I wouldn’t call 287 MB/s “performance drives” either, especially if multiple users are daring to use the sim at the same time.
On the subject of NAND flash, prices didn’t go up because of the AI craze? There was a crazy oversupply of NAND in 2021 that led to prices falling through the floor, and those have since recovered.
I agree it’s neat that people have homelabs now, but man, be realistic. How many people are going to rope friends in to spend so much on a sim? Fractions of a percent of the total userbase, an amount so small it simply does not make sense to waste dev time on it.
I’d be curious to see this whole theoretical system actually priced out and how you’d go about setting up the software for this (although now that I think about it, you live somewhere that has fiber, don’t you? Must be nice having symmetrical upload speeds , I miss fiber, but Comcast is gonna Comcast)
There’s a simpler solution - deploy a bittorrent-like msfs client so that those of us with symmetrical fibre internet connections can help out those stuck on cable or adsl lines.
As an incentive, people who share their bandwidth could earn marketplace credits.
Microsoft would save money, because having everything dependent on their servers has been a repeated failure, and it would be a lot cheaper than upgrading the servers and infrastructure.
But to your point of “how many people are going to rope friends into spend so much on a sim” … they would be spending it entirely for their own benefit, so 20 - 50 people around the country who don’t like the lod problems associated with being totally dependent on azure would not be that hard to find. There’s LOTS of people that hate how the servers are limiting their enjoyment.
And of course, there are alternate ways to map out the world. The data is out there for the taking.
wrt 287MB/sec (~2500mb/sec), that’s per controller. Buy 3 extra controllers, you can have more than 1 Gigabyte/sec (8 gb/sec).
For a server, you don’t need a graphics card (just use the iGPU if needed). 8-10 port pci controller cards are ~$150 each. Since it’s unlikely you’ll be both reading and writing to more than one drive per controller card, you can easily use an extra 24-30 drives.
Never understood why people bought pre-made home NAS storage. More expensive for less flexibility.
I have a 100 Mbps FTTC Australian NBN connection which will happily allow me to watch 4k streaming videos and fast forward and rewind as i wish. My connection causes me no issues no matter what game i throw at it. Low pings and good speed everywhere then i launch MSFS and oh dear, fly live and it does not matter where i go, ATC launches into hash tag ninety this and that mode or refuses to talk to me at all and i get constant connection error messages which they fixed by auto reconnecting you instead of you having to acknowledge the lost connection issues before it would reconnect but did not fix the connection issue.
Been going on for months now, and i have tried signing out out of everything and back in again, and tried flying clean, IE no simbrief, no Navigraph and an empty community folder. I have even been told ATC never use hash tags to replace words. The speeds offered to Australia by MSFS are not great (we have to connect to somewhere in Malaysia) becaue apparantly we dont need our own server, but it should be better than this.
It has now got to the stage now where it is unplayable, every 30 seconds or so it disconnects with a red box then 10 seconds later reconnects. I have even tried a full reinstall and turrning off windows defender.
Any advice anyone please.
A lot of people have experienced that, and it’s most likely the Azure content delivery network (CDN). I suggest sending a ticket via the MSFS Zendesk with all of your info about your ISP, your DNS settings, what city you are in, your IP address, and maybe they will look at it.
Try connecting via a VPN. CDN routing problems seem to cause specific network endpoints to have problems, while connecting from somewhere else might work fine.
Thank you for the reply. I just spent my day off doing yet another reinstall and trying a VPN with no gain. I suspect your right and that CDN routings are the issue which Asobo cant fix and Microsoft wont fix, which is why MSFS 2024 is using a completely different system than Azure for ATC. MSFS is a niche product, which is why it was dumped before because they refused to fix anything. They keep this up, it will be dumped again.
I think it would be helpful to specify roughly where you are (city or region), which ISP you are on, whether you are using custom DNS or your ISP’s DNS, a VPN, and any other detals about your connection. I think Microsoft will tend to respond when there is a pattern of issues…
I have a feeling that network connectivity is going to be a big discussion upon release. Since there have been Content Delivery Network issues before that turned out to be code-related and not customer related, I encourage the forum mods to come up with a dedicated template for reporting network issues, with specific questions that might help the Azure team find patterns and issues:
Country
City or region
Internet Service Provider
Connection type (cable, DSL, fiber)
DNS (custom or ISP)
VPN
Platform (PC, Xbox, etc)
OS version
Firewall (off, standard, custom)
MSFS Settings (Weather, Traffic, Multiplayer)
Date and time issue occured
And if people are not comfortable posting those potentially private details on the public forum, a dedicated “message” address to send them to privately in this forum…?
Hi @GimbalAxis,
We’ve actually been looking into this as there is a plugin that can be used for this forum which is similar to a “wizard” guide when posting in Bug Reporting Hub
However, this plugin is missing some other things we would need and a request has been made to see about implementing those additional features.
The problem we see with our existing way of doing this (it’s an inline template) is that it’s wordy and most users delete it right away. For new users, it’s also not clear where to reply in that template.
So hopefully we can get something better, and it’s been in discussion for a bit now.
All they need to do is selecting a good partner for online services. Providers that offer internet TV are streaming HD or 4K video 24/7 on a single country to more clients than FS2024 will have simultaneously connected worldwide, and that´s indeed demanding for TV providers, as such service is maintained over time. But this is already posible and does not require giant bandwidth on clients.
Game does not eat that much to download data as data is downloaded in steps as you fly (much less data than 4K video as only few km away are rendered in full detail). So game won´t require full speed during hours, but just during very few seconds upon flight loading to get the highest detail layers. Later on less than the one required for video is needed every few minutes as scenery is being updated. Indeed you can see how game downloads very few MB several times per minute to update the scenery periodically. Traffic and weather data mean cherry picking (few MB only) as for instance clouds are built locally on clients based on the received data and local cloud textures and AI traffic models are also local.
This is at least what I have seen on MSFS case when monitoring network for PG, Bing, standard scenery, weather, etc. It may change in FS2024 case, sure, but I don´t expect they reinvent the wheel as the existing solution already works when the online service also works.
One of the things that could change is AI traffic but traffic data itself is again cherry picking. What you could need to download now are the generic 3D models and textures (which are currently local in MSFS case), but that could come as part of the initial flight loading, with maybe textures being updated periodically depending on airline. Not a big deal as they won´t be full detail textures as player´s aircraft ones are and only exterior model textures will be needed. Same applies for road and sea traffic or generated animals, provided that models are not local anymore as in MSFS case.
MS owns Azure, it’s one of the largest data center companies in the World. Only AWS (Amazon) is larger. They are fine in that regard. People are demanding something impossible to provide (an uptime of 100%).
Historically with MSFS and “you are offline” errors, at least sometimes the issue has been traced to specific coding mistakes - repeating calls for the same assets without waiting for a reply causing a flood of requests to time out kicking you offline. So it’s not always the customer’s connection, or the server, or even the CDN. Regardless, the more accurate and specific information that can be collected when there is an issue, the better they can troubleshoot.
I have to believe that after 4 years of MSFS 2020, they’ve learned a lot about where issues can hide and how to find and fix them. Since MSFS 2024 will rely on streaming to fly, you can bet they’ll be monitoring for issues (eg, the Alpha test a couple of weeks ago…), and hopefully have some direct “red phone” lines to techs at Azure.
You can have the best data provider but still an interface which is a mistake that fails. Both Azure and Bing already exist in MSFS case and they are perfectly fine as providers. But what failed systematically in MSFS was the main client interface with them: xbox gaming services. That was the design mistake and what I meant with selecting a good partner.
I think people understands that 100% uptime is not realistic and in my opinion it shouldn’t be required either. However this is a 100% online game and there’s still a big difference between that full availability and the online services failing every week or two weeks.
I understood a new online service will be deployed for FS2024. Great! Lesson learnt. It only took them 4 years to come to this point. If it works well nobody will complain about it anymore but it’s normal that people is worried about that.
They don’t fail every two weeks. This year I remember two outages, and they were big and they affected more than just MSFS. They are pretty normal for online services. Steam every tuesday goes down for their system maintenance.
Also, there are other issues you might be facing on your end. Packages transmission across the internet is made through routes, if your provider is using a broken route you will face issues and MS can’t avoid those (when people from the same region faces connection issues, it can be broken routes). This is why people pay for tunneling services.
People shouldn’t be concerned about Azure’s reliability, it’s good. But issues will happen, and it’s not just on Azure’s end.
Azure is reliable. Azure itself is not the problem and I know it. We have seen few big outages related to it as you say. As I explained above the problem is the interace game has with Azure and the rest of providers. That’s what failed and what results in the coonection messages seen in first post. Why? Because the very first requirement to be able to receive any online data from any of those reliable data providers (Azure, Bing, etc) is that your Xbox profile itself goes online and stays online. Without that nothing else matters. Game won’t work in online mode and won’t get online data even if Azure, Bing, weather or traffic providers don’t have any issues themselves.
At that basic step is where most connection issues users are having happen, and they are not caused by users nor ISPs. It’s well known everywhere that this Xbox online service fails frequently, not only in MSFS but in many more games. However in other games impact is much lower and can be even not relevant. There is where outages happen on a weekly and even daily basis. There’s a official Xbox post that reports this status indeed so everyone can check it.
Sure. Offline mode is always an option. Do you honestly want to use it? I mean… I think it´s clear there were relevant connection issues in the past or this topic, among others, wouldn´t have been created by OPs. It´s also clear that Asobo is aware of it as they are deploying new online services for FS2024. Let´s see what happens and that´s it. If it works well then fine for me. I honestly want to get rid of all the techinical issues we saw during MSFS and focus on playing game without being disturbed by issues that just break the gaming experience.
I predict that the server will crash on tuesday. People downloading the program, and all the bandwidth necessary to run fs2024 may cause the system to crash. Just saying
, I miss fiber, but Comcast is gonna Comcast)