I read the download size is like 150GB. That’s why I didn’t buy it on sale.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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That's not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.
They've also talked about massively leveraging cloud computing and streaming, it's likely a lot of actual scenery isn't part of the offline file size unless you cache the areas for offline play (if that's even an option)
Yeah. That was admittedly the big issue with Australia. With VFR it was useless unless we used Orbx in the days
I wonder if it’s going to take several hours to download all the world content before allowing you into the menu screen like MSFS2020 does.
I wonder if they’ll insist on using MS servers for the content and will be kept at MS server caps at 5MBPS, meaning that it will take 20+ hours of downloading before you can even play, pulling you outside of the 2 hour Steam return window.
Yeah fucking MSFS2020 was such a bust for me living in Australia. It took days to download then I finally got it working something went wrong with install files and had to dick around. In the end I played 3 hours of it but have hundreds in download time.
Fuck MSFS
Afaik Steam does refund games if you tell support that you spent time troubleshooting or waited for the launcher to download the actual files.
Though I only think to have read about it. No concrete proof.
Yeah the Steam refund 2 hour thing is just the no questions asked guaranteed refund window. You can absolutely request a refund outside of that window and they'll be quite reasonable in most cases.
Hell, they’ve been refunding Linux users for GTAV this week because of the change to BattleEye.
Years ago, I tried cities skylines on a sort of shitty PC… spent at least 8 hours trying to get it to work, then just gave up.
Requested a refund and it was granted almost immediately.
I bought a better PC and repurchased, and not it runs fine but the game itself is pretty mod dependent and I have spent more time installing and uninstalling mods than actually playing the game.
So yes, ask for a refund and you will probably get it even outside the 2hour window.
And .kkrieger is 96 kilobytes and uses around 200MB of RAM iirc.
The demo scene was always technically amazing
JavaScript developers hate this one weird trick!
Oddly? This is not odd at all.
It's been a while sincce I wrote code, but I'll try to remember. Basically disk size and ram size have no connection. Disk size is for already generated assets (maybe you need to remember how the planes look like, so you create assets for all the planes. Or you want to have textures for the scenery, or for the Lincoln monument, or whatever).
But then you need to load those resources into RAM to access them faster, because if you try to load them directly from disk, it's a lot slower. So some part of those 64GB of RAM is because you are loading some premade assets.
But aside from this, there's also dynamically generated data that you have no way of knowing about at the beginning of the program, so you can't prepare in advance and generate assets for it. Like say for example the player wants to begin flying the plane - he's gonna have some different inputs than any other player. Maybe he drives slower at the beginning, or goes a little to the right when he takes off. Or his destination will be completely different. You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane's weight and who knows what else, I'm not a pilot. All of this, you allocate memory dynamically, based on user changes, and this uses the RAM as well.
Not to mention - you can make a 1kb program that takes 64 GB of RAM. You just ask the operating system for that much memory. You don't even need to fully use it. It'll take you one line of code.
All this to say - nothing odd about the program being smaller than the RAM requirements. It can mean it's not optimized, but it can also mean it has a lot of dynamic calculations that it's doing and a lot of stuff it needs to remember (and in the case of a flight Sim this wouldn't surprise me).
You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane's weight and who knows what else, I'm not a pilot.
You're not wrong per se, but I'm having trouble fathoming gigabytes of data being consumed by these types of parameters. You could probably track hundreds of thousands of airplanes with that much space. The only thing that I could imagine taking up that much memory is extremely detailed airflow simulation.
However, as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of memory data for video games is in most cases textures and geometry, and not so much the simulation. Based on the article, it seems this game streams high resolution geometry data based on your current location on earth, which I would say is the most probable reason it asks for so much memory.
Technically correct, but if I'd have any input into hiring a person whose background involves making a flight simulator requiring 64GB RAM, that doesn't emulate every mol in that plane for that cost (I'm exaggerating a bit), I'd ask many questions.
It requires 16GB RAM, which is perfectly acceptable. But it can use more if available, for high res textures I assume. Which are streamed from Microsoft's servers, explaining in part the difference between install size and max memory requirements.
My guess is the big video ram is high resolution textures, complex geometry, and a long draw distance. I honestly don't know much about video games though.
The smaller install is totally the map streaming stuff. I'm unsure quite why it has to be so big, but again, I don't know video games. I do recall you having to tell it where you want to start from and it'll download some stuff there.
The hardware and bandwidth demands of the first game were why I stopped playing it. I had a machine that could run it (and an even better one now) and internet that could handle it, but it still just wasn't a smooth experience. I don't have a cap on my internet data but my speed isn't particularly high, which meant the 80-150gb per week of data the game consumed was certainly felt.
Is it fun to play?
Defines: fun.
Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
That's exactly what they're doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.
Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.
My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
Also.. this is the kind of game that kind of requires a "live service" element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable.
You shouldn't have to download the entire planet though.
The game 100% should support installing local specific areas you wanna fly around, that anyone could then keep a copy of.
If a user wanted to cache an entire 8 TB of the entire world on a drive, they should be able to just do that (and thus have forever support without worrying about internet services staying online)
At least, as a snapshot of what the world looked like in 2024.
I don't see why users shouldn't have the option to locally HD save the data if they want to, to avoid maxing out their internet bandwidth in one sitting.
You do cache what you use as you use it
The issue is with this being a forever game. If there are no servers there is no streaming. Hence the need to somehow host a one off entire world download indefinitely.
MSF2020 runs offline too, it's even sold on discs in certain regions. You just don't get any of the satellite imagery or live weather. Obviously that means a degraded experience, but it still works.
Leveraging something they already run makes a lot more sense than building a bespoke thing for streaming the data for just MSFS. (In my defense, it is a game and game devs have done much sillier things than doing something like that.)
I just have begun to accept that I'm not the market for games anymore, because I'm unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there's no more money to be squeezed out of it.
I'm just very opposed to renting entertainment because everything is temporary.
(Thankfully there's ~30 years of games to play that don't suffer from any of this live-service-ness so I'm not exactly short of things to spend time on.)
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I doubt it's pulling in massive amounts of data.
But the maps data it does pull in will be messed about with, a bunch of trees splatted all over it, buildings extrapolated, water flows, etc. That'll be what's taking the RAM.
The actual flying seems like the least interesting part of this game, and what they've really made is Google Earth on steroids.
Yeah, the Google Maps equivalent that you're flying around in is the massive amount of data. The flight sim part isn't insignificant, but the massive amounts of canned data will be all those maps.
From what I heard they do actually put a lot of effort into simulating airplane aerodynamics at least for the smaller planes. So the flying part is kind of important.
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This game feels like the perfect candidate for streaming from XCloud/GeForce Now since all those data doesn’t really need to be transferred all the time. And the game’s design can tolerate a bit input latency.
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Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
Memory leaks goes brrrr
30GB plus unlimited data streaming while using it…
That said, I suppose one plus is that this hopefully wont need as many 10+GiB updates literally right when I finally have an hour free and want to play it.
30GB to install then 100+ after you open the game and it downloads updates and scenery. Same deal as 2020.
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Most games, most textures are compressed, which leads to something like Diablo 2's remake having ridiculous load times considering it's a simple reskin of a 20 year old game. That 30GB footprint probably gets unpacked to something twice the size, and if you're caching literally every single thing for the sake of smoothness (flight sims rarely have loading screens when you enter another country's airspace or a different biome), and a little bit of overhead for OS etc, gonna need heaps of RAM
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Oddly? The game needs ram to store data like variables that the game generates, like physics simulations, among other game systems. The game's asset size alone doesn't really matter.
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I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much
Great. Now I'll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.
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