Reasonably robust PC workstation and fairly high end graphics card. Lots of RAM.
When the game is running and I hit ESC key it essentially stops.
My expectation is that other programs (e.g. Outlook or Word or Excel or accounting or browser) would run as if the program was not loaded.
What I observe is halting/slow response to key input and various program actions. Not what I see with multiple programs active without MFS loaded.
Does the ESC key/function truly suspend the program or is it still consuming resources?
ESC is just pausing the game. It’s still rendering everything and doing their stuff as if the program is running. The application also retains all the data that they need to use as active in the RAM, otherwise if you’re treating it as not running, the app would close and when you press ESC to go back in, it would be the equivalent of starting the sim all over again.
Thank you for responding. That explains the current behavior.
It would be nice to have a ‘suspend’ function. Think Word or Acrobat or any other program. When minimized or the focus is transferred to another active program/process there is no longer any activity impinging on the system except for the memory occupied. Resuming the program/process then brings it to the forefront for access to system resources. There are programs that continue running in the ‘background’ but most of them I am familiar with allow for a pause/resume of the program by the user.
Should we be comparing them? I mean, comparing word processing software versus a complete flight simulation with real time 3D graphic rendering… Doesn’t seem to be an even playing field here. Word or acrobat can afford being inactive since they don’t really do anything even when they’re active. Unless you tell it to do a certain function or command.
But flightsim is constantly running, redrawing image 60 frames per second, even if it’s less then the background processes are the one still running.
I mean, it’s nice if we can have that feature of suspending the processes when inactive. But unless we can actually come up with some form of design for them to consider changing the entire infrastructure of the system to make it work that way. Otherwise, it’ll just be another wishful thinking of something that’ll never gonna happen. It is what it is.