K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?

Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play? Or only stream what you actually need when you play while you play?

Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?

Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.

You do that by, hear me out, playing! And the game figures out where exactly you want to play and what you need. Besides, it probably will be an option to preload anyway but I don’t know enough about MSFS. And in the case of preloading, you would hit the exact same data cap.

No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.

Yes and you only don’t fly everywhere in game that you would have to download in these preloaded chunks/regions you’re so happy with. If you just intend to stay in the same location, the streaming will stop! Because, everything will be cached…

You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.

So you cancel your ISP subscription ever time you finished downloading a game, movie, whatever? No you keep paying so you might as well use it. And if you a data cap, I’m sorry for you. That’s a real bummer. But, I don’t know why i have to keep repeating this point, the amount of data is at worst the same! (if you have enough storage to keep it all in cache) If you don’t want to use more data don’t fly to regions you haven’t downloaded yet… But this is the exact same as with preloading…

Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed, but it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game… I don’t get why this is so hard to grasp.

Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it? No you don’t, you let the program figure out which parts you actually need and stream it to you. Same exact thing, fot the exact same reason.

Storage is cheap

So is bandwidth. 8gb/h is only 2mb/s which was maybe a lot 25 years ago. These days you can’t even get a connection slower than 50/100mb/s

But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking.

Games try to be as efficient possible with their network code for real-time updates, so latency is minimalized. This is not at all important if you prefetch stuff minutes before you actually need it.

Yes, just like msfs does. They still use polygons and shaders… Polygons that make up the terrain and more and shaders that sample png tiles as textures… Msfs really does not do anything different than other games, outside of streaming in the assets instead of pre-installing them. Not sure why people think it’s any different.

That’s literally how every 3d game works (barring a few procedural games maybe). Now they just stream those texture and meshes as needed and presumably cache them.

Don’t get distracted by this terrible piece of an article. It never states how long this peak was. It could have been just 100ms. So interpolating this to 81gb/h make no sense at all. It’s just pure click bait.

In the end only the total volume downloaded matters (which the article of course doesn’t mention). Why wouldn’t you want to receive that as fast as possible?

First of all, the textures probably are already compressed, so compressing them more doesn’t do all that much. Secondly, streaming is just downloading, so you can just compress the stream. Sure you might lose a little bit of compression possibility when you don’t present it as one big archive. But that probably saves way less than the tricks I mentioned before.

They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.

No they did not, you have to download it either way… And streaming the render output is not at all the same as rendering locally on your own PC. Neither as an user experience nor as a cost benefit for Microsoft.

You have to download it anyway. If you have the space you can probably specify a high cache volume. Then after a while the streaming would slow down. So whether you download it upfront or during gameplay. In the end it’s more or less the same amount of data. So the whole data cap point is pretty moot. Unless your storage is low and it keeps clearing the cache. But then you wouldn’t be able to play in the other situation at all, or very limited.

And let’s be fair, if your ISP has a data cap less that 10s of TB (or at all) they are scamming you big time. Yay for monopolies eh?

Edit: Thinking about it, streaming the data probably would cause a lower data usage as they can apply LOD tricks and culling, etc. Which they wouldn’t be able to do when you have to pre-download it.

GeForce now does not stream the entire game to you. That’s the whole point of GeForce now, it just streams you the final render. Which is just 1 image, though at 60 per second. Which is way less than all the terrain data, textures, meshes, etc in multiple square kms of map data. Ever wonder why modern AAA games are 90+gb big? Thats all the assets that Microsoft streams to you in their flight sim. The actual code is only a few 10’s/100’s mb. Now imagine an AAA game that covers the whole earth and how much space those assets would take up. Hence why they have to stream it to you to make you even capable of playing this game.

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