I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Pcs are clearly inferior, that's like 32gb on a Mac. /s
Comparing a person computer to another personal computer
Rememeber how "no one will ever need more than 8gb of ram"? Up until fairly recently (a few years ago) you could not talk about anything having to do with ram online without someone coming along and being like "ACKTCHUALLY no one needs more than 8gb of ram for anything even gaming".
Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
FS2020 downloads 600GB of something ROUTINELY
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.
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.)
You must really hate going to the movies. If I spend $60-70 on a game and get 50-100+ hours of entertainment from that money spent that's a dub in my book.
If someone enjoys flight simming it's not really a question, they will buy this game because it's one of the best all-around sims.
I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt -- and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo's (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.
Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you're already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn't any big deal to you.
But it is a really good game for the time being
Call me when it's a really good game forever.
Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn't mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money
The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
I'll admit I haven't played much (or possibly even any?) online MSFS stuff and am generally just a fart around in a Cessna in a random city type of player so I don't even necessarily know what the online features are, other than the Install New Locations minigame wherein you spend hours downloading shit, heh.
There are some 3d demoscene programs that use miniscule amounts of disk space but still need a fair bit of memory for working space.
malloc knows no limits.
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.
I know. That statement was weird. In just a few lines of code I can chew up all available ram on a machine.
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
Interesting—D2R only had 1-3 seconds’ load time for me! Was it bad on consoles without SSDs?
Nowadays 2 seconds is an eternity considering M.2 drive speed and DDR4 bandwidth. Baldur's Gate 1 for example, nothing is compressed and load times are in single digit milliseconds. Sure BG1 is loading like 1/8th the stuff but load times are 1/300th
There's actually a program people use for D2R to unpack textures and it cuts load time significantly, but the install and the uncompressed files have a massive footprint
It probably streams the content during play.
It definitely does, it pulls satellite data of the whole world
lol i remember when you'd get called an idiot for installing 16 gb ram
Can’t have too much, but you can have not enough.
I remember being asked what I needed 64 MB of RAM for. My answer, of course, being "because I can."
My server has around 156GB RAM.
Do I use most of it? Nah.
Why then?
Cuz it was free from work and I wanted to hit the amount from Weird Al’s “it’s all about the Pentiums”
after years of dealing with emm386 trying to get ultima 7 to run on DOS, i always bought all the ram i could afford. fuck all that "you don't need that much" bullshit
Just to provide some context as someone who played the hell out of 2020 (on gamepass) and is looking forward to buying 2024 minute 1 and then figuring out how to keep a cat from fucking up a HOTAS sled for minutes 2-900:
The install is small because that is just the core game. Theoretically, that is all you need and it contains the meshes/logic for meshes and plane textures and so forth. You will then stream map data as you play and cache that. So the first time you take off at Pyongyang International it will take a bit of time to load but subsequent trips will be super fast.
That said... you will almost assuredly download the world packs. This is the much more hand crafted cities and airports so you can genuinely feel like you are flying over Paris or escaping from London Heathrow's international terminal and so forth. Or just to fix some weirdness because of a building layout near a river. And those world packs get big.
Before I switched over to linux for full time gaming? My PC install of MSFS 2020 was probably 100-200 GB on its own just from all the updates?
Microsoft is to memory as the conquistadors are to Central America.