helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 02:35
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I don’t get it.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 03:41
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Imagine you would save all YouTube videos on your hard drive. You don’t have enough space for that (and time to download anyway). So the next best thing is to just stream those videos and parts you actually watch.
And this is kind of how this game works; it will only deliver those parts and download in the background (which is called streaming) what you currently visit and need. Because you don’t have enough space on your drive.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 04:21
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So it’s a stream-only game?
ryannathans@aussie.zone
on 15 Oct 2024 05:44
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High quality photograhy of the earth streams, you don’t need to have it set to high quality
thingsiplay@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 11:21
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FS 2020 had an offline mode. You get much lower quality terrain and no live data like weather. I’m assuming it’s the same with FS 2024.
tuckerm@supermeter.social
on 15 Oct 2024 03:43
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mbtrhcs wasn't saying that you specifically don't have a big enough hard drive, they're saying that MS Flight Simulator is simply too big of a game to completely store on a player's computer.
MS Flight Simulator has a fairly accurate 3D model of the entire earth. Like, the whole thing. So it's constantly downloading the parts that the player is currently in, and deleting the parts that they are not in.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 03:52
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I hope there is a manual download function for your favorite areas to play them offline, that do not get deleted over time. Kind of how maps on your phone work, just with lot more requirements.
You can use as much storage space as you have available. There is no upper limit, as far as I know.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 02:40
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Live information from the earth like weather and other data. If its raining in your city, then it will be raining in the game at this place too. Plus the game does not have all other data anyway, because entire earth is too big for your drive.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 04:20
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Weather data does not need 180mbps
You can’t disable this?
SaltySalamander@fedia.io
on 15 Oct 2024 10:56
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because entire earth is too big for your drive
You sorta glossed over this part.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 13:21
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I didn’t gloss over anything. It simply makes no sense. The Earth is not a digital object.
GammaGames@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 13:24
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How… do you think we represent physical objects digitally? Vibes?
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 13:29
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No one said anything about a digital representation. I can draw Earth in MS Paint and it’s like 1mb.
If your point is that it has a high resolution digital image of the Earth, just say that.
But my point still stands. I’d still rather have a 500GB local install instead of all the problems that come with game streaming.
GammaGames@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 13:35
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We shouldn’t have to say that at this point, my initial reply already conveyed that information.
I understand the gripe with it though, they have the option to download areas ahead of time.
(Though it’s probably a one-time download, with models and textures cached for later use)
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 14:10
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We shouldn’t have to say that at this point, my initial reply already conveyed that information.
You sorta glossed over the part where I described how and why your reply was nonsense.
GammaGames@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 14:24
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My first reply said it was streaming high-res data from the cloud. Considering it’s a flight simulator advertising to cover the entire world, most people would intuit that would include textures and 3d models.
I’m not going to sit here and argue with you, have a nice day.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 11:53
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It’s not weather, it’s terrain and textures. It’s a high resolution stream of where you are flying over so you don’t need to keep the earth on your PC. The base install is supposed to be only ~30GB data, that’s not enough to see your house.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 13:25
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It’s dumb. I’d much rather have a 500GB install. They might as well just make the game a streaming service. It also ensures an early death for the game and no functionality without an internet connection.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 13:31
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I don’t think requiring online functionality is the death knell of a game in the year 2024. Personally, I’m excited. Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install and I hated MSFS2020 taking up a quarter of my game drive.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 15:26
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I 100% disagree. Any game that requires connection to a remote server for single player functionality is dead to me. And any suggestion otherwise I take personal offense to.
This makes your local game dependent on someone else’s server. That someone else, at any time, can shut down that server with zero consequences. They can change the terms of the deal, with zero consequences. Their servers may unintentionally go down or experience other technical issues, depriving you of the product you paid for, with zero consequences. Also you simply cannot use it away from an internet connection.
You are at the mercy of the provider, who has absolutely no legal obligations to you.
Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install
And you can’t see why that would be a massive problem while trying to livestream your game from their server?
DdCno1@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 17:09
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Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 17:12
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Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start
Were you streaming at 180mbps?
and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.
That’s not how cache works.
In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 18:35
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More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.
Interesting that they’re able to maintain such speeds for streaming map data but not downloads…
In this case, it does.
It doesn’t, in any case. Cache is, by definition, temporary.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 18:06
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The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.
Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.
FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.
You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.
FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 16:34
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You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming
But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…
You’re just keeping some of the data local (presumably “the game” itself and probably plane models and cabins) and streaming the terrain data.
they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.
That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.
But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…
No. Map and weather data is being streamed, cached on your SSD and then the game engine loads it from there into RAM and uses it in combination with other locally stored data and locally performed physics calculation to render the game on your machine. You get an uncompressed, high quality image and low-latency input, freshly baked by your graphics card for your eyes only. At 1080p and 60 fps, that’s already 2.98 Gbit/s per second generated by your GPU and sent to the screen as is. At 1440p, we are at 5.31 Gbit/s and at 4K, 11.94 Gbit/s. DisplayPort can handle up to 20 Gbit/s per lane and use up to four lanes, by the way.
Xbox Cloud Streaming only uses up to 20 Mbit/s (and that’s very optimistic). At the advertised 1080p, this means that only 6.7% as much data as generated on the server is reaching your screen.
The problem with game streaming is that in order to limit latency, they have to compress the image and send it very quickly, 60 times per second, which means they have just 16.7 milliseconds for each frame - and do this for potentially millions of users at the same time. This cannot physically be done at any decent level of quality. It is far easier to send much larger amounts of map data that is not time critical: It doesn’t matter if it’s even a few seconds late on your machine, since the game engine will render something with the data it already has. At worst, you get some building or terrain pop-in, whereas if even a single of the 60 frames required for direct game streaming is being dropped, you’ll immediately notice it as stuttering.
That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.
If you don’t have the hardware to play this game locally, then I would not recommend it. If you have - and a base Xbox Series S is enough for a reasonable experience, which costs just 300 bucks new or about half as much used - then there is no reason for using the streaming service, unless you absolutely have to play it on your phone at work.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 15 Oct 2024 17:05
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I don’t understand any of this. I’ll have to take your word for it. Thanks for the explanation.
Also don’t buy this because like the previous flight simulator, they will restrict you to slow Microsoft servers so your first 150 hours in-game will actually just be downloading additional content at whatever speed Microsoft has limited their servers. 5MBPs? Maybe sometimes!
B0rax@feddit.org
on 15 Oct 2024 06:12
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At this point, streaming the game (just the screen content) would be less of a bandwidth hog.
This shows they’re not trying very hard to optimize the simulator, but instead throw hardware and bandwidth at it, and expect users do the same.
Open world games like GTA allow flying over dense areas without using 180Mbps of bandwidth.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 11:48
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Because GTA has 99.99% of the data on disk. MFS2024 is trying to keep the install size from being 500 GB, so rather than having the whole world on your PC they are streaming it in. GTA doesn’t do that.
Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 12:26
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GTA 5’s entire game world is just the San Andreas area. The point of MFS2024 is that you can literally see your real world house from the air. It’s so, so, so much larger than GTA 5’s < 100 km2 it’s a totally unfair comparison.
I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.
That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.
So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.
wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 15 Oct 2024 12:50
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Except they can’t? Because the world itself doesn’t repeat like that.
Also we’re not talking a doubling of the area. We are talking 1:1 of the entire earth. Starting from satellite images.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 12:55
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Yeah, you’re not getting the goal. They are using actual data from the areas you’re flying over. You’re suggesting they look at it like a game, where the reuse textures and models. Their goal is the opposite, to have the game look like the real world.
Even in MFS2020 my house roughly look like my house, and the taller structures look like they do in my city, they aren’t just skyscraper#93781 and bridge#12381, they are all unique structures that uses the bing maps data to look just like it does in real life. The landmarks in my city are my cities landmarks. They aren’t just generic buildings.
I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.
MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.
SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
on 15 Oct 2024 13:26
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The fact that you started by comparing it to GTA 5 makes it obvious you don’t know, but okie dokie, at this point I have to assume you’re just trolling.
ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de
on 15 Oct 2024 12:39
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How small do you imagine the world of MFS is?
DdCno1@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 13:31
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Apples and oranges. GTA V has a small, entirely hand-built world. It’s just 80 square kilometers and was meant to fit onto two DVDs / one Blu Ray Disk. Real-world Los Angeles, which this is based on, is 1,210 square kilometers.
This Flight Simulator on the other hand covers the entire planet. If we are just going by land area, that’s 510.1 million square kilometers. It’s using a combination of satellite and aerial photography, radar maps, photogrammetry (reconstructing 3D objects - buildings and terrain in this case - from photos), Open Street Map and Bing Maps data, as well as hand-built and procedurally generated detail. There’s also information on the climate, live weather data, animal habitats (to spawn the right creatures in each part of the world), etc. pp. We are about two petabytes of data, which is an unfathomable amount outside of a data center.
You can not optimize your way out of this. The developers have the ambition to create the most detailed 1:1 virtual facsimile of this planet. There is no other way of achieving this goal. You can not store two petabytes of data on a consumer PC at the moment, you can not compress two petabytes of data to the point that they are being reduced to a couple hundred gigabytes and if your goal is accuracy, you cannot just reuse textures and objects from one city for another. That’s what every prior version of this flight simulator did, but if you remember those, the results were extremely disappointing, even for the time.
By the way, if you don’t have an active Internet connection, Flight Simulator 2020 (and 2024, if I’m not mistaken) will still work. They’ll just do what you’re suggesting, spawn generic procedurally generated buildings and other detail instead (in between a handful of high detail “hero” buildings in major cities), based on low-res satellite photography and OSM data, which is relatively small in size even for the whole planet and tells the program where a building and what its rough outline and height might be - but not what it actually looks like. Here’s a video from an earlier version of FS 2020 that shows the drastic difference: youtu.be/Z0T-7ggr8Tw
It is worth stressing that you will see this kind of relatively low detail geometry even with an Internet connection any time you’re flying in places where the kind of high quality aerial photography required for photogrammetry isn’t available of yet. FS 2020 has seen continuous content updates however, with entire regions being updated with higher quality photogrammetry and manually created detail every couple of months - and FS 2024 will receive the same treatment. I am generally not a fan of live-service games, but this is an exception. It makes the most sense here.
The one major downside is that eventually, the servers will be shut down. However, since you can choose to - in theory - cache all of the map data locally, if you have the amount of storage required, it is actually possible to preserve this data. It’s far out of reach for most people (we are talking low six figures in terms of cost), but in a few decades, ordinary consumer hardware is likely going to be able to store this amount of data locally. The moment Microsoft announces the shutdown of this service, people with the means will rush to preserve the data. Imagine what kind of amazing treasure this could be for future generations: A snapshot of our planet, of our civilization, with hundreds of cities captured with enough detail to identify individual buildings.
Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.
The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.
A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.
Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.
taanegl@beehaw.org
on 15 Oct 2024 08:32
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At that point, people were curious and decided to go deeper into the engine. Low and behold, it’s a game engine, based entirely on telemetry technology.
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 15 Oct 2024 13:37
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Lo* and behold. 💜 Lo is an old time word for listen.
threaded - newest
why does it need 1Mbps?
Streaming high-res data from the cloud
Ok but why
because the earth is big and you don’t have a hard drive big enough to store it locally?
No one does
Yeah…? That’s my point
I don’t get it.
Imagine you would save all YouTube videos on your hard drive. You don’t have enough space for that (and time to download anyway). So the next best thing is to just stream those videos and parts you actually watch.
And this is kind of how this game works; it will only deliver those parts and download in the background (which is called streaming) what you currently visit and need. Because you don’t have enough space on your drive.
So it’s a stream-only game?
High quality photograhy of the earth streams, you don’t need to have it set to high quality
I don’t know if it has offline only mode.
FS 2020 had an offline mode. You get much lower quality terrain and no live data like weather. I’m assuming it’s the same with FS 2024.
mbtrhcs wasn't saying that you specifically don't have a big enough hard drive, they're saying that MS Flight Simulator is simply too big of a game to completely store on a player's computer.
MS Flight Simulator has a fairly accurate 3D model of the entire earth. Like, the whole thing. So it's constantly downloading the parts that the player is currently in, and deleting the parts that they are not in.
I hope there is a manual download function for your favorite areas to play them offline, that do not get deleted over time. Kind of how maps on your phone work, just with lot more requirements.
There is. It’s called manual cache and it does exactly this:
i.imgur.com/MNmLqcb.jpeg
You can use as much storage space as you have available. There is no upper limit, as far as I know.
Live information from the earth like weather and other data. If its raining in your city, then it will be raining in the game at this place too. Plus the game does not have all other data anyway, because entire earth is too big for your drive.
You sorta glossed over this part.
I didn’t gloss over anything. It simply makes no sense. The Earth is not a digital object.
How… do you think we represent physical objects digitally? Vibes?
No one said anything about a digital representation. I can draw Earth in MS Paint and it’s like 1mb.
If your point is that it has a high resolution digital image of the Earth, just say that.
But my point still stands. I’d still rather have a 500GB local install instead of all the problems that come with game streaming.
We shouldn’t have to say that at this point, my initial reply already conveyed that information.
I understand the gripe with it though, they have the option to download areas ahead of time.
(Though it’s probably a one-time download, with models and textures cached for later use)
You sorta glossed over the part where I described how and why your reply was nonsense.
My first reply said it was streaming high-res data from the cloud. Considering it’s a flight simulator advertising to cover the entire world, most people would intuit that would include textures and 3d models.
I’m not going to sit here and argue with you, have a nice day.
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It’s not weather, it’s terrain and textures. It’s a high resolution stream of where you are flying over so you don’t need to keep the earth on your PC. The base install is supposed to be only ~30GB data, that’s not enough to see your house.
It’s dumb. I’d much rather have a 500GB install. They might as well just make the game a streaming service. It also ensures an early death for the game and no functionality without an internet connection.
I don’t think requiring online functionality is the death knell of a game in the year 2024. Personally, I’m excited. Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install and I hated MSFS2020 taking up a quarter of my game drive.
I 100% disagree. Any game that requires connection to a remote server for single player functionality is dead to me. And any suggestion otherwise I take personal offense to.
This makes your local game dependent on someone else’s server. That someone else, at any time, can shut down that server with zero consequences. They can change the terms of the deal, with zero consequences. Their servers may unintentionally go down or experience other technical issues, depriving you of the product you paid for, with zero consequences. Also you simply cannot use it away from an internet connection.
You are at the mercy of the provider, who has absolutely no legal obligations to you.
And you can’t see why that would be a massive problem while trying to livestream your game from their server?
Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
Were you streaming at 180mbps?
That’s not how cache works.
More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.
In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.
Interesting that they’re able to maintain such speeds for streaming map data but not downloads…
It doesn’t, in any case. Cache is, by definition, temporary.
The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.
Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.
How are you going to fit two petabytes of data into a 500 gigabyte install?
No one said anything about 2PB.
That’s how big this game world is.
Where did that number come from?
It’s mentioned here: flightsimulator.com/msfs2024-preorder-now-availab…
Ah well, that does make more sense then. I hope they have an offline mode as well.
Also it seems like they’d be better off making it a game streaming service entirely and that would remove the need for all that bandwidth…
FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.
You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.
FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.
But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…
You’re just keeping some of the data local (presumably “the game” itself and probably plane models and cabins) and streaming the terrain data.
That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.
No. Map and weather data is being streamed, cached on your SSD and then the game engine loads it from there into RAM and uses it in combination with other locally stored data and locally performed physics calculation to render the game on your machine. You get an uncompressed, high quality image and low-latency input, freshly baked by your graphics card for your eyes only. At 1080p and 60 fps, that’s already 2.98 Gbit/s per second generated by your GPU and sent to the screen as is. At 1440p, we are at 5.31 Gbit/s and at 4K, 11.94 Gbit/s. DisplayPort can handle up to 20 Gbit/s per lane and use up to four lanes, by the way.
Xbox Cloud Streaming only uses up to 20 Mbit/s (and that’s very optimistic). At the advertised 1080p, this means that only 6.7% as much data as generated on the server is reaching your screen.
The problem with game streaming is that in order to limit latency, they have to compress the image and send it very quickly, 60 times per second, which means they have just 16.7 milliseconds for each frame - and do this for potentially millions of users at the same time. This cannot physically be done at any decent level of quality. It is far easier to send much larger amounts of map data that is not time critical: It doesn’t matter if it’s even a few seconds late on your machine, since the game engine will render something with the data it already has. At worst, you get some building or terrain pop-in, whereas if even a single of the 60 frames required for direct game streaming is being dropped, you’ll immediately notice it as stuttering.
If you don’t have the hardware to play this game locally, then I would not recommend it. If you have - and a base Xbox Series S is enough for a reasonable experience, which costs just 300 bucks new or about half as much used - then there is no reason for using the streaming service, unless you absolutely have to play it on your phone at work.
I don’t understand any of this. I’ll have to take your word for it. Thanks for the explanation.
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Fuck this sim they said they would never make because 2020 was supposed to just be a live service.
Plus, they didn't deliver on tons of promised things, like multicrew.
Don't buy this, don't trust MS.
Wow, so just like Windows 10 to 11?
Also don’t buy this because like the previous flight simulator, they will restrict you to slow Microsoft servers so your first 150 hours in-game will actually just be downloading additional content at whatever speed Microsoft has limited their servers. 5MBPs? Maybe sometimes!
At this point, streaming the game (just the screen content) would be less of a bandwidth hog.
This shows they’re not trying very hard to optimize the simulator, but instead throw hardware and bandwidth at it, and expect users do the same.
Open world games like GTA allow flying over dense areas without using 180Mbps of bandwidth.
Because GTA has 99.99% of the data on disk. MFS2024 is trying to keep the install size from being 500 GB, so rather than having the whole world on your PC they are streaming it in. GTA doesn’t do that.
GTA 5 require 120GB of disk size, not 500GB. And this include everything, game engine, assets, and the whole area. …rockstargames.com/…/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PC-system…
Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.
GTA 5’s entire game world is just the San Andreas area. The point of MFS2024 is that you can literally see your real world house from the air. It’s so, so, so much larger than GTA 5’s < 100 km2 it’s a totally unfair comparison.
I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.
That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.
So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.
Except they can’t? Because the world itself doesn’t repeat like that.
Also we’re not talking a doubling of the area. We are talking 1:1 of the entire earth. Starting from satellite images.
Yeah, you’re not getting the goal. They are using actual data from the areas you’re flying over. You’re suggesting they look at it like a game, where the reuse textures and models. Their goal is the opposite, to have the game look like the real world.
Even in MFS2020 my house roughly look like my house, and the taller structures look like they do in my city, they aren’t just skyscraper#93781 and bridge#12381, they are all unique structures that uses the bing maps data to look just like it does in real life. The landmarks in my city are my cities landmarks. They aren’t just generic buildings.
I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.
MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.
The fact that you started by comparing it to GTA 5 makes it obvious you don’t know, but okie dokie, at this point I have to assume you’re just trolling.
How small do you imagine the world of MFS is?
Apples and oranges. GTA V has a small, entirely hand-built world. It’s just 80 square kilometers and was meant to fit onto two DVDs / one Blu Ray Disk. Real-world Los Angeles, which this is based on, is 1,210 square kilometers.
This Flight Simulator on the other hand covers the entire planet. If we are just going by land area, that’s 510.1 million square kilometers. It’s using a combination of satellite and aerial photography, radar maps, photogrammetry (reconstructing 3D objects - buildings and terrain in this case - from photos), Open Street Map and Bing Maps data, as well as hand-built and procedurally generated detail. There’s also information on the climate, live weather data, animal habitats (to spawn the right creatures in each part of the world), etc. pp. We are about two petabytes of data, which is an unfathomable amount outside of a data center.
You can not optimize your way out of this. The developers have the ambition to create the most detailed 1:1 virtual facsimile of this planet. There is no other way of achieving this goal. You can not store two petabytes of data on a consumer PC at the moment, you can not compress two petabytes of data to the point that they are being reduced to a couple hundred gigabytes and if your goal is accuracy, you cannot just reuse textures and objects from one city for another. That’s what every prior version of this flight simulator did, but if you remember those, the results were extremely disappointing, even for the time.
By the way, if you don’t have an active Internet connection, Flight Simulator 2020 (and 2024, if I’m not mistaken) will still work. They’ll just do what you’re suggesting, spawn generic procedurally generated buildings and other detail instead (in between a handful of high detail “hero” buildings in major cities), based on low-res satellite photography and OSM data, which is relatively small in size even for the whole planet and tells the program where a building and what its rough outline and height might be - but not what it actually looks like. Here’s a video from an earlier version of FS 2020 that shows the drastic difference: youtu.be/Z0T-7ggr8Tw
It is worth stressing that you will see this kind of relatively low detail geometry even with an Internet connection any time you’re flying in places where the kind of high quality aerial photography required for photogrammetry isn’t available of yet. FS 2020 has seen continuous content updates however, with entire regions being updated with higher quality photogrammetry and manually created detail every couple of months - and FS 2024 will receive the same treatment. I am generally not a fan of live-service games, but this is an exception. It makes the most sense here.
The one major downside is that eventually, the servers will be shut down. However, since you can choose to - in theory - cache all of the map data locally, if you have the amount of storage required, it is actually possible to preserve this data. It’s far out of reach for most people (we are talking low six figures in terms of cost), but in a few decades, ordinary consumer hardware is likely going to be able to store this amount of data locally. The moment Microsoft announces the shutdown of this service, people with the means will rush to preserve the data. Imagine what kind of amazing treasure this could be for future generations: A snapshot of our planet, of our civilization, with hundreds of cities captured with enough detail to identify individual buildings.
Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.
The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.
A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.
To be fair, GTA also isn’t the size of Earth while using extremely high resolution satellite images as textures.
Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.
At that point, people were curious and decided to go deeper into the engine. Low and behold, it’s a game engine, based entirely on telemetry technology.
Lo* and behold. 💜 Lo is an old time word for listen.
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I put a heart to make my intentions not seem mean.
I thought it was a fun comment, didn’t come across as negative at all. Also TIL!
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Simulating data in flight. Makes sense.
Checkmate! I don’t even have 180 mbps internet lane. Deal with it Microsoft!
/s
Is that what the pilot calls “streaming through the cloud”?