Nothing about weather except for tornadoes (btw who cares about tornadoes in a flight sim? Don’t know…)
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Probably those who will grab their C152 and fly directly into the tornado, knowing that no harm will befall their aircraft because hazardous weather will still remain something for a wishlist.
Would be immensely happy if they proved me wrong.
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And if one spawns near an airport, will AI traffic just ignore it? “Winds 280/300, cleared for takeoff, you’ll be fine.” This is why I really do think they are going the PSX route where AI will be directly linked to FR24 or some other vendor.
Well, in one of the interviews from the flight sim gathering thingy in Houston, Jorg did mention FlightRadar24 by name when talking about AI traffic. Don’t know if that was a slip, or what.
And then post a youtube video with a clickbait title in capital letters.
The multi-threading improvements for me is a great thing also. Dreadful multi-thread performance is a major achilles heel for FS2020.
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I am not sure if what you seem to be describing is what was announced for MSFS24
In essence there two solutions … that could both be used together:
A) Progressive on-demand download of assets … like todays ground texture streaming. The closer you get, the more detailed the texture will be which will get downloaded.
B) On-demand on-PC LOD computation … so the designer only produces the most high res version … and then the system locally reduces the complexity according to needs.
So (A) is a way to reduce local storage needs and to reduce the download requirements. Say I download the “City Update #x” but never fly anywhere close to 90% of the cities that are covered in that update … why download and store that data in the first place?
On the other hand (B) is more about GPU performance and the best utilisation of GPU (memory and compute). Unreal Engine 5 provides this feature.
IMHO Asobo only announced (A) … the “thin client”.
I have no idea if certain aspects of (B) are already in the game … but such a feature clearly requires solid multithreading inside the engine … and maybe MSFS24 is laying the foundation for such future enhancements.
I think the intention to reduce client size goes beyond progressive downloading but includes moving also more content to the cloud. That was at least what I understood. This may be eventually meaning that even marketplace addons could be cloud based. They already declared in the past that one of the ideas was to move WUs to the cloud. Indeed it never had sense that WUs were local, as anything including POIs and even airports could be on the cloud. We have recently seen an example of this implementation with the CUs, which are basically just a txt file that tells engine to enable them. So the city updates are already available on server but are only visible for you (therefore streammed) if you own the txt file. So players with and without the CU can still use the same streamming server and get different results. Same principle could be applicable for any marketplace addon without the need to own a local copy of the whole addon but just a signature file (instead of that non crypted txt) that enables the addon streamming if you purchased it and maybe a few config files. For instance that would only require the local download of the updated navigation data and airport definitions (runways, parkings and so on) while the 3D content or custom terrain elevation + satellite textures, which are the heavier part of the airport addons, are streamed as PG, CUs or regular world scenery is now streammed. Indeed this could be also applicable for aircraft addons as well. In that case you would only need the custom gauges (where the custom code is included) and maybe the config files for liveries and flight model but 3D model and textures (again the heavier part of the addon) could be streammed too.
Let´s see how this works at the end because, depite of the really interesting new technical features, we all know how history evolved for MSFS itself. That was also promissing 3 years ago and in some cases turned to be a hell of bugs together with performance issues and quality degradation as time passed by. So while a bit optimistic I´m still a bit cautious about expectations too. I just hope they have learnt from the past and we really get an improved and stable technical core upon start that is not touched every month to break things because that was really the main problem MSFS has had. So far we have seen just a few things about real game. The presentation itself was nice but was also using many real life images with the text describing what the intend to do in game instead of a picture of the feature in game itself. I guess many things are still under development but I was expecting to see a bit less of marketing and more about real game itself. We are basically just 1 year ahead of release so that´s not so much time available to implement everything they have said.
Cheers
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They will show more as time goes on, for now we will have to wait to be drip-fed:
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Sure they will do it. The first thing I want to see is if all those things are really included out of the box or we have months roadmaps to implement some of them after release again as they did in MSFS case.
Cheers
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I am optimistic for ONE major reason.
There was a global pandemic in 2020 which set devs back by around a year for most games. We are lucky MSFS came out at ALL that year. All other Xbox Studios productions were pushed back, along with the Xbox release of MSFS.
This time, they shouldn’t be scrambling and doing damage control for their producer during a console release year.
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Great list… Please, however, get rid of hyperbole like “Massive”…
“Performance improvements through adding a separate Flight Model calc thread” would be enough of an item.
MSFS 2024 does look promising. I will wait to buy a new machine until after it comes out and test it on my current machine. I’ve been holding off on using VR since my machine cannot play it at reasonable detail and FPS, but count me in as a future VR user if the software-hardware limits match such that VR is smooth, playable, with 4K level ultra detail.
I’m not convinced yet, but the scenery improvements intrigue me. What I really want to see is how it looks when satellite imagery is less than perfect.
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Improvements to multi threading sound good and if this was one of the fundamental reasons why it required scrapping the old thing and building fresh then I’ll buy into that.
I’m a little less stoked about the “thin client” less to download bit, but without more details I can’t really know what they really mean or where they are going with it. This title already suffered a bit from server issues when I was last fully immersed in the platform about 18 months ago however I’ll be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here and try it out.
(And I’ve been reading some folks have been working around these server issues by using VPN’s to get to better servers?)
- disclaimer. I’ve been out of the loop for about 18 months because of life stuff and general frustration with the title (bugs, performance, certain features just not getting attention etc)
I had recently been looking at dipping my toes back in to see how things have changed as I’m also building out a new PC
…and then this announcement was made.
Reading the core sim improvement list above gave me a little lift. My interest is genuinely piqued.
They’re only quoting what MS put on their slide at the expo. No hyperbole involved from @Maelmoor, but maybe from MS, who knows?
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Yes, if Microsoft said that, I wouldn’t even bother reading the word… 
Who’s Microsoft? 
I think Jorg or Seb said it during the presentation, but, when on a stage presenting you always have tendency to add filler words or over emphasise something. I say these things without thinking 95% of the time if I am ever presenting something.
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It’s in their slides, I just quoted what they had written on those 
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Surely they won’t be streaming planes? I doubt most people would want to download 1-3 gigs every time they start a flight…
Pretty sure it’s all about scenery streaming only.