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.
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His argument wasn’t about your internet speed but the speed at which it could be delivered by them. That is the bottleneck in terms of download time, he even said that in the QA. Based on their estimate of the maximum speed they could deliver it, it would take over 20 hours (I think the number was something like this).
I agree we should be able to download as much as we want and make our own decisions, but I also think doing it in one go is impractical. I think his comments about splitting it up into regions or something makes a lot more sense. This is on top of allowing downloading of planes and airports and such.
I think his comment was more to say it’s impractical to download 1.5 terabytes straight up just to be able to hit the play button. I also agree they should be more careful when using the word impossible when they mean impractical. All it does it make people not trust them.
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I would rather download it than stream it
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Personal Comments and Observations
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.
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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.
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I want to mention that the game makes a ludicrous amount of checks, something akin to a checksum, on the data in cache. This is how they know they have an “80% hit rate” on cached data. They know because your client is asking them if the data has changed since last used.
So even if you have data cached, there is a ridiculous amount of calls being made to their servers. They may be small but there is a ton of them. I would think they should put some kind of timer on that so it doesn’t constantly recheck the same cached data. This is just one issue in the pro column for downloading.
- EDIT: It is possible they have already addressed this or it was a launch issue based on a comment further down. I can’t verify either as I’m too lazy to monitor wireshark for hours as I did in the days after the game came out.
Another thing to consider in the pro column for downloading is if you do not want to redownload a specific region, but also occasionally do career mode or something. To ensure this doesn’t happen 100%, you would have to set your cache to the maximum size of the game anyways.
I do think some compromise of allowing downloading of specific regions, combined with caching should be an ultimate solution. I also think downloading the entire game at once is also not practical.
To reply to the mod, I don’t think people expect it to work FULLY offline. However, I think they at least want some degraded experience if they need to play it offline for some reason. Similar to 2020.
I think people are being unfair and misinterpreting their statements from the QA, but I also think it needs to be addressed and a practical compromise found.
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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.
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This is either a communication or comprehension fail.
1.3TB is only the library content which is currently streamed. That’s a very long way from allowing you to run it offline.
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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.
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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.
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I have not had wireshark running recently, but in the first days it was making an insane amount of tiny calls that got tiny responses. I assumed these to be some kind of checksum validation on cached data (as I have set mine very high). Obviously I don’t know this for a fact, but we know they are tracking cache hit metrics so it seems to me to be a more than likely scenario.
Perhaps that was just a launch issue or something, I would have to revalidate my own findings. A timer on each cached object, based on some kind of internal data they have for how often it changes, would be a very smart thing to do, if they haven’t already done it. I can’t verify what you say, but it would make sense for them to do, if they haven’t already.
I’ve been out of the loop. You guys are saying 2024 doesn’t download the whole game? It streams almost all of it?
exactly, only you have local files to run the software.
Seb said in the stream that the servers only provide data at 150Mbps/user, so I think that’s where the 25hr figure came from.
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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.
I think it should be noted that the “petabytes” you speak of are the highest resolution they offer. To say textures have a diminishing return in terms of storage size is an understatement.
As they said in the QA, the vast majority of people are not getting those textures and probably never will. So while yes, TECHNICALLY, the entire game is probably petabytes (I take their word on that), some degraded offline experience is more than possible with reasonable texture limitations.
I’m not convinced the model information is all that great. I have personally rendered the entire earth to 3 meter precision using data available on the NASA website. This game is better than that, but it’s not so much better that the data size for things like vertices would be that much larger than what I have done personally. Funny enough, the NASA data does have data for the ocean floor, and river beds and lake beds, etc. So my own rendering was more detailed than this game in that regard lol. You could actually go underwater in mine ><. I think that most of the data, in terms of size requirements, is textures and photogrammetry, and that most people won’t ever download anything close to the highest resolution textures for the vast majority of things unless they go out of their way to do so.
I think it’s more than possible to download a region to such a degree that one could fly a plane in it without noticing the difference.
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.
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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.
Good topic. Make it a wishlist so I can vote
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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.
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