Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
That’s exactly what they’re doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.
Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.
My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
Also… this is the kind of game that kind of requires a “live service” element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
Leveraging something they already run makes a lot more sense than building a bespoke thing for streaming the data for just MSFS. (In my defense, it is a game and game devs have done much sillier things than doing something like that.)
I just have begun to accept that I’m not the market for games anymore, because I’m unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there’s no more money to be squeezed out of it.
I’m just very opposed to renting entertainment because everything is temporary.
(Thankfully there’s ~30 years of games to play that don’t suffer from any of this live-service-ness so I’m not exactly short of things to spend time on.)
You must really hate going to the movies. If I spend $60-70 on a game and get 50-100+ hours of entertainment from that money spent that’s a dub in my book.
If someone enjoys flight simming it’s not really a question, they will buy this game because it’s one of the best all-around sims.
Rant but mostly venting to the void - reply to both you and parent comment, my thoughts:
I have games that are 20+ years old that I’m still clocking gametime in. Games with dedicated communities, still-going multi-player, mods, game improvements…
If a game becomes intentionally unavailable, I - and everyone else - should get a full refund. Full stop, no exceptions, no bullshit store credit. Money back in my account. You don’t expect someone to repo your phone, car, or house after 3 years of “ownership”, why is literally anything any different?
In current times, I’m super pissed at The Crew getting axed, and I plan to only yarr content published by ubi now. They can’t be trusted, so it’s not my fault, but theirs.
I have unannounced/anticipated games on my radar that I’m already planning on ‘wait, see’ or ‘only the base game’ because I see the shift to ‘lease ownership’ and ‘everything is a bundle of parts’. Current games that I have thousands of hours in, but due to bugs, cheating (with no response from devs), added after-purchase ‘packs’ when I bought the fancy bullshit version to have the “whole game”, etc that I now value at 1/5th of the full asking price I paid - I’m tired of this garbage. Being a “beta” (alpha, in some cases) early access guinea pig is not a fucking perk. Promises of content later is not a fucking perk. Always online is not a fucking perk.
Game time isn’t the only metric; for me, at the bare minimum, the game has to be good - I shouldn’t fight a game every step of the way to draw enjoyment from it (related: stop trying to use players’ in-game creations to prop up the game itself and it’s core content) - and it has to remain mine, forever. Maybe I’m getting old, but at least I’m not a fool. A purchase is a purchase, not a temporary allotment.
And (because why not) I fucking despise going to the theater. Other people are annoying, can’t pause the film to take a piss, sticky/cum-soaked floors adhering fuck-knows-what to your shoes, noisy phones going off, $12 for a midday showing + a snack and drink is another $9. If you go to a fancy theater, you can order a microwaved burger and fries right from your seat for only $31. They cannot go away fast enough.
Games used to be $20, you got the full game, forever, sometimes with multi-player that you can host yourself, forever, sometimes with free DLC, forever. Now they want $80 and are trying to say that they have the right to take it back and still keep the money. Fuck em all. Except indie devs. But I’m watching you.
Anyway. That was cathartic. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Why would they hate sitting in one chair for more than an hour, looking at a wall with picture projected there, and with the darkness around whispering, sighing, laughing, squealing, grunting, sneezing, farting
I just have begun to accept that I’m not the market for games anymore, because I’m unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there’s no more money to be squeezed out of it.
Most games still aren’t like this though and this is really one of the few games where it’s justifiable because of the nature of the technical challenges in letting players explore the real world.
the nature of the technical challenges
I’m big into the retro and preservationist movements, and while I’m certainly not capable of providing a good answer as to how you could implement the features they have, it makes it where the game is, effectively, dead and not salvageable as soon as Microsoft decides to pull the plug.
Sure, you could maybe do a reimplementation of it on your own and host all the data and such, but realistically it’s a cool thing that’ll eventually vanish from usability.
(I also don’t expect most people to care, but it’s still a case where it’s built in a way you really can’t preserve it as it is right now.)
Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable.
You shouldn’t have to download the entire planet though.
The game 100% should support installing local specific areas you wanna fly around, that anyone could then keep a copy of.
If a user wanted to cache an entire 8 TB of the entire world on a drive, they should be able to just do that (and thus have forever support without worrying about internet services staying online)
At least, as a snapshot of what the world looked like in 2024.
I don’t see why users shouldn’t have the option to locally HD save the data if they want to, to avoid maxing out their internet bandwidth in one sitting.
You do cache what you use as you use it
The issue is with this being a forever game. If there are no servers there is no streaming. Hence the need to somehow host a one off entire world download indefinitely.
MSF2020 runs offline too, it’s even sold on discs in certain regions. You just don’t get any of the satellite imagery or live weather. Obviously that means a degraded experience, but it still works.
I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt – and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo’s (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.
Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.
Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.
Gonna take strong issue with that sentiment.
People are people. Some people buy the three season passes for the annual CoD game. Some people buy every single stardew-like. Some people have a monthly subscription to WoW or war thunder or whatever. And some people buy one or two planes for DCS per year. It boils down to spending money on entertainment.
What confuses people is that they look at the Steam page for DCS and lose their god damned minds. Which “makes sense” when you are used to games that have conditioned you that you need EVERYTHING or else you will miss out on everything and be a loser and Josh Duhamael will think less of you. But a given plane in DCS is so high fidelity that it basically is an entire game in and of itself. Same with the super complex train DLCs for those games. You aren’t buying every single plane. You are buying an FA18 because you want to spend an hour or two learning the startup procedure and another couple hours training yourself on the electronics so that you can then spend a few more hours on…
As for hardware setups? I am a scrub so I “just” have a HOTAS with pedals (separate stick and coupled throttle+pedals. Probably 250 USD total including the mods I made to the throttle) and a chinesium sled so that I don’t have to mount and unmount them from my desk (like 30 USD and half a can of WD40). Yeah, that was more than a questionable purchase (and let’s not talk about the sticks I iterated on to get to this setup…) but it is a once a generation, if not once a lifetime, purchase. And sure, others go a LOT farther (because they are the cool kids who go on a roadtrip to get a real scrapped cockpit).
But a quick google says that a call of duty skin is 20 USD. And people buy those every year because activision have keyed in on “people don’t want live games. they want to buy the same shit every year and lose features every fall”. Others will buy big supporter packs for their live game of choice and so forth. It, again, boils down to spending money on entertainment.
Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable.
I’m certain Soviet General Staff maps turned into a flight sim map, with a few thousands of buildings being modeled and textured individually and the rest with similar (like buildings made of hexagon modules in some games have variety, but the separate components are not too numerous) procedurally-generated repeated kinds of meshes, textures and shaders, would take weigh little enough that you wouldn’t notice download times.
What else do they do for flight sims?
Weather data? A lot, but not that much.
I just can’t imagine what would need 64GB. I think it’s an intentional waste for the purpose of this game not being playable after its end of life.
A bit like Heinlein’s “Door into summer” future economics. Only there such stupid things are done to reduce unemployment, while here they are done to keep markets predictable for corporations and controlled, so that they wouldn’t, you know, die, as they would in a normal market because of competition.
Which reminds me of one important thing I’ve already changed in my life to not support such malicious actions. I don’t buy products that are intentionally made this way.
But it is a really good game for the time being
Call me when it’s a really good game forever.
Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn’t mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money
FS 2020 reportedly already used 2 PB of data as it’s base. Good luck downloading that!
The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
I’ll admit I haven’t played much (or possibly even any?) online MSFS stuff and am generally just a fart around in a Cessna in a random city type of player so I don’t even necessarily know what the online features are, other than the Install New Locations minigame wherein you spend hours downloading shit, heh.
Live weather, live traffic, multiplayer traffic, and photogrammetry are all disabled in offline mode.
I doubt it’s pulling in massive amounts of data.
But the maps data it does pull in will be messed about with, a bunch of trees splatted all over it, buildings extrapolated, water flows, etc. That’ll be what’s taking the RAM.
The actual flying seems like the least interesting part of this game, and what they’ve really made is Google Earth on steroids.
From what I heard they do actually put a lot of effort into simulating airplane aerodynamics at least for the smaller planes. So the flying part is kind of important.
Yeah, the Google Maps equivalent that you’re flying around in is the massive amount of data. The flight sim part isn’t insignificant, but the massive amounts of canned data will be all those maps.
There are some 3d demoscene programs that use miniscule amounts of disk space but still need a fair bit of memory for working space.
Like .kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
FS2020 downloads 600GB of something ROUTINELY
Oddly? This is not odd at all.
It’s been a while sincce I wrote code, but I’ll try to remember. Basically disk size and ram size have no connection. Disk size is for already generated assets (maybe you need to remember how the planes look like, so you create assets for all the planes. Or you want to have textures for the scenery, or for the Lincoln monument, or whatever).
But then you need to load those resources into RAM to access them faster, because if you try to load them directly from disk, it’s a lot slower. So some part of those 64GB of RAM is because you are loading some premade assets.
But aside from this, there’s also dynamically generated data that you have no way of knowing about at the beginning of the program, so you can’t prepare in advance and generate assets for it. Like say for example the player wants to begin flying the plane - he’s gonna have some different inputs than any other player. Maybe he drives slower at the beginning, or goes a little to the right when he takes off. Or his destination will be completely different. You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane’s weight and who knows what else, I’m not a pilot. All of this, you allocate memory dynamically, based on user changes, and this uses the RAM as well.
Not to mention - you can make a 1kb program that takes 64 GB of RAM. You just ask the operating system for that much memory. You don’t even need to fully use it. It’ll take you one line of code.
All this to say - nothing odd about the program being smaller than the RAM requirements. It can mean it’s not optimized, but it can also mean it has a lot of dynamic calculations that it’s doing and a lot of stuff it needs to remember (and in the case of a flight Sim this wouldn’t surprise me).
Technically correct, but if I’d have any input into hiring a person whose background involves making a flight simulator requiring 64GB RAM, that doesn’t emulate every mol in that plane for that cost (I’m exaggerating a bit), I’d ask many questions.
It requires 16GB RAM, which is perfectly acceptable. But it can use more if available, for high res textures I assume. Which are streamed from Microsoft’s servers, explaining in part the difference between install size and max memory requirements.
My guess is the big video ram is high resolution textures, complex geometry, and a long draw distance. I honestly don’t know much about video games though.
The smaller install is totally the map streaming stuff. I’m unsure quite why it has to be so big, but again, I don’t know video games. I do recall you having to tell it where you want to start from and it’ll download some stuff there.
So… Sid Meier?
Sigh
You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane’s weight and who knows what else, I’m not a pilot.
You’re not wrong per se, but I’m having trouble fathoming gigabytes of data being consumed by these types of parameters. You could probably track hundreds of thousands of airplanes with that much space. The only thing that I could imagine taking up that much memory is extremely detailed airflow simulation.
However, as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of memory data for video games is in most cases textures and geometry, and not so much the simulation. Based on the article, it seems this game streams high resolution geometry data based on your current location on earth, which I would say is the most probable reason it asks for so much memory.
Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
Your 32gb can do a lot and will still let you do a lot for a reasonable timeframe. No need to worry.
this situation reminds me of this interesting study: https://www.eoblab.com/_files/ugd/06b6e1_2e2b75f5053f40729dea921c758b8fec.pdf
That’s not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.
They’ve also talked about massively leveraging cloud computing and streaming, it’s likely a lot of actual scenery isn’t part of the offline file size unless you cache the areas for offline play (if that’s even an option)
Yeah. That was admittedly the big issue with Australia. With VFR it was useless unless we used Orbx in the days
I wonder if it’s going to take several hours to download all the world content before allowing you into the menu screen like MSFS2020 does.
I wonder if they’ll insist on using MS servers for the content and will be kept at MS server caps at 5MBPS, meaning that it will take 20+ hours of downloading before you can even play, pulling you outside of the 2 hour Steam return window.
Afaik Steam does refund games if you tell support that you spent time troubleshooting or waited for the launcher to download the actual files.
Though I only think to have read about it. No concrete proof.Hell, they’ve been refunding Linux users for GTAV this week because of the change to BattleEye.
Yeah the Steam refund 2 hour thing is just the no questions asked guaranteed refund window. You can absolutely request a refund outside of that window and they’ll be quite reasonable in most cases.
Years ago, I tried cities skylines on a sort of shitty PC… spent at least 8 hours trying to get it to work, then just gave up.
Requested a refund and it was granted almost immediately.
I bought a better PC and repurchased, and not it runs fine but the game itself is pretty mod dependent and I have spent more time installing and uninstalling mods than actually playing the game.
So yes, ask for a refund and you will probably get it even outside the 2hour window.
Yeah fucking MSFS2020 was such a bust for me living in Australia. It took days to download then I finally got it working something went wrong with install files and had to dick around. In the end I played 3 hours of it but have hundreds in download time.
Fuck MSFS
I was seriously hyped for it and waited years until I had a good gaming rig and then when I downloaded it I couldn’t even get past the loading screen. Unable to establish connection to Microsoft servers. I ended up buying Xplane 12 and Aerofly FS4 instead.
And .kkrieger is 96 kilobytes and uses around 200MB of RAM iirc.
JavaScript developers hate this one weird trick!
The demo scene was always technically amazing
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Interesting—D2R only had 1-3 seconds’ load time for me! Was it bad on consoles without SSDs?
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This game feels like the perfect candidate for streaming from XCloud/GeForce Now since all those data doesn’t really need to be transferred all the time. And the game’s design can tolerate a bit input latency.
Probably will be available on Gamepass Ultimate or whatever the streaming one is called.
Oddly? The game needs ram to store data like variables that the game generates, like physics simulations, among other game systems. The game’s asset size alone doesn’t really matter.
I know. That statement was weird. In just a few lines of code I can chew up all available ram on a machine.
Which is you messing around, nothing professional. RAM leaks are a big bug.
Nah, most of the space is filled with textures in a graphical game. Which is odd in 2:1 RAM:disk ratio, since most of the textures are in ddx nowadays, a format the GPU can use 1:1. You can’t really compress ddx.
They’re taking ram, though not vram.
Still has to be put somewhere, for speed of access. Directly disk to vram would prkbably feel like the chunk loading in Kenshi (engine is old and devs were amateurs).
30GB plus unlimited data streaming while using it…
That said, I suppose one plus is that this hopefully wont need as many 10+GiB updates literally right when I finally have an hour free and want to play it.
30GB to install then 100+ after you open the game and it downloads updates and scenery. Same deal as 2020.
I’m thinking 30 before opening the game and then 100+ after.
It probably streams the content during play.
It definitely does, it pulls satellite data of the whole world
I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much
Just to provide some context as someone who played the hell out of 2020 (on gamepass) and is looking forward to buying 2024 minute 1 and then figuring out how to keep a cat from fucking up a HOTAS sled for minutes 2-900:
The install is small because that is just the core game. Theoretically, that is all you need and it contains the meshes/logic for meshes and plane textures and so forth. You will then stream map data as you play and cache that. So the first time you take off at Pyongyang International it will take a bit of time to load but subsequent trips will be super fast.
That said… you will almost assuredly download the world packs. This is the much more hand crafted cities and airports so you can genuinely feel like you are flying over Paris or escaping from London Heathrow’s international terminal and so forth. Or just to fix some weirdness because of a building layout near a river. And those world packs get big.
Before I switched over to linux for full time gaming? My PC install of MSFS 2020 was probably 100-200 GB on its own just from all the updates?
Casual FS2020 enjoyer here, what changes have you the most excited for 2024?
I’m glad they’re moving the world update and other massive downloads to something in the cloud and on-demand. Anything between 10-40% of my “play time” on steam was actually downloading stuff.
Great. Now I’ll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.
