Microsoft's Flight Simulator now includes every airport in the world. Gamers will have a choice of over 37,000 airports to take off from and land at. The previous version of the game included just 24,000 airports. The new game includes international hubs like New York's JFK and London Heathrow. It also has tiny grassy landing strips and runways in the middle of deserts or on the top of mountains. The 37,000 airports in Flight Simulator have been manually designed to look like the real airports. Designers used images from satellites and Bing Maps to do this.
The graphics are much better in the new game. The designers put a lot of effort into increasing the level of detail. There are windsocks blowing in the wind and service vehicles driving around next to the runways. The runway markings in the game are the same as those on the real runways. The lead game designer said: "To reach a new level, we needed a new approach. We decided to innovate by editing airports from real satellite pictures. This technique involves editing each airport manually. This means we paid particular attention to detail to bring every airport a step closer to reality."