A region is measured in Petabytes. Manhattan alone took up several dozen gigs depending upon the level of quality and how many grid squares you could select. And that took a couple of hours. Tri-State area wasn’t practical, never mind NYC+outlying boroughs and maybe parts of Jersey across the way.
The sim is squarely in the realm of MMORPGs - it’s a Software-as-a-Service application, just like WoW, Eve Online, The Elder Scrolls, etc. The scope and breadth of the world’s Digital Twin far exceeds local storage and access capability if you’re talking very large areas.
Now if you were talking about your local field and maybe a couple square miles around it - maybe. Regions would be a reach too far for any local PC asset.
This is what IPACS (Aero Fly FS4, FS2) does. You buy the DLC’s for certain regions and install em. No server dependency unless you want global scenery of which you can turn off or on if you like. Why can’t Asobo or Microsoft take example from that, is beyond me. Not everyone flys the entire globe. Some people are fine with just flying in repeated areas of their liking. For example I fly mostly Canada, and Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Andorra, Gilbralter, Spain and central Europe. I love the French Alps, Swiss Alps, and Italian Alps. I don’t bother with any other global areas much if at all. We NEED to have this choice, instead of having this server dependency forced on us to play the SIM. I’ve always felt it wasn’t right.
They need to listen to us after all we are the paying customers footing the bills. It could be another income stream for them…?
It doesn’t even come close to 1% and the number of outages are far from unacceptable. It doesn’t mean they can’t improve and improve their uptime rate. Azure also has an uptime rate of 99.99%:
A bank, or any kind of important data provider will have redundant systems, that’s not the case for a game service. I mean, we are not talking about real aviation here, we are talking about a non-essential service.
We had a big outage that affected important services, and wasn’t really because of the network, it was caused by the anti-virus and not being possible to fix it remotely (each user needed to locally update their machines).
But it’s already possible to download the areas, it’s called manual cache. But you won’t be able to download the whole world.
About the settings, that’s definitely a huge oversight. For a flight simulator, where we can take hours/days/months to set up our controllers, it’s a huge pain to lose everything.
I will repeat what I’ve said above, you can use the manual cache and just do that. But you will just give up, for one single reason, the MSFS scenery is way more detailed than those sold as DLCs, you would need petabytes to store everything. You can try a few smaller regions if you are curious.
The real solution, would be making better offline textures. The current ones look really bad (crop fields, roads, cities etc).
Ya all valid points, I see the difficulty in that, petabytes and all. I guess it works for some SIM’s just not feasible with MSFS given the aforementioned. Therefore I digress on my earlier post about that.
Not focusing on Azure specifically, but cloud services generally, I am wary of relying on them too much. I would never advocate having everything in the cloud. At work we use cloud services for resilience, and disaster recovery only, and no essential services exist only in the cloud.
Historically companies spent millions on resilience. Duplication of services across geographically separate sites, and for the most part it worked well. Now companies spend millions on moving their services offsite, for reasons some may only partially understand themselves, usually cost saving or headcount, but it has one major flaw.
One little gust of wind, and your cloud blows away.
I hate to admit it, but you’re right. Getting all the nice photogrammetry and world texturing and everything… the only way to store that amount of data is server side.
X-Plane doesn’t do this, and world detail is not nearly as good. And the install is still huge, to boot.
We’ve got it pretty good with MSFS, and the price we pay is server dependency. That said, Azure seems to go down A LOT.
Agreed, we do have it good with MSFS, given all its nuances. Suffice to say it is what it is and what it’s going to be, love it or like it. We go fly regardless and roll with the punches 4 years in.
FYI, for those who have not seen this, in MSFS 2024 this is now alleviated with the concept of controller packages, as Mr Martial Bossard talked about in the FSExpo Livestream which can be shared both by manufacturers of hardware & between users!
One of the most important reasons for companies going cloud with Azure and MS are the licenses. Where I work (a large European bank) we had to go cloud because MS does not allow enterprise licenses for their Office, SQL etc products unless you go cloud. And people got fired because they tried to raise exactly the concerns you do in your comment. That’s the sad reality.
Look, I totally understand why big companies would want redundancies for their data or services (their data cost money and each minute their services aren’t working they lose money).
That’s not the case here, it’s a simulator. I know we all want to have it working 24/7 so we can use whenever we want. MS should keep their network up and running as much as they can, but outages will happen. And we will be fine if we can’t use it for a few hours. Redundancies cost them money and it wouldn’t justify to have them running for the Xbox network (like I said it’s not essential, and the customers (us) wouldn’t pay more to have this kind of protection).
That said, the online services can’t be provided offline because they are live services. You need to be online to access them. I’m talking about live weather, live traffic and all the new live services coming with 2024. There’s no workaround on those.
Also, it’s possible to fly while offline, but of course, the simulator won’t have the live services working. You won’t be unable to fly, but you will fly without some of the features.
Of course there’s room for improvement, like I’ve said above, improving the offline scenery would help. Also when the historic weather is implemented, that also will help. Settings not being wiped is another thing.
TLDR: They can’t keep all the features in offline mode. It’s already possible to use the simulator offline, but without some of the features.
Honest question: would this controller package system be back-portable to FS2020, for those of us who either can’t or don’t want to buy FS2024 when it releases? It seems like it would do a lot of good, but idk how many of us would want to - or, in my case, be able to - buy another simulator for that sort of feature.
Hi @zBrainlezz,
I don’t know if the controller package system will be back-portable to FS2020. That has not been discussed by MS/AS AFAIK. We may find out more in September when more details of 2024 are provided.
The outages we tend to see are more general failures of Azure, and not XBox/Live specific, and they hit Azure customers across the board. The only parts of Azure that were not affected seemed to be the government ones.
The other issue with “just fly offline”, is that the usual thing that happens is the sim fails to even launch, meaning you can’t. You just get stuck on the loading screen.
I’m really SMH about your comments. Fisrt of all, you can’t fly offline when you’re not in the game because you won’t get passed the update screen. Secondly, MSFS has by far the most server problems of any other online game. Third, MS/Asobo should change loading the game. Now you must load the whole world while about 75% or more are just staying within 1 continent. That saves a hell lot of (unused) data.
I also think that a lot of players would be paying extra for more redundancy. MS and Asobo are way to passive in all of this which is a shame.
There was noting Asobo could have done about the situation, and MS were updating their Azure status page while they were working on it. There’s not much else they could do while they worked at the problem.
That was not my point. It’s about many server issues that aren’t been solved. Also with the verification problems (also effects Office for example) already known for over a year but nothing has been done about it. It’s a long list.
I use MSFS daily for multiple hours a day and when you’re a frequent user like me you’re really getting tired of all the (server) hickups. Nobody expects 100% and that is not the problem but what they do is fixing (short term) a problem instead of solving (long term) the problem.
