Making it a fully cloud-based sim is going to exclude a huge number of potential customers world-wide. Google are due to start their Stadia cloud gaming service later this year and they say that it will need at least 20 Mbps just to play at 1080p. If you want to play at 4k (60 FPS) you'll need 35 Mbps. It could be years before those sorts of speeds become the norm everywhere in the world. As interesting as it is to speculate on how they're going to do it, surely they'll be aiming it at the largest market they can?

Edited June 14, 20196 yr by vortex681

1 hour ago, vortex681 said:

Making it a fully cloud-based sim is going to exclude a huge number of potential customers world-wide. Google are due to start their Stadia cloud gaming service later this year and they say that it will need at least 20 Mbps just to play at 1080p. If you want to play at 4k (60 FPS) you'll need 35 Mbps. It could be years before those sorts of speeds become the norm everywhere in the world. As interesting as it is to speculate on how they're going to do it, surely they'll be aiming it at the largest market they can?

I'm guessing they'll be ways to play it locally or online with more scenery content. Perhaps a base game with some ortho cities and landclass filling in the gaps but a subscription service gets you streaming orthos in far more places.

On some level though, technology is just leaving those with slow connections behind. I highly doubt there will be a boxed edition, for example.

 

Edited June 15, 20196 yr by bonchie

On 6/13/2019 at 3:03 PM, Paraffin said:

120 fps at 4k resolution and ray tracing? That's beastly hardware.

What, so are you trying to say that my circa 2010 Core i7 970 machine that barely runs FSX with add-ons won't cut it? I'm gutted.

2 hours ago, vortex681 said:

Making it a fully cloud-based sim is going to exclude a huge number of potential customers world-wide. Google are due to start their Stadia cloud gaming service later this year and they say that it will need at least 20 Mbps just to play at 1080p. If you want to play at 4k (60 FPS) you'll need 35 Mbps. It could be years before those sorts of speeds become the norm everywhere in the world. As interesting as it is to speculate on how they're going to do it, surely they'll be aiming it at the largest market they can?

Hopefully they have a simple slider 😃

Offline scenery

Low bandwidth streaming

Medium bandwidth streaming

High bandwidth streaming

19 hours ago, bonchie said:

On some level though, technology is just leaving those with slow connections behind.

And it's currently leaving a lot behind. What's the point of putting the time and money into developing a new title which, if cloud-based, will only work well for a limited number of people (of which only a relatively small proportion will want a civilian flight sim, anyway)?

1 minute ago, vortex681 said:

And it's currently leaving a lot behind. What's the point of putting the time and money into developing a new title which, if cloud-based, will only work well for a limited number of people (of which only a relatively small proportion will want a civilian flight sim, anyway)?

Obviously, the market of people with decent internet connections is large enough to make it profitable Look at the popularity of Steam, where 25-50GB downloads for games are now the norm. Consoles are also moving toward cloud based gaming. Boxed games are all but extinct.

But I think the answer to your question is that they have to go somewhere and the limits of technology are dictating where that somewhere is. You just can't localize on your hard drive the amount of information they are describing with this new Flight Simulator.

 

5 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

And it's currently leaving a lot behind. What's the point of putting the time and money into developing a new title which, if cloud-based, will only work well for a limited number of people (of which only a relatively small proportion will want a civilian flight sim, anyway)?

I agree, lots of places around the world do not possess high speeds, even within Europe.

More over, a lot of connections have high international contention ratios, making international TCP/IP traffic even slower.

It seems some developers of technologies like this are not taking such things into consideration, we need a replacement for TCP/IP to make communication more efficient over long hops.

Regards 

Simbol

6 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Look at the popularity of Steam, where 25-50GB downloads for games are now the norm.

There's a big difference between downloading games to play on your local machine, where you could leave it for days to download if necessary, and actually playing games in the cloud.

 

Edited June 15, 20196 yr by vortex681

3 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

There's a big difference between downloading games to play on your local machine, where you could leave it for days to download if necessary, and playing games in the cloud.

I get it, but what do you want them to do?

They are pushing the envelope with satellite and AI technology. That's just not possible in a fully localized game. Maybe they'll have a landclass system that can work offline and that would be great? But there's noway they could fit even the 165 3D city areas Bing has into a localized installation, much less satellite data all over the world.

I'd rather them do everything that's possible instead of holding back advancement because some people still have slow internet connections. For those people, the older sims are still here until infrastructure improves.

I know that sounds a bit elitist, and that's not my intention, but I don't know what else a developer can do except move forward.

Edited June 15, 20196 yr by bonchie

I'm not saying that they won't use streaming to a greater or lesser extent, just that there's a balance to strike if they want the maximum number of sales. We have no idea how much storage will be needed to run the game. Just because they use petabytes of data to create the scenery, that doesn't necessarily mean the the final scenery will petabytes in size. What about compression? That may be another area where AI will step in.

Edited June 15, 20196 yr by vortex681

16 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

And it's currently leaving a lot behind. What's the point of putting the time and money into developing a new title which, if cloud-based, will only work well for a limited number of people (of which only a relatively small proportion will want a civilian flight sim, anyway)?

We don't know how it will turn out, but there could be options for those with slower connections. Here's one possibility:

First, the server could automatically test the user's connection speed by talking to the client. Then the server combines that info with how the user sets the options for eye candy based on the power of their CPU, RAM, and GPU. Available bandwidth could override those settings.

And then, the server builds you a custom version of the scenery on the fly for streaming. Instead of serving the full maxed-out 4K version, you get some lesser version with lower texture res, less autogen, and so on. Someone with a fast connection gets a fancier scenery build, up to the full 4k version.

This would be very different from the current paradigm where we all have potentially maxed-out scenery and other eye candy sitting on our hard drives, and we set sliders based on our CPU/GPU to filter how much of that can be displayed in the sim. This method of "custom scenery streaming for everyone" would benefit Microsoft too, because their bandwidth costs would be less if they're not streaming the full maxed-out 4K scenery build to every client.

Another option, since streaming suggests "look ahead" buffering anyway, might be an option to use a map UI to say "I want to fly in this area." Then instead of live streaming, you let the sim download everything it needs overnight for that one area. This could allow offline flying, using a laptop on a train without WiFi, etc. Frankly, I think this is less likely for reasons of piracy protection. A flight sim that requires a full-time connection, and only works with live streamed data from the host, is the perfect DRM method.

I think the first option is more likely if they can pull it off. It's also wild speculation based on absolutely zero information about what MS is doing, or is capable of doing. 😊

5 hours ago, bonchie said:

Obviously, the market of people with decent internet connections is large enough to make it profitable Look at the popularity of Steam, where 25-50GB downloads for games are now the norm. Consoles are also moving toward cloud based gaming. Boxed games are all but extinct.

But I think the answer to your question is that they have to go somewhere and the limits of technology are dictating where that somewhere is. You just can't localize on your hard drive the amount of information they are describing with this new Flight Simulator.

 

Steam users don't mind a one-time download to play a game, many schedule it for download while they're asleep... and as for consoles...actually, consoles are not moving to cloud only.  Not even close.  There has been a massive, massive pushback over the purchase of a game at places like GameStop for $50+ only to have to download the game from the internet.  This is going to go back to where the disk has the game.

As for "amount of information"... at no point has anyone from Microsoft stated that the database for the sim contains 2 petabytes of data. Not one person.  Zip, zilch, nada.

I just watched a 4K movie online... in excess of 6 gigs of data, per hour to watch a 4K film.

28 minutes ago, WarpD said:

As for "amount of information"... at no point has anyone from Microsoft stated that the database for the sim contains 2 petabytes of data. Not one person.  Zip, zilch, nada.

I didn't say that.

I was referring to the probability of the size of what we saw in the trailer, not the 2 petabytes of data comment. We saw orthos in places all over the earth, from huge mountain ranges, to Hawaii, to major cities, and even underneath autogen in the Bahamas and Dubai. The use of orthos is obviously extensive. We also saw at least 6 major 3D scanned cities that we know came from Bing Earth View data, of which there are 165 of those cities just in the United States.

How big is one of the new Orbx ortho regions? 50+GB? And it's much more compressed looking than what we saw. I see noway that what we saw in that trailer is somehow only a 50-100GB download. So do they release a game with 500GB of data? A TB? As someone that has used orthos in XP, it could even be much larger than that by many magnitudes. I've got a 4TB drive I use just for regional ortho coverage of the U.S.

I realize we are all speculating and I don't know exactly how big it is, but I don't think it's out of line for me to say that what we saw in that trailer would take up a ton of physical space unless they are just scamming everyone and what we saw in the trailer is the full extent of the 3D areas and orthos.

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by bonchie

14 minutes ago, WarpD said:

I just watched a 4K movie online... in excess of 6 gigs of data, per hour to watch a 4K film.

We don't know if that's a fair comparison or not.

Go download Earth View and fly around. See how much usage it takes over the course of ten minutes and extrapolate. I suspect it's not going to come out to 6GB of data usage.

 

Edited June 16, 20196 yr by bonchie