As Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Steam reviews collapse to ‘Overwhelmingly Negative,’ its developer has admitted it "completely underestimated" the excitement for the game.
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
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
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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)!