Before we start, it may sound crazy, but with the arguments I’m going to give, it doesn’t sound so crazy.
First, a little context. Back in the day, when there was no fiber optics, we had copper ADSL lines with speeds (in my case) of 10 Mbps, games that weighed more than 10GB or more took hours to download, but we downloaded them anyway on hard drives of 500GB or less, see the case of the 120GB Xbox 360 for example.
We are in an era in which we have fiber optics with dizzying speeds and huge storage, where am I going with this? Downloading those 1.3TB on a gigabit line would take less than 5 hours, which would be perfectly acceptable (for me and surely for other people), even with less speed. The 10GB of yesteryear are the 1331GB of today, since the internet infrastructure has changed due to fiber optics, the enormous storage space and writing of SSDs.
So give us the option and let the customer (the one who pays for your product) decide, because surely they prefer to download those 1.3TB and spend a whole day if that resolves the blurry textures.
But of course, those 1.3TB have to be accompanied by 2 conditions (they are not requirements, they are logical steps): that said download package is external to the game and that in case of an internet outage, because it can happen, I can continue playing as happens with 2020 and its offline patch and that you allow me to go beyond that gray screen “permanent connection required” with a basic level 3 world as you mention in your SDK>Procedural World Generation because it is useless to download 1.3TB if you then do not let me get past said screen in case of an internet outage.
And also of course for the preservation of the game.
Your end point speed is not the same as the maximum session bandwidth offered to a typical user from the network hosting the sim. Hence, 25 hours or so to pull the info down.
Not to mention, what is the corrective action if some part of that 1.3TB is corrupt either during or immediately after full download? Restart? Is there an Integrity check that can enable diffs rather than full?
The Streaming solution is deliberately designed so that massive monothiic downloads are minimized, along with the accompanying data integrity issues. It doesn’t have to be corrupted on download, you could have a local storage issue and it would be the same outcome.
Seb said it best: increase your cache size so it captures what you fly over regularly. If desired, pull down the planes and airports you prefer. Let everything else cache. I bought two 4TB drives specifically for the sim, so my cache is running at about 150GB on a dedicated drive.
A SaaS application like 20/24 was never intended to work fully offline. It can’t.
I totally agree. I have 24TB SSD storage on a 2cm thin laptop, for desktop owners they can have more than what laptop can. if downloading not the way to go, setting the cache in hundreds of gigas or multi teras seems golden i guess there is no excuse, just what is needed some ssds for cache & they are @ good price these days.
I think MSFS is preserved through the clouds, because in the end, its core is petabytes of data, if it were to be shutdown, offline simulator will render without that 3 peta data. unless you have a data center, which is not realistic.
It does actually. I am not sure where you get the notion that there is a “ludicrous amount of checks”, you got any source for that?
The 1.3 TB is also an incorrect notion. As Jorg said, even France alone is multiple petabytes at the lowest level of detail. For Aerosoft I bought sat imagery for airport development. A single airport image could easily be 250Gb. That’s ONE airport. The 1.3 TB is just the core data, not the content. You would still need to download all that. Having the 1.3 TB on your disk would make very little impact.
I would be just fine with it taking 25 hours over my 1Gb fiber connection to download everything I possible could to my 4TB drive.
1.3 TB = 1,300 GB = 1,300,000 MB = 10,400,000 Mb
Assuming the Cloud could deliver 500 Mb/s it would take 5.77 hours.
I think the actual download speed would be 1/4 of that, or 125 Mb/s (which is about what FS20 WU download speed was.)
So yeah, 20-25 hours (depending on the crush of simultaneous access.)
Those with crippling internet speed might suffer, just like they’re suffering now. But if we could download those assets, we’d suffer once.
Either way, during gameplay I’d rather access assets from my hard drive than from the Cloud.
That was the plan for FS24 from the beginning, all to reduce the drive space required. The sim’s aircraft, airports, and especially texture maps got bigger and bigger, and they needed to figure out how to make it playable on the Xbox and PC’s without large drives. Streaming those assets was the logical solution.
Rolling Cache is not going to do a lot for you if you are flying different places each time or perhaps doing a world tour. It’s all mostly all new data and cache isn’t helping with that.
We need a clever and easy to use way to pre-cache. The pre caching is nothing like that if it’s anything like the solution offered in 2020. Perhaps it could be based on a flight plan or even dragging a rectangular box across the world map before flight.
let’s be clear in the definition of streaming, as I see many threads which does make sense to me.
My understanding, mostly validated by Seb’s explanation in latest Q&A, is that the sim is indeed « streamed » from their server to our PC/Xbox based on our needs. But the comparison with « video streaming » stops here: while videos would not be cached when we play (only buffered to avoid stutters), streamed files for MSFS are cached/stored until we miss space or their an update server side that needs to be downloaded. That is to say we download as we play, and for now 8 times out of 10 the cache is effectively being used.
From that, imagine we forget about world data (which is peta bytes of info) and you setup a 1.5TB cache. You use all possible add-ons/planes available, at the end you will have on your PC 80%*1,5TB of data from MSFS. Apart from cache efficiency improvement that Seb mentionned, what is the difference with manually downloading this data?
Please keep me corrected, but I sense we should be cautious in using the word streaming here.
Partly correct but there is a scenario that the caching doesn’t really apply to. That would be when you don’t ever return to the same place for a while. The cache is getting continually overwritten with the new data but it becomes useless if you never go back there. A cache is useful if you can read a lot from it but writing loads all the time and hardly ever reading from it doesn’t really help you. To solve that a descent way to pre cache is required. No that’s not the clunky 2020 solution.
as CasualClick mentioned, its can avoid errors and corruptions, besides, the size of the cache is the same for different content, it can change dynamically based on usage and need. permanent storage is one state, which is very demanding. so if we had 150gb cache, it can store all content for my flight today, if thats changed, it adapts on that same size allocated.
I want to clarify a couple of points because I don’t know how to make a multiple answer:
What I want to convey with my post is that we have the same as 2020 in terms of offline functionality applied to 2024
The 2020 offline patch does not require any type of dynamic cache or prior download because it is a level 3 world according to the SDK. How to explain it better, the 60gb of said patch in 2020 allows me to start an uninterrupted trip without any type of connection in Spain, go throughout Europe, Russia, cross the Beirut Strait, go through Canada, the entire US, Mexico, all of Latin America to Tierra del Fuego without any type of prior download, because I repeat it is a level 3 world.
Tell me that it is impossible to make an offline sim when I have just explained the above, which is either lying or they lack information.
If I mention that it is a download outside of the game it is to avoid the download problems that we have with 2020 related to the launcher/market and instead of downloading it directly from Asobo, we download it from the MS servers where we download the current client and in 2020, console users have no problem downloading the core of the game.
The 1.3TB as some users say may be right and refers to all the content in the Market, which I agree with because it is content that you have not paid for and it is absurd to download it. But you put it more in my favor, reducing the size of the download, and I highly doubt that the career mode “takes up 500gb” is a way of speaking. It already sounded strange to me yesterday.
Downloading 1.5 Terabytes would take 1.7 days on my connection. Best case…
Did he say that? Because Seb said that the data for the whole world is about 3 petabytes now, so multiple petabytes for France alone doesn’t quite check out.
i guess there is no excuse, just what is needed some ssds for cache & they are @ good price these days.