and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure."
By underestimated excitement they meant player count straining their ridiculous approach of streaming massive amounts of data through the game instead of preinstalling.
I’m calling it now: for Flight Simulator 2025, they’re going to pull a Windows update “energy saver” and have it stream data peer-to-peer wherever possible.
I think they’ll go full terminal mode on the next iteration. You’ll download a 100MB launcher and then just do cloud gaming from there.
Its almost as if they plan for this experience. Theyve done it multiple times now, you can only assume its intentional.
Jesus Christ people…
I can almost understand most mmos when this happens, but you designed your freaking game to constantly stream gigantic amounts of data what the actual fuck?
I’m glad I didn’t buy it, but that was because of the incoming administration and their plans to allow data caps to go nutty… Can’t play a game that’s going to cost me tons of money just to play it :(
I mean the business case is clear: It’s way harder to pirate a game that forces everyone to connect to the server to work at all, then when a new version comes out you shut down the old servers and force everyone to buy the newer one. Welcome to late stage capitalism where you’ll own nothing and be happy!
where you’ll own nothing and be happy!
*Terms and conditions apply. Happiness™ is trademark property of capitalism INC and not guaranteed.
Can data streaming be turned off?
No it cannot.
The way they simulate you flying through places is by offloading all the scenery information to MS servers.
The game calculates that you are approaching world tile #1527473 (since all scenery is split into large squares) and asks MS servers to download that tile, which is high resolution satellite images from Bing and topographic data.
In a 30 minute flight while flying an airliner, you may fly through 50+ tiles. One tile (just the orthographic satellite map at high detail resolution) are 5Gb or more (usually more but I’m being conservative since this is napkin math).
As a result, the way the last MSFS and this one rely on terrain streaming to make things work.
If you want a flight simulator that does not rely on streaming and forever load times, check out XPlane 12 or my favourite: Aerofly FS4
That is so fucking stupid it boggles the mind.
It’s not “stupid” if you think that you’d need several terabytes of free space to have the whole world available offline for your game (total land area is roughly 149,4 million square kilometers - assuming 1GB per 100km², you’d need 1,495 terabytes of storage). Of course, M$ knows they could’ve allowed a super lower-res version of the tiles to be installed locally (like 1MB per 100km², though that’d still require 1.5tb of storage), but why if they can force everyone to be always online?
I haven’t played these games but the way I see it, if 2020 was playable offline this really should have been too. I doubt whatever graphical bump they managed between then and now was worth this kind of insane trade off
But then again idk, maybe it was
Oh no I guess this is where you’re a bit mistaken because 2020 was the same garbage. I bought 2020 4 months ago and I had the exact problems people today are having with 2024. The technology behind how they handle scenery is the exact same unfortunately. Hence why I refunded it before my 2 hour refund window.
This might make sense if you keep the image?
Like download time #1527473, and next time you fly over that one it already has it so no need to download…
Or is it as dumb as possible and each time…
A tile is around 5gb, you can go through 1-2 tiles per minute. They only stream what is needed instead of the entire tile when you go through one.
If they downloaded the entirety of every tile as you went through them you’d need 5-600gb of storage for every hour of playtime (assuming you don’t fly the same route all the time) and you’d also need the internet speed to keep downloading 500gb per hour (1.1gbit!)
You’d need a so so so much storage for that. They’ve built it in such a way that if you want high resolution textures, you have to stream it.
I believe it’s how they get the graphical data among other things. Instead of storing textures and stuff on your PC they steam it all in. I don’t think it’s something that can be deactivated.
A step closer to just let you have a terminal, and not access to your data.
Fuck most of Microsoft’s shit, but this is the only way you can realistically do the real world at any recognizable level of detail at all. You might be able to cache an area with an obscene amount of storage, but it would have to be a pretty constrained flight path at pretty low detail to really work.
How much data is it?
For the whole planet? More than your computer can hold, most likely.
It’s 80GB/hour at high quality and that’s a very small area of the planet.
Okay fair enough 😅!
Edit: bad calculations were made by me, it’s only 180Mb/s needed.
Maybe at low you can store it off …
This comment calculated just under 1.5 Pb (yes, petabytes)!
That’s how mfs 2020 works as well, it’s not new
I purchased MSFS several months ago. I was excited to fly the entire world. The game kept crashing (i5 13600k and RTX 4070 Super). After maybe 5 attempts I got past opening the .exe, only to find that the game required 150 gb of updates. No worries, I’ve got fast internet.
But guess what? You’re limited to Microsoft’s server speeds, which appeared to be capped at 320 kbps. I would have run through my refund window ages before I’d even have the game downloaded. Do I risk $90 CAD on the hopes that an already struggling to run game actually works? Or do I refund? Tough choice it was for me. Hah.
Also special fuck you to Thrustmaster. NEVER waste your money on their absolute garbage. I bought the Boeing 787 yoke and it worked for 3 months before the roll sensor gave out, making it impossible to fly straight because the yoke is detecting random spastic motions all over the place, making the entire thing unusable. If you search this issue online you’ll find tons of people with the same issue. They use a first gen cheap hall sensor for the roll axis that keeps picking up interference from everything (especially the left throttle axis)
Also special fuck you to Thrustmaster.
100% fuck thrustmaster. I gave up on them and got a pair of VKB Evo gladiators and absolutely love them.
I grabbed literally the cheapest HOTAS from Aliexpress a few years ago and it has been awesome.*
*It required tweaks. The stick centering spring was WAY too tough and had to be shortened. And the measured range of motion was only about 80% of the physical range of motion so there were deadzones at the end of each axis. Resistors can be added to each POT to stretch out the measured range.
EVO NXT x2 after both my TH16000s shit the bed. Yup, the roll sensors. Opened the damed things up, alchohol swabbed the contacts and sensors, put back together and worked again. But gave them away to a friend just getting into flight/space sims. I warned him about the sensors.
FFS Trustmaster.
I kickstartered Virpils advanced flight yoke system they recently announced. I bought a Winwing Ursa Minor Airbus joystick and it’s fantastic (considering I snagged it for $80cad)
Wouldn’t that be covered by warranty though? 3 months is a pretty short period.
It is! And they want me to pay shipping costs to mail it to them in Florida, where they will send me a brand new one (maybe) and I will encounter the same issue in maybe 3 months? 6 months? The fault lies with the actual sensor they use so I’m kind of boned regardless. It’s a design flaw.
As a fellow simmer, all I can say is: please try X-Plane. It needs support and is the best way to make sure the MSFS approach does not become the norm.
XPlane is fantastic but I play in VR and that is where XPlane downright sucks. XPlane is bound to single core performance on a cpu. It doesn’t matter how good your graphics card is because if you play in vr, your frame rate is capped at single core performance so it is absolutely unplayable (with ASW enabled and all graphics set to low).
For VR, Aerofly FS4 is phenomenal. But the tradeoff there is that Aerofly doesn’t have weather or live ATC. Aerofly actually uses a similar technology as Microsoft (if you enable global coverage). The difference here is that they don’t have access to high resolution orthographic scenery so it’s pretty low res. Performance though is absolutely unbeatable. The full simulator can be run on an iPhone or a Nintendo switch.
Yeah, agreed X-Plane is behind in VR. That specific use case gives MSFS an edge.
Is VR even playable in MSFS? I could never get it to open properly for me in pancake mode.
A completely ridiculous lie on their part. What sane person would give /Microsoft/ any benefit of the doubt whatsoever? (nobody here so far, just saying in general) Microsoft owns insane cloud infrastructure and are also the publishers of the game. If there’s a problem, it’s one they chose not to address, not one that was simply “underestimated”.
Games as services aren’t popular – with a particular demographic. The disconnect here might be that people who tend to play flight sims are decidedly not in the games as a service group.
One reason why I play X-Plane is to avoid this silliness with streaming everything from servers (that, plus the flight and lighting models are better).
If you consider X-Plane
nasnapproaches infinity, it becomes indistinguishable from a subscription model.Except that you can continue to play whatever version you want without issue. X-Plane 12 is the current, but many people are still on X-Plane 11. You can remain on old versions indefinitely – because they aren’t games as a service. They’re local installs.
Mega Corp that operates its own infra can’t manage its servers for a paid product…
Nobody to blame, nobody at fault. Y’all keep paying folks
