MSFS2024 November 19th, 2024

Discussion Hub MSFS 2024
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Also, allowing for the simulation of weapons systems, along with collision detection, to name just a couple, would be a massive undertaking and should certainly not be underestimated. That is just the sim and aircraft devs would also need to invest a massive amount of time and resources into researching and implementing specific weapon systems for their offerings.

I know MS have deep pockets, but all of the above would need to be integrated into MSFS, or a copy thereof, without further significant impact on performance. I can’t see it ever happening, not profitably at least.

I occasionally get the urge to fly military ops and when I do, I just fly DCS.

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Maybe Microsoft could work with Razbam better


(Just a joke
)

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I have a CIB copy of this title for my Atari 800 (I had a 
 “less than fully legal” copy as a kid). Let’s be 100% fair here: Sublogic FS II was not aimed at “children.” We (80’s teenagers) were not the target demographic. I mean, it came with a flight physics manual, for heaven’s sake! And some sample physical charts, even.

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Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the topic so we should get back to MSFS2024. Even though I don’t really pine for a return to Combat Flight Simulator (I have a CD-ROM of that around here somewhere too), I do wish they’d relax the prohibilition against non-functional gun barrels on warplanes. along with non-functional visual representations of munitions and such on miljets.

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You are just missing the MS business model which is almost entirely about GamePass these days.

So, telling parents that a new family friendly, “E for Everyone” game is coming later this year is part of the sales pitch.

MSFS was among the first computer games I ever played (Either 1 or 2.0) and I was 7-8 at the time. Took me another 30 years to become a core simmer but I would always buy and play the latest version.

Do not underestimate the allure of flying. Children LOVE airplanes.

Of course they won’t be logging hundreds of flight hours. But it is a way for parents to pass down the MSFS tradition.

And that E rating is ridiculously restrictive. Like, racing games can’t have women in bikinis near the podium. So no weapons makes a lot of sense in that ridiculous context.

I am all for a Combat Flight Sim if they ever want to do something else with a different rating, but I understand the goal right now is to tell parents they will have X number of family friendly GamePass games each year, and MSFS is a far better candidate for this than the next Gears of War or Halo. A LOT of parents get GamePass for their kids or share an account with their kids. MS wants their continued business and reliably gives them new E for everyone content each year.

TLDR: It costs MS nothing to make MSFS E for everyone. A sim that never showed crashes. A sim that (almost) never was about fighting (but you could declare, “War” back in the good old days). Their other sim titles are also E rated. Forza. Farm Simulator. It’s their brand and really always have been. Their sims were always for everyone of any age. Ratings came later and restricted MS even more if they wanted to stick with their tradition.

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I think they should keep separated products just like it was back in the day. MSFS and MSCFS.

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I’ve never understood the rating and the censoring of weapons on the sim. But yet we have the F18 and aircraft carriers in the sim. This has been pointed out many times but warbirds, fighter jets in themselves are weapons. They are manufactured by defense companies to defend freedom. If you are intercepted by a Rhino, even if it’s not carrying artillery, that is a show of force and it’s wise for you to comply. For there is a weapon flying next to you, even when empty has many capabilities.

When the Hawaiian updates hit we got the USS Missouri Memorial with its cannons in Pearl Harbor. But before this update SeaFront Sims had to model their Missouri Memorial with no guns visible. So if it’s a historical landmark it can keep weapons visible.

The math ain’t mathing. Make it make sense.

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The USA rules are quite arbitrary and err on the side of caution, especially for ratings below M, so the industry can avoid being federally regulated by some sort of MPAA for gaming.

Because some folks blamed the Columbine shooting on Doom. Ironically, MS now owns that franchise. Not surprisingly, it is now rated M.

And the writing was on the wall for federal regulations if the industry didn’t quickly come up with a rating system themselves.

So the Missouri has guns because nobody decided to remove them (and also because it is in the world and not a vehicle you fly). And it isn’t a problem because MS’s game ratings are not governmentally mandated. Except in like, Germany and Australia. In this case, MS polices itself and does their best, but they don’t have to be 100% consistent. 3rd party devs are the same. Some have guns some do not in marketplace. But none can shoot. They are just doing what they think is best on an individual basis. And then MS decides if they will accept their submission or not.

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ALL:
Let’s get back on-topic of MSFS 2024. :+1:

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Multi-threaded or not, you can clearly see the game is maxing out 1 core of the CPU continuously. If some of that load can be moved to other cores it would be really good. Excited to see how MSFS2024 runs.

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I hereby ask, no plead, for disengaging from the continuously reappearing discussion on military additions to this sim. I am just very glad that there are still a few games that are non-violent that I can play.
Thanks to the mods for getting this discussion back on track

:pray::heart_hands::pray:

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Best I can tell, MSFS 2020 had that inherent flaw built into it from the get go. It tried to do the whole Main Theread or as much as possible on one core. The rest of the stuff was divvied out to the other cores as needed. This throttled low to mid spec PCs and greatly limited Xbox.

This made the already CPU intensive sim extra CPU intensive because one core was always being throttled by its clock speed. So the speed of the cores mattered most, even though only one core needed to be fast.

My understanding is they would have needed to basically rebuild their engine to fix this.

Now, keep in mind Asobo is mainly a game engine company. Sure they make games too, but they have all been made, often for different companies or producers, with the same Asobo engine and it has evolved and grown through the decades with each new game. Without their engine, folks wouldn’t hire them to develop their games. That Asobo engine also gives us in house graphical feasts like A Plague’s Tale 2. So, to Asobo, reworking the game engine is no big deal. It is what they do. But it takes a HUGE portion of their team to do it, and then they have to re build the sim on top of it. This is how they make THEIR money.

They know what was holding the MSFS 2020 engine up and I expect they set out to fix it. Once fixed, the sim should be able to do so many more things at once, they could add a whole bunch of new features and graphical wonders and still run on a Series S.

At that point it just makes sense to call it a sequel. Bills need to be paid after that much work. They’ve rebuilt the entire game to run and look differently on a new updated engine they also made. Sure some parts of MSFS will remain basically the same. Like Forza titles. This is an incremental sequel not an entire ground up reworking and rebuilding. But the whole thing had to be built around an updated graphics and game engine, so it is a new game.

Asobo better understands the hardware limitations of the Xbox. This will now be their third Xbox Seies generation title.

I know, I keep talking Xbox but it is a low-mid PC at best, and if the sim better scales to that hardware it will also scale up far better than 2020 ever did. An Xbox or a mid tier PC will benefit FAR more from core optimization than a top tier PC. It will potentially allow for a lot more to be calculated at once than 2020 did.

2020 was always flawed to the literal core.

Asobo seems to think they have fixed that flaw with this sequel. The Xbox isn’t getting any faster so it would seem to be a top priority to better optimize their engine for systems of that spec. Not just for MSFS but for other games they develop or are developing.

They know what they had to fix to get more out of a flight sim this generation. They’re getting a second chance. Last time they had no experience making flight sims.

So yeah, I think they will have to improve the whole multi threading issue. That seems to be the only way they could add more features to a seriously limited system like the Series S.

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I just hope MSFS2024 doesn’t suffer from the same server instability that has affected the current Sim, I’m not just talking about the recent Checking For Updates issue either, practically every weekend I suffer from “Your bandwidth is too low” even though I’m on 1gig broadband.

Servers generally suffering from the strain every now and then with downtime affecting users quite often, the recent issues are one thing, the persistent server issues are another and they need to be better going forward.

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Well, I’m looking forward to hearing more technical details about improved simulation capabilities and quality, performance, graphics and more in the coming months. :smiley:

Until we get some of that info we’re just waiting and re-hashing our reactions to the same two trailers. :wink:

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Expanded improvements of ground handling is a big one for me, as I’m sure it is for lots of others too.

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Please talk about improvements to the flight models, including helicopters!

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I have long theorized the server issue is simply because they use SO many different servers. Scenery server, multiplayer server, marketplace server, update server.

Most online games only need to connect you to one server.

So we are just 4x as likely to suffer issues because of all the different servers that need to work in harmony.

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As I wrote in another thread, I really hope the Asobo developers who are responsible for the flight model (and in particular the ground handling) will put down their Gauloises and glasses of wine for an afternoon and go flying in a real GA airplane. Maybe with their managers. If they’re not pilots themselves, they should go to a flight school and ask for a demonstration of a soft field takeoff, how the aircraft moves on the ground in response to control deflections, crosswind behavior, etc. The new ground handling model of SU15 was presumably the showcase feature of that update but instead it’s kind of embarrassing. We’re long past the era where the highest echalon of flight simming was flying tube liners on Vatsim. With MSFS 2020 and it’s beautiful representation of the real world, GA flying is now an important aspect of the game. A 15 knot wind matters to a C172 more than it does to an A320. Ground handling, crosswind behavior, slow flight behavior, etc. in light and moderate winds are all a big part of GA flying. We need MSFS 2024 to do better at these.

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Interesting post, and some good points made. I also feel like the current state of the sim on XBOX is not great. Lots of people complaining it looks and performs poorly. So much so that //42 have even released a utility to turn off certain instruments to help free up memory for Xbox players.

No doubt Asobo will want MSFS2024 to be running and looking much better on XBOX.

On the flip side, over the decades I’ve heard time and time again that getting a flight simulator to run more efficiently over multiple cores is extremely hard as you often can’t have instruction sets running in parallel and finishing at different times when you’re calculating things like flight physics. I don’t know anywhere near enough about this stuff to know how true that is, but it does seem plausible as XP is also a system hog. Not sure about other flight sims.

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I agree to a certain degree. In my findings, the sim is working better than ever on XBox Series X from a performance/stability perspective.

However, the LOD definitely took a nose dive after SU15 due to the third party addons needing to be supported. So I have a feeling the key area of focus for Asobo with MSFS2024 will be giving both performance/stability and optimizing memory usage to allow for both to be possible on console.

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I think this was the issue with 2020 and what needed a rebuilding in order to work better in 2024. That Main Thread uses a LOT of resources but four years has given them ample time to look for a more efficient way.

Basically SO many calculations need to work in sync because time is linear and we need to feel time’s constant, uninterrupted progression while flying in a sim. This is why a CPU bottleneck causes time to stutter in sim. A GPU bottleneck just slows the framerate but time continues uninterrupted.

I don’t think they can ever get rid of the main thread, and I am unsure if it can really be split between cores. But it can be optimized. If Rockstar can get RDR2 running in 4K on a last gen console, it can be done. It just takes manpower, time, and money. And Asobo’s manpower has had four years and MS production money to fix the bottleneck.