God I love having a future where my ability to play a fucking flight simulator depends on both internet access and server reliability.
Completely unnecessary to boot. Store a low res copy locally, offer the high res as regional packs. 0 reason to stream this data in.
If you want a functional flight simulator that doesn’t require you constantly online , try out XPlane or Aerofly FS4. These games will work even if Microsoft puts out another steaming pile of shit in the next 4 years.
Wouldn’t that end up being hundreds of gigabytes per region file?
For low res, no.
Hi res, sure. Make it optional, or let players download the region they like. Or just the airports with much lower res landscapes, etc etc.
Or just, let them have it all and make these choices. Memory is CHEAP nowadays. If you’re a flight sim enthusiast, a few terabytes for the map data is the least expensive part of your setup by far.
Supposedly, the full map is measured in petabytes.
This is actually a perfectly reasonable use of streaming assets for full-resolution, since almost no players will ever experience even 1 percent of the map.
Precisely this – I don’t remember anyone complaining that the FS2020 install size was too large, even if its install size was the butt of a few good-natured jokes. They’ve solved a problem that didn’t exist and in doing so have turned FS into an always online internet-connected live service instead of a game. I’m not touching this game with a 40 foot aileron until an offline mode of some quality exists.
Fs2020 streamed assets, too
Sure, but it had an offline mode and had a base level globe that was downloaded when the game was installed that you could use immediately and didn’t require live cloud connectivity in order for basic functionality to work. Additionally, it allowed you to pre-download large chunks of high detailed land for offline use as well.
My internet service in Silicon Valley charges like $1/GB above 1TB of usage per month :(
Just so we’re clear, that’s a wired service?
Yup. Comcast/Xfinity residential cable. I pay like $80/mo and still have that cap. They also had an outage yesterday for like 5 hours for maintenance that was clearly planned ahead of time, but they never bothered to tell me ahead of time, and when the outage happened, they still gave me a bad estimate of when it would be restored due to “network damage”.
I still have trouble wrapping my mind around the absolute scam that are US Internet provider companies.
Kinda wild that their previous flight simulator was met with near flawless reviews across the board, then the complete opposite for the immediate successor that probably shares 90% of the same code.
I think the issue was precisely that. They didn’t plan for the surge of users coming in on day one and whatever cloud hybrid system they have for this game got overwhelmed. We’ll get to know about the game’s actual quality a week from now I guess.
They shouldn‘t have added it to GamePass on launch day but wait a few weeks or even months to stretch out the server load.
I bet there are tons of causal and first time players that are already subscribed to gamepass that wanted to try out MSFS24 just because they have access to it. Now those people are pissed off even though they would have waited longer to get a better experience.
I’m sure the Microsoft executive that made the decision is absolutely drenched in the “Azure scales infinitely if you give Microsoft more money” kool-ade.
No one dared speak up against it, cause that isn’t a “growth mindset”.
Just like Windows versions.
Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.
X-plane 12 is looking better and better.
This is one of the most dumbest Parts of this game, everyone’s complaint of the last iteration was the massive download times, and the inefficiencies in the game causing it to lag even on high end systems. And their solution to that was to increase the specs that it’s required to run the game and require a high speed internet on top of that? They more or less made it so anyone running satellite internet can’t buy their game and anyone that lives in like 70% of the US that still has absolute dog shit internet speeds couldn’t even imagine playing it. My mom still has a 5/5 mbit/s, that’s the fastest anyone offers in her area, even downloading the previous game took ages there’s no way in hell I’m going to recommend her buying this game
Lmao
game was too hard for my smoothie brain
also the AI voice actors are kinda rude and sound very bad by today’s standards
the engine is off
you left the brakes on
stop fucking with the egg yoke I swear to god I will BSOD;youanyone have recommendations for flying games that were made for dipshits like me?
DCS. Easy peasy.
DCS is amazing much higher fidelity sim but its at the complete opposite end of easy.
Haha, yes, I was being cheeky. :)
war thunder?
Most renown as a cloud storage provider for classified military documents
anyone have recommendations for flying games that were mae for dip shit likee lik m
Ace Combat?
Ace combat is dope but I had to use my flight stick to make it playable.
XPlane 12 and Aerofly FS4. They don’t need always on internet and the loading times are measured in seconds, not tens of minutes+
GTA5
VTOL is better, but you hafta have a good VR system :c
Love VTOL vr but haven’t touched it since getting a nice civ aviation sim (not Microsoft).
The virtual controls are very nice in VTOL but nothing beats an actual yoke and throttle and rudder pedals
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I was surprised at the long load time initially and had a quick fly of an A10 warthog from a local small airfield.
This was on my Xbox Series S and it was a bit stuttery in places. It’s clearly not meant for this console. This is for the pcs with big GPUs.
This is what happens when you have monopoly status. They’re too big to fail.
Sims are a captive market: all enthusiasts just buy it once, and there’s limited number of enthusiasts. Companies either have finite money and resell the same sim again and again with a different coat of paint, or over promise and under deliver. Long gone are the days of a company that doesn’t need to be profitable (like Microsoft with the early flight sims, made at a loss to showcase and sell their OS), and games are more expensive to make nowadays, not less.
To break a captive market you either increase customers (not gonna happen, in fact simmers and interest in aviation is trending down compared with the 80s and 90s), or remove the market part altogether.
Removing the market is the solution: be need an open source sim for the community by the community. Sims and libraries that can aglutinate all work done in academia, gaming, and different styles of sims under one umbrella, bringing a symbiotic work that is way better than the separate parts. We need to pull a Blender.
We are in 2024. Sims suck. They are barely multi threaded. They reimplement all planes again and again, losing all info in what they falsely call themselves “a sim museum”.
We can do better.
be need an open source sim for the community by the community.
You mean something like FlightGear ?
In soul yes , in reality no. I mean:
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Something with a cutting-edge game engine like Bevy: Entity-Component-System architecture, Rust, immensely multi threaded, new graphic tecnhiques like Meshlets (same as nanite tech from UE5, the other only game engine I know that has it), physically based rendering, highly performing, customizable, with good multiplayer capabilities, using new techniques of software engineering (it’s not the 90s anymore).
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Something with a community that embraces collaboration and the new tools (again, it’s not the 90s anymore). Git forges, chat platforms, RFCs.
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Something that from the game engine to the flight models is open to be reused across academia, different types of sims such as land vehicle sims, civil aviation sims, combat sims. Something that wants to foster that kind of relationships.
All of this is possible, but not particularly easy. It doesn’t need to start big, just with libraries and utilities for academia and developers that one can build on top of.
Hence why I think the formula is “Bevy + Blender + some Copyleft licensed parts (GPL) + Community”. I’ve given quite the thought to the topic, and a custom ECS engine is paramount. One that is designed for working collaboratively and not by in-house devs with UI tools for it. One that is massive in the cutting edge of tech and at the same time easy to collaborate on remotely. That is Bevy: the shortcomings (no UI tooling l for now) don’t matter for Sim games, as we normally need just one model in Blender, rigid animations, and no level editors. It also is written in Rust, is performant, a bliss to work on iteratively and grow the size of, and people are actually looking forward to work on for free, contrary to C++.
Whatever we do, the best we can do with fellow enthusiasts is recognise that sim games are a captive market. This way we can change the Zeitgeist, and move away our attention from the hype and drama of this companies (Microsoft, DCS’s eagle dynamics, IL2’s 1C), and into collaboration.
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Works fine now that they fixed the problem, but that was an oops for sure.
I heard that you can’t even fly a pterodactyl in it.
Pathetic
Nothing out of the ordinary.
After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.
The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.
I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run
There’s a new flight simulator? Shit, I still haven’t played the one I bought like a year or two ago.
Let me guess,it doesn’t work on Linux.
You don’t have to inject Linux into the conversation just because Microsoft is in the title
Have you been on Lemmy?
Nah am guessing, because when I see a game with negative reviews I always assume it doesn’t work on Linux.
Lmao, it apparently doesn’t work on Windows either.
Bruh 💀
It doesn’t work on anything, apparently. That’s kinda the point of the post.
Ah I see.