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.
mbtrhcs wasn’t saying that you specifically don’t have a big enough hard drive, they’re saying that MS Flight Simulator is simply too big of a game to completely store on a player’s computer.
MS Flight Simulator has a fairly accurate 3D model of the entire earth. Like, the whole thing. So it’s constantly downloading the parts that the player is currently in, and deleting the parts that they are not in.
I hope there is a manual download function for your favorite areas to play them offline, that do not get deleted over time. Kind of how maps on your phone work, just with lot more requirements.
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.
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.
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.
Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.
Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.
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.
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High quality photograhy of the earth streams, you don’t need to have it set to high quality
FS 2020 had an offline mode. You get much lower quality terrain and no live data like weather. I’m assuming it’s the same with FS 2024.
I don’t know if it has offline only mode.
mbtrhcs wasn’t saying that you specifically don’t have a big enough hard drive, they’re saying that MS Flight Simulator is simply too big of a game to completely store on a player’s computer.
MS Flight Simulator has a fairly accurate 3D model of the entire earth. Like, the whole thing. So it’s constantly downloading the parts that the player is currently in, and deleting the parts that they are not in.
I hope there is a manual download function for your favorite areas to play them offline, that do not get deleted over time. Kind of how maps on your phone work, just with lot more requirements.
There is. It’s called manual cache and it does exactly this:
https://i.imgur.com/MNmLqcb.jpeg
You can use as much storage space as you have available. There is no upper limit, as far as I know.
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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You sorta glossed over this part.
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How… do you think we represent physical objects digitally? Vibes?
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We shouldn’t have to say that at this point, my initial reply already conveyed that information.
I understand the gripe with it though, they have the option to download areas ahead of time.
(Though it’s probably a one-time download, with models and textures cached for later use)
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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That’s how big this game world is.
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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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Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.
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The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.
Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.