Is it going to be a "distributed FDM" ?

[jcomm 5,939]

As much as I wouldn't like to if I explore my deepest simmer feeling, the announcment of MS FS2020 was Great News for me, and relighted my interest for the civil flight simulation genre...

I've been wondering about many "features" that will come with this, I guess revolutionary, design by MS, including the "streamed" approach. But while we do not have access to further details, and I really look fwd for this months additional infos by the Dev Team, I start thinking about how it could work.

Aerowinx PSX, by far the most accurate and rewarding simulation of a Boeing 744, has a sort of "distributed" flight model, when several instances of the main program run, in the same or various networked PCs in complex environments like those it was designed to work in.

The use of this technique is more or less based on a central computation of the details of the most intricate details of the flight dynamics that is then sent to the avrious instances, and used there, in a shorter / synthesized form to make it act locally in a smooth way.

Is MS FS2020 going to run the flight dynamics at it's core, and have our client PCs receive the 6DOF info, probably with a single force matrix that is locally "smoothed" and used to represent the movement of the aircraft ?

Is weather also going to run centrally, or locally ? In standalone mode, for instance when our Internet link is down or bellow a certain threshold that renders it "not good", how is the FDM / Weather going to be computed ? 

Well, many questions, that can also bring interesting perspectives about how 3pds will be able to develop for such a platform, but all of these based only in my imagination ! 🙂

Let's wait & see, but MS FS 2020 is already playing within me :-)))

Edited August 5, 2019 by jcomm

[cgbart 7]

Many years ago I was fortunate to attend multi-day seminars in Boston at Harvard hosted by John Donovan discussing the three-tiered approach to computing. Back-end servers, middle-layer processing and front-end presentation. This in effect is what I believe will be the approach as you have spelled out, as well as a previous post describing Azure processing in the background as we reap the benefits of flying in a very realistic world. Interesting to see what comes about. My feeling is that this will be an Ala-carte solution based on the amount  of data to be made available.

We'll wait and see. Exciting times ahead!

Chris

[jcomm 5,939]

Of course doing it "centrally" ( it's far from that since it's going to be in the cloud... ), both flight dynamics and weather dynamics would also mean a new approach to 3pd cooperation.

If the flight dynamics and / or weather dynamics, which sum up to create the "Physics of Flight", are going to run remotely in the cloud, with "thin clients" in our PCs then when a 3pd creates a new aircraft and or weather engine, it'll have to be "installed" in the cloud, and then we will have to buy licenses to access it / it's features.

This would be a rather interesting approach - we would stop reading those typical threads going as: "will my new **** Boeing run on my rig ?"  ...

Is it going to be such a huge step ahead ?

Looking fwd into their next disclosures 🙂

Edited August 6, 2019 by jcomm

[Paraffin 2,197]

8 hours ago, jcomm said:

Of course doing it "centrally" ( it's far from that since it's going to be in the cloud... ), both flight dynamics and weather dynamics would also mean a new approach to 3pd cooperation.

If the flight dynamics and / or weather dynamics, which sum up to create the "Physics of Flight", are going to run remotely in the cloud, with "thin clients" in our PCs then when a 3pd creates a new aircraft and or weather engine, it'll have to be "installed" in the cloud, and then we will have to buy licenses to access it / it's features.

Repeating a point I made elsewhere, it would certainly be "interesting" for a 3rd party developer to work with a flight simulator where most of the code and all the assets were running remotely in the cloud. Normally this sort of thing with a server-based game and thin client is developed without 3rd party involvement, like the World of Warcraft MMO.

To alpha or beta test anything, each 3rd party developer would need a private remote server space, so whatever they were working on wasn't available to everyone before it was ready. Same issue with user-made content. How do you work on something like a free airport model or livery and test it, without some kind of private access to the remote servers?

This is why I'm a bit skeptical that this will be a fully "distributed" or Stadia-type game where the client is just a graphics processing slave. It would seriously complicate any outside development, and MS has said they want to support that.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

What on earth is a Distributed FDM? 🤨

[jcomm 5,939]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

What on earth is a Distributed FDM? 🤨

One that doesn't run only in your rig...

It can actually run in the cloud, or run partly in the cloud and partly in your rig.

There are a few, of which the one I know better is Aerowinx PSX when used in several instances, specially when these run in different nodes of a networked environment.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

6 minutes ago, jcomm said:

One that doesn't run only in your rig...

It can actually run in the cloud, or run partly in the cloud and partly in your rig.

There are a few, of which the one I know better is Aerowinx PSX when used in several instances, specially when these run in different nodes of a networked environment.

Right so with no internet connection you're stuffed. No thanks. 100% on my SSD for me with the exception of downloading weather and my ChasePlane settings.

Still don't know what the TLA stands for. Hope you appreciate the irony.

[jcomm 5,939]

:-)

 

But this is merely a conjecture... It's probably far from being like that, at least regarding the flight dynamics...

And yes, I'm also a bit worried about the network requirements. Mine's not great, but it more than suffices to play my IL-2 GB ...

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

@jcomm, yes I appreciate that but should it be the case that scenery has to be streamed then that is not a line I’m prepared to cross.

[Noooch 1,084]

9 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@jcomm, yes I appreciate that but should it be the case that scenery has to be streamed then that is not a line I’m prepared to cross.

You can download maps to use them offline with Bing. Maybe that's what they are thinking of for offline mode.

Anyway that would also require some good internet.

Otherwise I don't see how you will enjoy those stunning visuals, maybe only on youtube 😉

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

18 minutes ago, Noooch said:

You can download maps to use them offline with Bing. Maybe that's what they are thinking of for offline mode.

Anyway that would also require some good internet.

Otherwise I don't see how you will enjoy those stunning visuals, maybe only on youtube 😉

You seem to be summising what an offline mode will be. If it is necessary to download large amounts of data for these views I don't think I want to go down that route. When you're cruising six miles up the current P3D v4 setup I have is fine for me.

[Noooch 1,084]

3 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

You seem to be summising what an offline mode will be. If it is necessary to download large amounts of data for these views I don't think I want to go down that route. When you're cruising six miles up the current P3D v4 setup I have is fine for me.

I don't know why you said I am summising that, I said maybe.

You keep saying your P3Dv4 is enough for you so I suggest you stick with it.

[andyjohnston.net 617]

Didn't they say it could run without being connected?  Am I mistaken?

[jcomm 5,939]

9 hours ago, andyjohnston.net said:

Didn't they say it could run without being connected?  Am I mistaken?

Yep, they did, which may render my conjecture totally useless :-)

[Christopher Low 5,354]

Yes, but the offline mode may be massively limited. What's the point of purchasing a next generation flight simulator if you are going to use last generation graphics?