft shadows depending on the size, shape and distance of the light source
Per-pixel emissive lighting
Indirect diffuse illumination (diffuse global illumination)
Indirect specular illumination (reflections)
Transparent materials with reflection, refraction and scattering (stained glass, water, ice)
Atmospheric scattering and density (volumetric fog, light shafts, realistic sky)
One of the interesting new games is Synced: Off-Planet, which is being built by Tencent’s flagship games development studio. The game is a brand new franchise that will use ray-traced reflections and shadows in a new twist on PvPvE that has players fighting each other while surviving 1,000+ “Nano Zombies.”
“Minecraft is the Legos of our generation, enabling people to create and build in a world inside of inside of a video game,” Paul said. “And the community has done amazing things with it. The impact of this game in the community is massive. We’re really excited to be working with Microsoft to take this to the next level.”
Microsoft and the Minecraft Team want to give Minecraft players a chance to try the franchise’s new AR game on Android. Minecraft Earth is already available as a beta test for people running iOS 10 devices. Now, it’s expanding to include Android 7 or higher devices.
You can sign up for Minecraft Earth now. You’ll need to have a Microsoft or Xbox Live account. You’ll also need to provide some other information as well as your choice of iOS or Android. Microsoft will then email you with details about how to get into the game.
Minecraft Earth is an AR game. This means that it augments the real world with computer graphics as well as gameplay mechanics. Using your smartphone and its camera, you can view Minecraft creations that people build and leave around your neighborhood. You can, of course, build structures yourself and leave them for others to discover.
This is obviously a lot like the megasuccessful Pokémon Go, which has players catching pocket monsters out in the real world. Like that game, Microsoft and developer Mojang are creating permanent digital installations in public. Some of these locations will offer players the chance to go on adventures.
In these adventures, you can dig through digital blocks to uncover chests and materials. You will even have to fight mobs. One of the coolest aspects of these adventures is that your position in 3D space is locked to the game. That means if you see some skeleton enemies underground, you will have to go down one story in the real-world to get to them.
Minecraft Earth does not have a release date for its public version, but the game is clearly making progress. So expect to hear more about it soon.
Minecraft’s Marketplace was able to hit such huge heights thanks in part to the summer sale, which ran through the first week of July. The Minecraft Team also launched some free content to celebrate that sale. Anyone could get the Summer Beach Party skin pack at no cost.Recommended videosPowered by AnyClipOcasio-Cortez Shares Road Trip Video Of Her Standing In Front Of Giant SequoiasPauseUnmuteDuration 0:37/Current Time 0:04Loaded: 38.81% FullscreenUp Next
But as for premium content, Toy Story was on top for the second month in a row. And I get that. Toy Story 4 was so good, so now waiting for that movie to come out on home video is excruciating. I’ll take Toy Story anything to hold me over, and Minecraft delivers exactly that with the Toy Story Mash-Up pack.
Let’s get to the charts:
Top 10 most downloaded in Minecraft Marketplace July 2019
9. Animals
1. Toy Story Mash-Up by Minecraft
Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep and many of your favorite toys come to life in this oversized mashup based on all the Toy Story movies. To infinity and beyond!
2. Furniture: Modern by Spark Squared
Decorate your home with over 350 furniture options. Mod your living room, bedroom, kitchen, and even your garden! Design your dream house like never before.
3. Lucky Blocks: Classic by Spark Squared
Test your luck with Lucky Blocks: Classic! Open the infamous [?] question mark blocks in this fun world and face exciting or potentially devastating results.
4. Military Base by Vaeron
Your duty begins today, soldier! Drive the troop transport into your base, use the multipurpose vehicle to cover tough ground, and fly the jet through the skies.
5. Party Island by Imagiverse
Take a vacation from the city to Party Island! Choose your own modern mansion and enjoy music at parties all around the island.
6. PureBDCraft by BDcraft
Dive into the exciting life of a marine biologist! Explore several ocean biomes while discovering amazing creatures.
7. Star Wars Classic Skin Pack by Minecraft
The Star Wars Classic Skin Pack features an assortment of over 50 heroes, villains, and rogues from the Galactic Civil War. Whether you pick a Jawa or the mighty Darth Vader, you can play as your favorite Star Wars characters from Episodes IV to VI, Minecraft-style.
8. City Living by Noxcrew
Get the full lifestyle experience with luxury apartments, office buildings, and even drivable vehicles. Pick your perfect home or take in the sights. Customize your world with brand new models, blocks, & textures. Comes with 30 free skins.
9. ANIMALS by Everbloom Studios
Discover tons of newly added animals in a massive custom world! Every animal has its own unique behaviors, animations and sounds.
10. Dinosaurs by Vaeron
Watch out for the dangerous T-rex, dive into the ocean to watch the Sea Rex hunt, and follow the herd of giant Diplodocus.
Top 10 highest grossing Minecraft Marketplace July 2019
8. Advanced Dragons
7. Animals
1. Toy Story Mash-Up by Minecraft
Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep and many of your favorite toys come to life in this oversized mashup based on all the Toy Story movies. To infinity and beyond!
2. Furniture: Modern by Spark Squared
Decorate your home with over 350 furniture options. Mod your living room, bedroom, kitchen, and even your garden! Design your dream house like never before.
3. Lucky Blocks: Classic by Spark Squared
Test your luck with Lucky Blocks: Classic! Open the infamous [?] question mark blocks in this fun world and face exciting or potentially devastating results.
4. Party Island by Imagiverse
Take a vacation from the city to Party Island! Choose your own modern mansion and enjoy music at parties all around the island.
5. Military Base by Vaeron
Your duty begins today, soldier! Drive the troop transport into your base, use the multipurpose vehicle to cover tough ground, and fly the jet through the skies.
6. City Living by Noxcrew
Get the full lifestyle experience with luxury apartments, office buildings, and even drivable vehicles. Pick your perfect home or take in the sights. Customize your world with brand new models, blocks, and textures. Comes with 30 free skins.
7. ANIMALS by Everbloom Studios
Discover tons of newly added animals in a massive custom world! Every animal has its own unique behaviors, animations and sounds.
8. Advanced Dragons by Pixelbiester
Take one of six dragons to the skies and become a legendary dragon rider! Surprise your enemies with custom attacks. Shoot fireballs and drop TNT. Explore three huge castles and the beautiful custom landscape.
9. PureBDCraft by BDcraft
Dive into the exciting life of a marine biologist! Explore several ocean biomes while discovering amazing creatures.
10. Dinosaurs by Vaeron
Watch out for the dangerous T-rex, dive into the ocean to watch the Sea Rex hunt, and follow the herd of giant Diplodocus.
The most advanced AIs today can perform select tasks with superhuman-like efficiency, beating the best humans have to offer at intricate games like Starcraft II and Go. But ask those same AIs to perform something outside of their area of expertise, and they’ll struggle. Creating an AI that’s a generalist is one of the next major challenges of AI research. And it’s something a team of researchers at Facebook is attempting to do by teaching an AI how to play a game.
This time around, however, the game of choice is Minecraft. According to Facebook, the simplicity and sandbox nature of Microsoft’s popular title make it the perfect training ground for a generalist assistant AI. In Minecraft‘s ‘Creative’ mode, players have been able to recreate complex structures like Star Trek’s Enterprise D with just a few simple building blocks. It’s that potential for almost infinite creativity with a small set of easy-to-understand tools, in conjunction with the difficulty of teaching an AI to understand natural language, that has Facebook spending countless hours on a private Minecraft server. The hope is to eventually create an AI assistant that can help people with their day-to-day tasks, which is something Facebook has been trying to do for a couple of years now.
In 2015, Facebook launched M, an AI-powered personal assistant within the company’s Messenger app, only to shut down the platform after two-and-a-half years. One of the limitations of M was that it frequently required human oversight to complete tasks. Its other issue was that, outside of a small handful of tasks, Messenger users didn’t use M a lot, limiting the AI’s ability to learn. With enough time and some tweaks, the company’s Minecraft AI could form the basis of a future version of M. In the meantime, if you’d like to check out Facebook’s Minecraft AI, it’s available to download.
Nvidia has revealed Minecraft awash in a coat of new pretty paint, with a new trailer on Monday that shows the before and after effects of Nvidia’s raytracing capabilities, with thoughts on the update by Minecraft’s development team.
Watch the trailer above to see all sorts of locales get the RTX treatment on Windows 10, including vibrant homes, glistening lakes, darkened tunnels full of glowing lava, and expansive caves with light filtering in from cracks above. We went hands-on to experience the improvements with Minecraft using RTX, and felt that it looks like an entirely new game. You can hear more of IGN’s thoughts in the video below.
The raytracing will include enhanced lighting, reflections, and shadows across the world, putting more depth and quality into the classic blocks that retain the same assets, but with better looking textures all around. Nvidia also mentioned that everything will be moddable to benefit players, which is a spot of good news after it was announced that the Super Duper Graphics Pack has been cancelled.
The RTX update from Nvidia doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but when it lands you can expect a free update that’s available to anyone using Nvidia cards in the 2060, 2070, or 2080 range (including the Super and Ti variants).For more on Gamescom, be sure to check out our Gamescom 2019 hub, and check out the whole show’s schedule for a clue as to what else we might be hearing about this week.
