• OmegaLemmy@discuss.online
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    15 days ago

    Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning

  • Skates@feddit.nl
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    15 days ago

    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).

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      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.

      • loutr@sh.itjust.works
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        15 days ago

        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.

        • nik9000@programming.dev
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          15 days ago

          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.

    • sushibowl@feddit.nl
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      14 days ago

      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.

  • auzy@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    That’s not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.

    • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      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)

      • auzy@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        Yeah. That was admittedly the big issue with Australia. With VFR it was useless unless we used Orbx in the days

  • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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    14 days ago

    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.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      15 days ago

      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.

      • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        Hell, they’ve been refunding Linux users for GTAV this week because of the change to BattleEye.

      • fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        14 days ago

        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.

      • UmeU@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        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.

  • Ugurcan@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    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.

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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    15 days ago

    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.

    • geogle@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I know. That statement was weird. In just a few lines of code I can chew up all available ram on a machine.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      15 days ago

      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.

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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          14 days ago

          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).

  • thejml@lemm.ee
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    15 days ago

    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.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    15 days ago

    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?

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      I remember being asked what I needed 64 MB of RAM for. My answer, of course, being “because I can.”

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 days ago

        My server has around 156GB RAM.

        Do I use most of it? Nah.

        Why then?

        Cuz it was free from work and I wanted to hit the amount from Weird Al’s “it’s all about the Pentiums”

      • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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        15 days ago

        after years of dealing with emm386 trying to get ultima 7 to run on DOS, i always bought all the ram i could afford. fuck all that “you don’t need that much” bullshit