They do seem awfully worried about players “hacking” the stupid ranked challenges and especially career mode, which is probably because they intend to monetize the latter (pay X real money for Y pretend money and avoid the grind).
I suspect (okay, I really hope) that this attempt will fail spectacularly. It is beyond idiotic to try and pull a Candy Crush Saga in a flight simulator, and PlayStation fanboys will rightly bully Xbox fans over it (not that whatever they say merits any attention)
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" especially career mode, which is probably because they intend to monetize the latter"
It’s hardly a grind. I’m 20 flight hours in, and only have 2 Certs left of the Aircraft side, and the three Hook, Hoist, ATP certs on the Helo side left to do.
It seems like it’s gonna be a grind when the next cert is $10,000 and your jobs are paying $600, but the scaling is done fairly well. The catch is that you have to actually DO the mission. If you Alt-N (or whatever the console version of “Skip to the next thing” is) your way through it, your rewards are reduced in proportion to the amount that you actually did.
I’ve had 2-3 missions so far that have paid out north of 40k.
I’ve also had missions that paid 20k, where I needed “10 VIP Transports of B Rating or Higher” sticking the landing was the important part, and I skipped through 90% of the mission and got paid $1200 for a $21,000 misison… (but I did 10 VIP flights in an afternoon, so…)
As for the Cloud Streaming part from the subject.
I’m on a Metered Connection (it’s not very metered, it’s 1 TB/mo, but the point stands, it’s not unlimited…)
I’ve also got a 4TB nVME SSD that’s just sitting here, mostly empty, that I can’t meaningfully use for FS2024.
That’s idiotic.
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Yes storage is getting faster and cheaper and cloud based stuff is getting more expensive and less reliable (exasperated by the way there are really only the two major cloud providers AWS and Azure and most companies only use just one of them for absolutely everything- lots of eggs in one basket).
On a side note - I attended a Dell conference on AI and database design recently and they emphasised that bespoke AI (the sort of thing MSFS is going to need eventually) is not cloud friendly and needs dedicated AI servers or a dedicated AI datacentre.
Bearing in mind Dell were trying to sell their AI Blade Servers but the basic thrust of the whole day was management of a lot of companies are “stuck back in the cloud era” from 10 years ago and do not realise the speed of the move towards bespoke use case specific AI based databases which are simply not cloud friendly.
Yeah I’m a flight sim vet going back about 20 years. I kindof skipped all the previews and hype about 2024, thinking I was just gonna jump in, manually cache a bunch of Socal, and have a go at a career. The lack of manual cache really has me quite grumpy and I can’t imagine running a flight sim without local assets. It seems obvious.
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I have not bought MSFS24 yet.
Can someone pleaselet me know the data usage for a, say 3 hour flight in MSFS24? I know this can vary and I am after a ballpark figure.
I am in Sri Lanka with Fibre to the house. However, the data is metered. As I tend to watch 4K + Dolby Atmos shows in NetFlix I pay extra money to get 28GB data per day and normally I consume around 24GB per day. This includes other normal internet activities in the household.
So, the data usage is a factor for me moving to MSFS24.
From Toms Hardware:
Just launching Flight Simulator 2024 the first time downloaded about 730 MB of data — not horrible for a fast connection but also not something everyone could just ignore. The second launch only downloaded about 70 MB (and was also faster). Uploads were 18 MB for the first launch and about 3 MB on the second launch. It’s not clear what data is being uploaded, but it’s a small fraction of the total network use. As expected, data use over time should decrease.
Loading into the Iceland landing challenge, the first time we launched the game downloaded just over 700 MB of data, presumably maps and textures and such. The second time it only used about 92 MB, and the third launch only needed 50 MB. Data uploads were again a small fraction of the network traffic: 12 MB for the first run, 4 MB on the second, and 2 MB on the third.
Finally, we have the long-term data use. The first run we stopped after 25 minutes, and that pulled down the majority of the data in the first couple of minutes. During that time, MSFS24 used a bit more than 1GB of data. The second run lasted over five hours, and the initial part didn’t need much more in the way of new information. However, after a while, you can see the data spikes that start to appear, and those are likely as the engine loads new sections of the map in bursts.
It’s a somewhat consistent increase in data downloaded, pulling anywhere from around 250 to 575 MB per hour. The average over the last four hours was around 365 MB per hour. Note that a 50 Mbps network connection could download up to 22,500 MB per hour, so really, the higher speed recommended by Microsoft is to help get the desired data in a faster burst rather than because it’s consistently using that much bandwidth.
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Nice comparison by Tom’s hardware. They should repeat it in a few weeks because I am certain that excessive cloud streaming affects CPU performance.
I think the the MSFS24 data usage is available on the settings menu (I saw it on a YouTube stream).
It would be nice to see these numbers from real flying as well.
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Mabye other people said it, but i think the devs shouldn’t worry about one time downloading of 1.5 terrabyte. I think more SSD killer if you donwload gigabytes per day for a long long time. Otherwise, if u can download the core elements, they dont have problem with servers. Stable gaming experience, happy gamers (happy buyers). Everybody happy. So yes, I agree with optional cloud streaming.
TIP: Make a SSD edtiion for the shop 
For example: There is a sample library company in music industry which offer you to buy their products direct on HDD. Some products of these are more hundred gigabytes.
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So it doesn’t seem like they added the ability to download the default planes yet? I did not see any download button when I brought up the Cessna 172 content files in the Content Manager. It said “streamed” but there was no download button for it.
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I’m sure Seb knows how to throw the switch to enable downloading.
But it seems there are over 7000 addons and not all work correctly in FS24. So they have to systematically work through all the compatibility problems first.
Then it will be the right time for permanent download, or “forced download” as Seb mentioned once.
Put it another way, don’t assume there is 1TB of perfect data just waiting for download and Asobo are deliberately it holding back.
I don’t think so!
Checking between and with each other is a lot of work.
We have already a sim that is almost in Beta state.
So trow all of the add-ons in the ring and we have a insoluble mess.
And also “There is no perfect data”.
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any news in this subject?
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Interestingly, just as management and CEO types are finally getting on the bandwagon with Cloud and SAS technology, major IT companies like Dell are starting to warn not to “get stuck back in the Cloud era” as cloud computing is not “bespoke AI” friendly. The cloud is fine for mega apps like ChatGPT and CoPilot but really sucks and is way expensive if you are trying to implement custom AI to monitor systems or interrogate a custom database. As an example, his may potentially be problematic if someone wants to build a sophisticated AI based ATC addon.
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I like this! Even a cheap and slow external harddrive would be better than internet for many people. “Global Aviators edition” that comes with packages pre installed on branded USB drive 
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I’m staying in a hotel with low bandwidth over Christmas! It’s a shame that MS and Asobo still haven’t solved the problem 6 weeks after the launch!!! Paid dearly but only got poor quality delivered so far…the WOW moments are very much outnumbered here… Great Christmas…Thanks for nothing to Asobo and Microsoft
i need this. please, make cloud optional!
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My guess:
While the game is stil in (heavy) development, it is a lot easier for players and the developers fixing, stuff in the cloud, and stream the result to all the players. Alternative would be an update every day.
WHEN they have “finished” the sim, and fixed “enough” then you can download the full version, and stream updates.
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Are you under the impression that there were any server-side fixes to bugs?
I mean any fundamental bugs.
I was hoping that the cloud would help to get fixes faster. But so far I did not notice any fixes or updates other than the hotfixes we got via download.
The only server-side fix I heard of was the availability of missions in career mode. But this can hardly be called a fix or an update. That was simply activating an online feature that was deactivated earlier.
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Offline mode?