Data streaming and offline mode confirmed

[ca_metal 2,024]

6 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

I don’t know, but the percentage of people who have top of the range P.C. gear is vanishingly small. 

Right?! There are some folks around simulating on weak laptops... 

[Superdelphinus 718]

2 hours ago, B777ER said:

I see companies like HiFi, REX and Orbx and their business models possibly losing a lot. If MS AI handles real-time weather and the way it already looks with the clouds and the sky and the AI scenery being loaded in real time as you fly there's no need for any of their products..

C’est la vie. The good ones will adapt and survive. 

[Superdelphinus 718]

1 minute ago, ca_metal said:

Right?! There are some folks around simulating on weak laptops... 

I love it when they release those steam surveys and discover that about 98% of gamers use an i3 and a voodoo fx gpu

[irrics 1,517]

4 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

C’est la vie. The good ones will adapt and survive. 

My thoughts exactly.

OrbX I think has a much brighter potential here as they are on the scenery side.

But the products from REX/HiFi do things that should be natively integrated into the core product.

[Superdelphinus 718]

Just in this article...

Obviously the guardian is a reliable source (the amount you agree with that might be influenced by your political standpoint), but how much of this article is based on actual new insight, and how much is just conjecture as we’ve being doing in this forum with wild abandon for the last few weeks. It makes it look like it was based on an interview with spencer, but that isn’t specifically referenced so I don’t think it was, and the quotes it uses sound familiar. 

Do we reckon this was actually based on new information for sure?

[ca_metal 2,024]

3 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

Just in this article...

Obviously the guardian is a reliable source (the amount you agree with that might be influenced by your political standpoint), but how much of this article is based on actual new insight, and how much is just conjecture as we’ve being doing in this forum with wild abandon for the last few weeks. It makes it look like it was based on an interview with spencer, but that isn’t specifically referenced so I don’t think it was, and the quotes it uses sound familiar. 

Do we reckon this was actually based on new information for sure?

I believe it is based on an interview the author had with Phil Spencer. If not, I would be really surprised they would publish something like that on The Guardian.

[Paraffin 2,197]

36 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

I don’t know, but the percentage of people who have top of the range P.C. gear is vanishingly small. 

Not so much for flight sim hobbyists in general. Here's the current XP11 automated usage data, scooped up without user interaction (except for opting in), so it's pretty accurate. It shows the following for RAM usage (cumulative from the bottom up, so the 32 GB+ number is included in the 8 GB+ number):

8 GB+  RAM 92.4%
16 GB+ RAM 63.8%
32 GB+ RAM 17.7%

CPU cores from the last (Summer 2018) automated survey, which isn't shown in the current dashboard:

4 Cores 43%
8 Cores 44%

68% of users are running Nvidia GPUs, and the number is probably higher for PC users, because this stat includes the mobile platform GPUs. 

That's just X-Plane, but I don't think the numbers would be very different for P3D or Aerofly FS2. I know some folks are flying on laptops, which is great if it works for 'ya, but this is a hobby that's been associated with high-end hardware for as long as I've been in it. I don't think MFS is going to wave a magic wand to drastically reduce these requirements, but we'll see.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Paraffin

[nas123 160]

I see no reason to update my rig for the new MFS.     I do have a i7 6700K @4.5 CPU w/4 cores.    I guess a new game in 2020 will use multicores in a much more effective way than what we have in P3D/XPLANE11. In addition my 300 Mbps Internet will handle streaming more than enough.

Edited July 24, 2019 by nas123

[Superdelphinus 718]

44 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

I believe it is based on an interview the author had with Phil Spencer. If not, I would be really surprised they would publish something like that on The Guardian.

I agree, but unless I’ve missed it, at no point does it say anywhere that it was based on an interview, which I think is very unusual. 

Edited July 24, 2019 by Superdelphinus

[irrics 1,517]

47 minutes ago, nas123 said:

I see no reason to update my rig for the new MFS. 

I'm holding off completely until we know a lot more.

I'd even consider using it with a new Xbox down the line depending upon what the tradeoffs might be (or not).

[Mengy 814]

4 hours ago, Woozie said:

some features will definitely require a permanent internet connection.

If I had to hazard a guess, from a programming perspective with performance as a priority, then I'd wager on the following:

- Most of the computational things will be done at the client end by the user's CPU + graphics card.

- This offline mode will likely be some type of base landclass layer / mesh / textures, similar to how FSX / P3D handle things today.

- The majority of streaming will be the satellite textures constantly being downloaded by the sim as the player flies around.  The client will handle the interpretation of that data to produce autogen.  Monument buildings will be stored client side.

- Weather data will likely constantly download too, but only meteorological data, the actual calculations to display the weather graphically will likely be client side.

- Multiplayer data will also come down from the server.  MS will want to make this very multiplayer friendly as that will appeal greatly to the Xbox crowd.  

 

In short, I think the net will be used to get weather data, multiplayer data, and sat textures only, everything else will work like a normal modern game and run client side.

[Superdelphinus 718]

Well presumably because they’re very expensive, the profit margins are sensational, many of them are used for cryptomining and we have no idea how many they actually sell in the first place anyway. Anyway, my point was that if they are hoping mfs reaches a broader market, some of the more demanding parts of it being streamed in makes a lot of sense given what the steam survey suggests the average pc specs are of the broader market (and I think the steam data gives a better idea of that than anything else I can think of).

Who knows, perhaps at some point in the future they’ll be able to throw so much computing power through the cloud that we’ll get something approaching actual complex physics simulations in a whole range of genres and titles. 

[Murmur 3,941]

If we consider just satellite imagery, the 2 petabytes mentioned for the source data would roughly correspond to worldwide coverage at zoom level 19 (only land) or zoom level 18 (both land and sea):

 

[simaddict 46]

Most every current internet plan starts at 100 Mbps. So we should be ok.

[tonywob 4,769]

3 hours ago, simaddict said:

Most every current internet plan starts at 100 Mbps. So we should be ok.

Certainly not in these parts of the world it doesn't. I remember trying one of these online PCs for gaming (it was a French company and I don't remember the name now), it was pretty unusable for me and I had a 20mb connection. Left me wondering how people with even slower internet would use something like this.

Over something like an LTE connection, that some people are limited to having, streaming such huge amounts of data into the sim would quickly use up any caps, so the offline mode is most welcome, as long as it will be possible for third-parties to still make weather and AI addons etc...