Discussion: World Update III: United Kingdom

Thanks but, I have the current version.
Appreciate your suggestion

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Yeah, I do agree, London is huge and I can appreciate how it will take longer to download and take the GPU and CPU longer to process onto our system, however for me the UK update photogrammetry is taking slightly longer and am getting more ‘melted buildings’ in all the cities that are in the UK update than any other.

For instance, I flew in Southampton (original photogrammetry) earlier today and didn’t have a single problem with the processing and looked amazing, then I flew my cessna upto Bristol but it seemed to struggle more with the data there and onwards to Oxford it seemed to do the same with melted scenery, very strange…there is a small chance it may have been a co-incidence with the slower data from the servers at that particular time.

I then went into New York, Chicago and Vancouver (to mix it up a bit) and had fine photogrammetry again.

It may be better if I can get the small cities manually cached and the orbx update should sort London out but I don’t know if anyone else was finding something similar or it was just me :slight_smile:

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Lets not forget, the UK is in lockdown with (up until recently) all kids doing online lessons streamed over the internet, and millions of staff home working using Teams, Zoom etc - it is not surprising that the internet is being throttled to some extent since the internet usage across the UK and line contention must be going through the roof.

Data density is the answer. It seems the newly added PG areas are of higher resolution. What instantly stands out to me is all the 3D parked cars in Bristol. You can find your own car!

My data rate is higher over Bristol than over Southampton and data downloaded per km is also higher. Bristol is still far less than London, but more than NY and Southampton.

Yeah, you can tell the density data is higher, it does make it slightly better but a lot more taxing on the computer trying to load it, just a shame they didn’t go slightly further north with the photogrammetry in Sheffield where I live :grinning:, would have loved having my Vauxhall Meriva in 3D photogrammetry :wink:.

I just hope they can do something to make it load quicker as it’s currently not a nice area to fly around at the moment and I find myself switching off the UK photogrammetry and using a 3rd party mod for those cities at the moment until they can sort it :+1:.

I have every faith though that it will eventually be sorted by Asobo.

What can they do though?

Either turn it off or reduce the resolution until it looks more like NY

Compare those shots with these

To get better visuals the spatial resolution needs to be even higher. I guess they can dd more detail levels at the source, so it loads quicker when you stay at the same altitude, optimized meshes by altitude and optimized meshes for glide paths.

Handcrafting all that is simply not possible. Another solution is improving the AI buildings with the PG data, ie more AI placed models to better match the actual data. That still means a lot of handcrafting for all the building types and styles and a reliable way to detect what goes where.

For ‘fun’ very crude estimate for Earth at London PG resolution. London PG area is about 42.5 GiB of data (I estimated it between 41 and 44 based on my grid search in the second link). The area the PG data covers is between 115km2 and 145 km2 (measured using the map created in lnm, it’s roughly square minus a rough square on the lower right side, but I was flying outside the edges as well)

Total land area of Earth is about 148 326 000 km2, which would be between 41.5 petabytes and 52.3 petabytes. And it’s not detailed enough yet!

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LOL!!

Your idea of “fun” SvenZ is both impressive and hilarious at the same time.

I for one, really appreciate your sane, level-headed approach to this very difficult and sometimes emotional thread.

Thank you!

:+1: :+1:

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Agreed, my internet is fine for every other online thing i do and only slows when I fly. It started out ok and the scenery was great, but with each new update, especially the UK one, and the passage of time, that same scenery is now a mass of melting buildings and graphical glitches. I am no expert but i will take a punt and say the problem is not my end, but at the full or rapidly filling servers at the Microsoft / Asobo end.

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Not to try to deflect away from the possibility that there is a server issue with MSFS, but I have been trying to trace this for a while now. So far the evidence is purely anecdotal. I have encountered no slowdown of streaming rates or download speeds so it is very hard to duplicate some of the things I have been seeing.

When MSFS connects for play there are more than one connection. I see (usually) 3 separate IPs. Having some background with internet providers in Canada, bandwidth management was always a struggle. There was a time when geographical areas were managed as blocks. When individual connections within a block were monitored, any hi flow IPs were throttled to prevent a drop in available bandwidth within the block. At the time, we called it equitable bandwidth sharing. It was not uncommon to maintain a table of server IPs that were heavy users and they would be auto throttled anytime someone connected to that IP.

In North America that practice has long ago been replaced by extreme bandwidth availability. Even small communities are gaining access to 1GB+ optical connections. There are still some private providers in small markets that purchase bandwidth from the “Big Guys” and are ‘party lining’ it to their subscribers.

When I compare providers in Europe, what we, in North America, would call HiSpeed Internet is very limited. I am seeing standard connections of 50-100 MB. Some are far less. 500 MB + is rare. The available bandwidth is obviously being stressed by the population in Europe. The providers are going to be forced to manage bandwidth carefully. Is it possible that IP filtering and throttling is being used? I have no evidence other than the simple fact that the issues seen regarding unreasonably slow downloads and poor streaming performance IS far more prevalent in Europe/NZ/Australia than any where else in the world. Users elsewhere are also affected to some extent. It is not possible, without a survey of users around the world, to generate a graph but the trend IS telling.

Just an observation so far. May be completely wrong. Might just be MSFS servers can’t handle the load. Maybe they never expected the number of European users that they ended up with.

even though my AMD 3900x, X5700XT, 32gbRAM and 2tb PCIe4.0 m.2 4800gb/s drive can’t handle London photogrammetry in 1440p above 8-15fps, (Berlin photogrammetry leaves me with 35-43fps) let alone 4K. (high Settings, clouds, and light to ultra)
But having in mind that they focus on releasing this as a “game for Xbox consoles” it kind of becomes clear why they but their work on eye candy (in regards to London photogrammetry, it’s not even eye candy, more of a eye sore) and not bug fixing.
Quality control and patch testers seem to be kind of non existing. “Let’s add the UK update with new stuff to look at, and while we’re at it why not change the flaps and flight model to make this feel like a 1990 arcade game”

Best way to test to see if your being throttled, is to install a vpn start it and see if the problems persist (of course the ISP could be throttling all traffic so this isnt a 100% perfect test. Personally I think the problems is with the servers, early in the morning when most arent on I have glorious looking scenery with only using bing maps, I will play later in the day, ‘primetime’ and it seems that scenery is now ‘pixelated’ with nothing changed on my end.

That could just be general internet congestion. I had terrible interne during lock downs. It’s still bad when online schooling is on, all that zoom video traffic clogging up the pipes. But even before the pandemic, green bars on GT Sport outside prime time to sometimes down to 1 little red bar on weekend afternoons and prime time evenings.

It’s the same with Netflix, generally looks great, yet duringi prime time it can go down to 480p and even pause to buffer now and then. It was getting better until the pandemic hit, putting extraordinary strain on the internet infrastructure.

This was from before the lock downs started

Since then global internet traffic has increased by 40 to 70% and you tube had lower quality to keep the internet going in Europe. The servers might not be strained, the internet certainly is.

The pandemic has likely also slowed the expansion of internet capacity. It’s harder and harder to get computer components, construction (laying down fiber cables, expanding data centers) has been shut down along with everything else while demand keeps growing.

In the end, photogrammetry data might simply be a dead end. It costs over 3x more bandwidth to get the data in fast enough than streaming a high quality 4K60 video. It’s more efficient to have the entire game in the cloud.

Just for the record as your obviously more savvy at this, it does not matter where i fly and at what graphics settings, the ground under me builds just in front of me then the buildings disappear or look half finished or in certain cites look dark and half finished. London is a molten mess for me, it just looks ridiculous. I know i am not being throttled by my ISP because i rang and enquired and they did some trace routes and they say nope your getting the 100 Mbps you pay for all the way to the server, but your download speed on the way back is poor and that is not down to our routing and we do not throttle.
I have a high end PC, a high end GPU, 2 x SSD, and this is the only online game i have ever had an issue with. Everything else runs butter smooth with low online pings, i understand MSFS is not DCS world but the lowest ping i have seen on any available server is 97. Thats stupidly high for me for any other online game i play, I still sticking with my hunch the issue is not my end.

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Since Ping is mostly a function of distance it will depend on how far you are from the server you are trying to connect to. You might just be unlucky with your location and it’s distance from any of the available servers.

I’m in the UK and the two European servers are both fairly close, I get about 25 - 35 ms for both.

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I found half a solution. I ran this Command prompt “netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal” and hey presto my in game download speed went from at best 30Mbps to 97Mbps occasionally. I can see a lot more completed buildings in London now but still not enough, to many pauses and speed fluctuations, which i again blame on the server. I am in Canberra Australia, our continent was not deemed fit to have its own server, so our closest one is somewhere in SE Asia.
That is like asking a UK player who lives in Inverness, Scotland to connect to a server in Delhi, India and that is a conservative estimate.

A few months ago, just before the december update I decided to make a flight in various GA Aircraft, but in most cases the Cessna 172, from the Isle of Wight via Wales and England to Scotland and the Hebrides and finally to Shetland.

That was enjoyable, but not spectacular. After the World Update III most things have changed for the better. The developers have done something to the horizon and the shading effects, the landscapes appear to be more defined and therefore they feel more three dimensional. Coastlines have been altered and the important chalk cliffs at Dover, Folkestone have become well, chalk cliffs. It’s a lot of fun to fly across the country and it’s a lot of fun to make cross country VFR flights, especially when using a tool like Little Navmaps or even real ICAO maps.

In general, the stability seems to have improved on my system, but that’s subjective, but the overall feel is that flying has improved since the last update. I have been to London, I found it impressive and I could actually fly around there, but the infamous NASA computer would have made a huge difference. The 3D effect of flying through the high risers is great, it must be spectacular in VR, I have Track IR.

Photogrammetry is not always great, I am sure that will improve in the coming years. The terrible dystopic cranes and spikes ruin a lot. That is also something that needs attention. It must be possible to model 3D cranes and place them into the scenery, I don’t care if they are all the same, at the moment they are horrendous.I haven’t overflown all of the UK enhanced photogrammetry cities, but Oxford is great, until you get closer. And, although that has improved there are still a lot of apartment buildings/office buildings in rural areas.

My verdict is still positive though, this is a work in progress and the sim will change over the months, also due to the input by the community. It’s an absolute joy to fly with a GA airplane and to look outside to see the rivers, villages, open mines, forrests, lakes, railroads and airports that you can also find on your map. I used to fly with the heavy metal jumbos a lot and I still enjoy that, but this sim has brought us back to the basic principles of flying. As an experienced glider pilot I love to see the cloud dynamics, the cumulus clouds look good and it is nice to see a whisp of cloud disappear over time or grow into a cumulus cloud because it is fed by the thermals. I will make the trip from the Isle of Wight up to the Shetland Islands again to see if the UK Update has indeed altered my experience in a positive way.

Cheers, Marc

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I’m curious about what you had it set to before if it wasn’t normal. You should have ran a “get” first. Normal is the default I think.

In the previous discussion (since closed) I mentioned that the ORBX Leeds-Bradford airport caused a CTD every time I went near the airport.
Whatever I did to try and resolve it did nothing.
But the latest Sim update 3 has fixed it!

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Rattled past Woodford in the Mooney amd although it is evident that the airfield has been ripped up for yet another dubious development, it would appear that somebody has forgotten to turn the beacon off. Made me smile.

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I noticed the simulator is super slow particularly with BREDOK 3D 737 MAX plane after update 3. Other Asobo’s planes and 3rd party planes have no similar issue, but rather have many other different issues.