Make Cloud Streaming Optional -MSFS 2024

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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290

The cloud steaming… err…streaming is an attempt to “garden” the market. Acceptable from a business perspective in some measure but imho in danger to fail long term and everything with it afterword if everything is actually depending on its success in this.

Why I say this? Some of us are also DCS World players where another “attempt” to garden and harvest the market is tried since forever… with similar deadly results for the sim. Only… in reverse.
What I mean is in DCS World the publisher Eagle Dynamics tries to push out modules and maps and ask quite a hefty price for them. It needs to pump more and more and quality only lowers and as the modules are out the community, even if single player mostly, get spread and divided more and more. And is easy to plot the graph further into the future and see it will end up with the whole Earth to buy by the lot at a lower and lower quality and planes more and more riddled with bugs… thus the market slumps, growth slumps… money flow reduces… end.

MS/Asobo has a different approach… Let’s put everything in cloud and make the world basically free!

Perfect!

But… “the only” problem is… THE WORLD IS ALREADY FREE!!!

What do I mean by that?

We have/had “We love VFR”, EDM sources and other free mods, Open Street map, Google photogrammetry, Soon we will start to use Gaussian Splatting and what not. All open and free.

On top of that we have more and more A.I. that can generate content ,especially easier if it works with a library of assets.

If we merge the vast availability of open data with AI accessing (a local) library we can see that actually most of MSFS2024 could be “generated on the fly” rather than massively streamed.

We can see how MS/Asobo is pushing this/their approach beyond what would be common sense… they stream OPTIONS in the menus! You can see when the system is struggling and you go to change graphical settings that the listing of the fix number of options either is incomplete or simply missing parts that get a place holder name until the list is refreshed!!!
Think about it… who would need to stream the name: “Anisotropic filtering” in some options panel??? Other than somebody that is trying aggressively to build a wall around a garden?

When the beautiful world of MSFS2024 is presented we can see most of it is actually generated. It look realistic… we have grass and trees and roads and rocks and terrain is not flat but filled with pots and rocks etc and the plane leaves traces on it but non of it is ACTUAL and real but generated on the fly. That big rock in front of your house resembles a rock you actually might have but is not THAT ONE!

So what is the problem?

The problem is that this tech MS/Asobo thinks is unique and hard to do without Azure (LoL) and their massive infrastructure is not really true now. So it’s a tech forced and obviously forced to its limits. Others are seeing what I see and will act. So then MS will have a big problem to support financially such expensive but bypass-able approach!

And then the money flow will decrease… etc… end.

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291

I absolutely NEED this option because I have only 16 MBit internet and there is no way to get more. I can download MSFS 2020 in a night and a half day, which is acceptable. But if the new version forces me to wait hours then it’s no use to me.

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292

Voted. Aircraft need to be local so that we can edit them, remove whatever we don’t want to fly and be able to add or remove liveries as we wish, like it has always been (even if with MSFS some tricks were required due to most stuff being encrypted God knows why…).

Streaming such things from the cloud is just bad practice.

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294

I agree, aircraft need to be local.
Could it be an attempt just to sell add-ons on the marketplace?

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295

But it will have the opposite effect.
Buying 3rd party outside of marketplace got even more attractive now.

I can store it localy, I can activate or deacrivate whenever I want, it will not be encrypted and therefore be open for modding.

Streaming is the only thing that Marketplace has to offer.
But streaming seems to be the reason for a lot of problems - so not really a selling point compared to all the disadvantages.

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296

I’m in the same vote. I have higher internet speeds than you, but streaming msfs2024 from the cloud, using other programs, and watching YouTube and streaming on Twitch will kill me.

On my 48mb/s down is a no no, MSFS2024 eats up all of it.

Having a cache does not always help. I fly anywhere around the world, so I might start at EGLL and end up in New York or five years away. So even if you load in the South of the United Kingdom, as you fly, it needs to stream to the other parts of the world.

So I’m going to see maxed-out speeds, Twitch losing connection and MSFS will start to look like a potato world

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297

3 gigs in 10 minutes is a lot of data. I know there are a lot of people in similar situations with limited data. Hopefully something changes soon.

298

You make multiple valid points. I didn’t realize the menu options themselves were being streamed. Begs to question what was actually downloaded to our systems. This approach does not seem sustainable long term.

299

I feel
Your pain. And you have really good download speeds. I couldn’t even load into an airport last night I presume because the demand picked back up over the weekend thus increasing the strain on the servers. I believe this will continue to be an issue until they allow us the option to download more of the game. But it appears that they are working on an option to do just that. In the meantime, I went back to 2020

300

I really would like to know if all the game problems are streaming-related or only some. Or if the game itself has some problems.

I am not a fan of this streaming idea. I dont want to fly for 1 or 2 hours and have problems with textures both plane and nature.

Also, offline options, when there are some problems, are always better than none.

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301

They should make it as modular as possible. So Xbox users can use as little of their precious SDD space as possible and PC enthusiasts can put as much as possible on their 4TB SSD. Don’t forget the core simmers, or the whole thing is doomed anyway long-term.

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302

I can’t complain about my internet optic fiber speed. We are on Sunday and for the first time so far it’s taking 1h10 min to get to 68% “Loading word data” stuck there since… and still not at 100% so it will take maybe one hour and a half or two hours to get to the menu!!! :triumph: how crazy does it sound!!!
It feeds the frustration after spending $xxx! Yesterday for some X reason I have to wait on the tarmac more than 10 min that msfs loads the textures as it was well represented by Q8pilot on his last youtube video…
I don’t understand that the devs didn’t expect such an issue, they just rushed unifinished “alpha” msfs 2024 to release it for business purposes, that’s it. So at this level of issues and missing realistic features in Live Weather on top of that, I definitely understand that some users want to get a refund, I’m not a part of this but I share the frustration… Again bugs are acceptable at the release date somehow but at this high level and missing features it is just unacceptable.
You got my vote :wink:

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303

They could offer the following download choices by country or region:
-POI and airports
-Buildings
-Mountains
-Vegetation: Trees, grass and water
-Animals

We should also be allowed to choose to download specific planes.

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304

I installed inibuilds for Innsbruck in the community files, but found that it overlaps with the Innsbruck scenery of streaming asobo. However, in the content manager, I cannot close or uninstall streaming asoobo Innsbruck. Now objects are being duplicated, and even experiencing significant FPS issues.

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305

You have my vote too.

I mean it’s way better to have your files locally and run it from there, or at least make your own choice.

There will be spikes overloading servers during weekends and holidays at all times I guess.

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306

Absolutely agree. I believe this way everyone wins

307

Being an XBox game, MSFS is certainly meant to be XBox first and that makes it less niche and the things we know about the PC niche sims and their business model.

This being said, I was personally dreaming for FS2004 about the Aviator Edition being a PC / Enthusiasts / Simmers oriented edition in terms of menus experience, content, granular settings and customization.

I do not want to pretend how this edition would affect the dev and deployment costs but I would suppose that this version would be derived from the actual one with a PC mouse and keyboard experience, less assistance options and extra control over the customization and settings etc etc.

308

Nothing to do with your speed, I have a ping of 0.17 ms with an up and down speed of over 900 and it’s still a mess!

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309

From devsupport forum:

“My Library” will allow to download an aircraft (or any other package) locally to avoid having to stream it. I am not 100% sure on the ETA but I think it should be before Christmas.

Of course we initially planned to have this option available for launch but didn’t manage to achieve it - apologies for the inconvenience.

Best regards,

Eric / Asobo

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310

Lets reply to the main topic about making steaming optional. I think this is impossible to achieve. You would have to build an entire new game from the ground up because now in msfs 2024 billions line of code refer to Microsoft servers.Not only that, have you compared the file size between msfs 2020 vs msfs 2024? That’s quite a difference! This new msfs 2024 is what you call a thin client. As you would have noticed the terrain mapping is stunning,you couldn’t get this level of details on a 10dvd,s like on msfs 2020. And if you had to download all the maps, well thats a quite a lot of data and not everyone has a gigabit Internet connection…