đź”´ A Video is worth 10,000 words - Developer's Videos

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I came across this recent 1 hour Twitch Video from MilViz

Long, and at times a little 'self indulgent" but it did give a very interesting perspective from a developer’s point of view, within the limitation of what they could talk about, with a MSFS NDA in place,

And then of course, there are the Asobo Q&A Videos.

One thing that stuck me in both, is the realization that these guys are only human, and not miracle workers, and progress is going to be slow, in this fast pace, consumer demanding world.

A few thing struck me as “interesting” in that they contradicted my “assumptions”.

FSX was 32 bit. Asobo started off with FSX to produce MSFS.
ESP was 32 bit. Lockheed started off with ESP, developed P3D, which then went to 64 bit.
X-Plane was 32 bit – now it’s 64 bit.

I has assumed that MSFS was developed to be released as 64 bit, and would be multi-threaded, as was even P3D.

But in the Milviz video, they were saying that MSFS is still only 32bit & is singe threaded only.

Something does not stack up – surely MSFS is 64Bit & Multi-threaded ???

In any case, after watching some of these Video, I am left with a feeling of being “less than impressed” as I find my assumed expectation of those featured, to be far less “impressive” than I had originally imagined.

Probably my failing with incorrect assumptions and expectations, after coming from a Commercial/Military Aerospace environment.

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lol, what a bunch of BS…msfs is not 32bit nor single threaded…just look at your taskmanager and look how much RAM msfs is using…■■■■■ ■■■■■■

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I know LOL … hence by shattered expectations

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MFS litterally can’t be 32-bit because it would be using max 2GB of ram, and it’s even using 16gb on my system sometimes. And it definitely IS multithreaded, Asobo themselves said that on the Q&A streams. I didn’t watch the video you linked but you must’ve misunderstood them or they didn’t properly explain it.

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I know :slight_smile: which is why everything else “Technical” they said is now so “suspect” (sigh)

Unfortunately, despite good intentions, that video was a PR disaster.

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maybe I need to go watch it again … it was LONG ( 1 hour) maybe I fell asleeep half way thought it … it was 4am when I started watching it .

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And you can literally see on your task manager that it’s using more than one thread, so it’s definitely not singlethreaded nor 32-bit. And it’s impossible to make such a huge game with only 32-bit. It’s not like they could’ve stayed with 32-bit because they were lazy lol

image

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Definitely is not 32 bit lol. I think they meant is about the WASM modules, currently they are single threaded and i read somewhere I think in Aerosoft fourum that Asobo will add the multi threads support to WASM soon as it is highly requested by many third party developers

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OK, I was not dreaming … watch the MilViz video from time code 21:19
16 bit, single thread ROFL

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OK, maybe … so WASM is currently single thread , but surely it is 64 bit ???

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So I’m not really sure but from what I can gather from google, wasm is the layer responsible for the glass cockpit displays. It would make sense that it’s single threaded and 32-bit given the big performance hit that planes with glass cockpit have. So we can expect big performance improvements with those planes in the future.

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There is wasm32 and wasm64 … still cannot see that MSFS uses, looking.

one major issue I have just learn with wasm …

Unfortunately as stated in WASM’s known limitations: “C++ exceptions are not supported.” So you can’t try-catch your exception.

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Yes of course, it is the whole sim architecture is 64-bit , there is no anyway that even will run with 32-bit with this kind of sim, they should be aware of their words to say.
Back to WASM, yes currently you can’t spawn another threads to do something, for example if you really need to spawn another threads to do something in WASM, this is currently not supported and hence a WASM module is a single threaded module.
However this is not a showstopper, as developer you can find another work around, for example Asobo recently added standalone WASM module which helps on some background tasks that you could argue that you need a threads for, but it will need some refactor of course.
However, I do understand Asobo’s hesitance on the adding the support of the multi threads to WASM modules, WASM modules should stay small and should be micro-modules, just like lego bricks. And I can think, if they start adding multi threads to WASM, you could end up with gigantic module that do everything that could have some performance impact but I don’t know, this is only some speculation from my side, I am not really sure.
It sounds to me that MilViz wants to just want to take whatever code they have for P3D/FSX and just put it onto MSFS with minimal refactor and have it working due perhaps to cash flow and investment time? As the guys at Asobo and also Matijas Kok from Aerosoft mentioned, is a new platform and you need to adopt to it, that means a new mentality of developing, new way of doing things … etc. This of course, has some impact on some third party developers that don’t have cash flow to start re-factoring for MSFS but honestly, this has been always the case in software development, we gotta always adopt to changes and innovations.

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Totally confusing, the official system requirements state it’s an x64 architecture.

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I have not looked into WASM before now, so speak from a point of complete ignorance.

But now, my interest is peaked …

File access

In order to access files from within an add-on,
filenames can be prefixed in two ways:

".\": to access the files from within the add-on package.

This has a read-only access.

"\work": to access a persistent storage that the add-on can use.

This is a read/write access.

So maybe this is a way to make a js gauge have the ability to save it’s configuration, if it has been changed within the Gauge !!!

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Okay I watched a bit of it, I think there are some BS in the video:

  • 32-bit, that is pure BS.
  • Fly on rail? Huh, never seen this in MSFS or X-Plane, are they referring to P3D?
  • Bashing X-Box, sure as simmer may be weird but that is good for third party survival.

I think some of these developers have the old mentality, just like software development, OSGI was there, Docker and Kubernetes were newly born and then you hear all this bashing on Docker and Kubernetes, it just because a new mentality, new way of doing things that won’t make some people feeling comfortable. And also some of these developers unfortunately acting is a game not sim mentality. But guess what, MSFS is unleashing new generation and young of developers, just look at FBW, WorkingTitle … etc Even QualityWings has started to adopt to the new sim and will release its 787 middle next year.

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If you want a live example for WASM, you can try the FBW320 with the custom-fly-wire system, that system was entirely built with WASM module.
You can find it here.
The fly by wire C++ code in WASM is here

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I was there, watching it live when it was broadcast.

What happened (and what you can see if you watch the whole video) is this: Prepar3D and Xplane11 sales all “tanked” (not my words but these devs’) from the day MSFS 2020 trailer was announced, and they still continue to “tank”.

Milviz (and I guess many other devs) thought it would be easy to get the “old way of code” running in MSFS and make a handsome amount of money quickly. That way they wouldn’t need to invest more time and resources in learning the new ways of doing things. Obviously that didn’t happen, and hence they are upset, and you can feel their frustration in the way they are wording things.

They also didn’t hesitate to criticize Carenado’s recent offerings for MSFS, although they conveniently skipped the fact that many real world pilots of these aircraft said without hesitation that the Carenado versions were quite realistic in many aspects. Milviz are either ignorant (intentionally or unintentionally) of the real world pilot reviews of Carenado’s MSFS offerings, or they are simply jealous of the fact that Carenado has been able to offer something to the market so quickly before others.

In a way I’m glad that they decided to go live and said whatever they said. They said they expected (and still do expect) to run the old code in MSFS and expect the aircraft to behave in MSFS like they did in Prepar3D, and their upcoming Cessna 310 will behave as “good as Prepar3D”, which is something I definitely don’t want and will not pay for. MSFS flight model and the way the aircraft feels when they are up in the air is completely different than Prepar3D aka on-rails, and I’m not paying for a train simulator again.

Regardless of the issues this dev and any other devs are facing whether it’s financial, pandemic etc etc, if devs refuse to learn, adopt and embrace new technology and the newer way of doing things, they won’t be seeing a penny from me. And that goes for everyone, whether they are Carenado, A2A, Milviz or PMDG or FSLabs.

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I can see the “value” in an X-Box .

While, its not something I “think” I want, it is a lot of PC power for the money, and should be a no-risk solution for anyone wanting a system that should run MSFS.
Putting together a similar system, from selected hardware, will cost almost x2 that of the X-Box.

Of course, for x3 or x4, you can get something considerably more powerful, if that is the direction you feel you need to go.

The X-Box will be even more attractive, once it becomes more readily available, and is not being jacked up in price by skimmers.

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I too think they are just hating on the sim and spreading misinformation to hide their incompetence to deal with this new thing.

“the FBW 320 is not built from scratch”. Yeah, they are now building an A380 from nothing. The Aerosoft CRJ is also getting closer to completion.

“the learning curve is huge”. Yeah, deal with it. So they kinda admit they don’t know everything yet, yet they are bashing it.

Talking about a new product (that is still in active devlopment!) like this comes across as unprofessional to me. And so was their streaming set up. I’d take everything with a grain of salt.

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