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.
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: https://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.
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. https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/203428177/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PC-system-requirements
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.
How small do you imagine the world of MFS is?
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.
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.
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.
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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Streaming high-res data from the cloud
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because the earth is big and you don’t have a hard drive big enough to store it locally?
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Yeah…? That’s my point
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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.
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.
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because entire earth is too big for your drive
You sorta glossed over this part.
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How… do you think we represent physical objects digitally? Vibes?
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.
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How are you going to fit two petabytes of data into a 500 gigabyte install?
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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.
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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”?
Simulating data in flight. Makes sense.
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@savvywolf @Xatolos agree the article is probably disingenuous about real data usage but 180 / 1000 / 8 * 60 * 60 = 81
Yeah, I goofed and forgot a “* 60”.
