36 minutes ago, domkle said:

  No caps here but an unreliable and slow connection (end of a ADSL2 line - download at an e 0.6 mb/s max). This is a point that I hope the MS team has in mind. Not everybody is connected with fiber. 

I think they are playing the long game here, tomorrow will be a 5g connected world

9 hours ago, nickhod said:

Pretty much any time you're seeing the exterior of a plane, it's ray traced. If you look closely you'll see the real reflections of the objects around it on the paintwork, not a sampled "reflection probe" best guess (like current sims use).

The sun light on the river also could be ray traced, but there are other ways of achieving the same effect.

The reality is that users without 2070/80 RTX cards wont see this (i.e. most of them for a few years).

Wait a minute, the idea behind streaming is they do all (or Big part of) the calculations with their supercomputers and we enjoy the result at 60fps am I wrong ?

1 minute ago, Noooch said:

I think they are playing the long game here, tomorrow will be a 5g connected world

Long game ? You don't mean the FSX game when a 2006 release could only be reasonably played on a 2009 machine without endless tweakings, don't you  😇 😁 ? 

May I add that being 70 I am more interested in the short term than in the long term 😉 ! I hope that  they will develop compression algorithms, buffers, whatever they fancy, that will work with my pitiful connection. At release.

 

Just now, Noooch said:

Wait a minute, the idea behind streaming is they do all (or Big part of) the calculations with their supercomputers and we enjoy the result at 60fps am I wrong ?

It's not rendered in the cloud in the way that Google Stadia is.

Bing does the satellite imagery, the photogrammetry and probably the worldwide autogen. Your PC renders what you see on screen. If you don't have card that does real time ray tracing, you wont be seeing the fancy reflections in the preview screenshots and videos.

(For an example of real-time ray tracing, look at the propeller cone of the TBM on the main FS homepage. You'll note that the propeller blades are actually reflected in it, which is only achievable if you ray trace the scene. A normal reflection map would just reflect the sky, ground and buildings).

How do you know it is not like stadia ?

13 minutes ago, nickhod said:

It's not rendered in the cloud in the way that Google Stadia is.

Bing does the satellite imagery, the photogrammetry and probably the worldwide autogen. Your PC renders what you see on screen. If you don't have card that does real time ray tracing, you wont be seeing the fancy reflections in the preview screenshots and videos.

(For an example of real-time ray tracing, look at the propeller cone of the TBM on the main FS homepage. You'll note that the propeller blades are actually reflected in it, which is only achievable if you ray trace the scene. A normal reflection map would just reflect the sky, ground and buildings).

How do you know it is not like stadia ?

19 minutes ago, Noooch said:

How do you know it is not like stadia ?

Firstly, they strongly hinted that it will not require a subscription.

Secondly, full game streaming is in its infancy. It being a normal game is the default assumption. Nothing in the previews so far suggests anything else.

Thirdly, it would practically rule out VR support.

@nickhod I agree they hinted "no subscription". But do you seriously think it will be no streaming at all?

Edited August 17, 20196 yr by Noooch

4 minutes ago, Noooch said:

@nickhod I agree they hinted "no subscription". But do you seriously think it will be no streaming at all?

Oh I'm sure it'll stream satellite imagery, photogrammetry and autogen, just not the full game.

Just now, nickhod said:

Oh I'm sure it'll stream satellite imagery, photogrammetry and autogen, just not the full game.

Still I don't understand why they would stop there and no go all the way via streaming like their competitor Google Stadia does?

The dealbreakers for me would be bad performance, no 3rd party addons and the most important, no more Azure AI support after some time. It's already concerning enough to stay online all the time for scenery generation and what if one day MS decides to shut down their cloud platform for flightsim because of whatever reason... that would render the sim useless wouldn't it?

30 minutes ago, Noooch said:

Still I don't understand why they would stop there and no go all the way via streaming like their competitor Google Stadia does?

The games on Stadia are also available as normal, installable games though.

In a flight sim you need super low latency response to contoller input, that's not going to happen with full game streaming, even with a reasonable ping.

It would also rule everyone but those with very good internet connections.

24 minutes ago, Noooch said:

Still I don't understand why they would stop there and no go all the way via streaming like their competitor Google Stadia does?

Because, like @nickhod said, game streaming is in its infancy.

Some have already mentioned the bandwidth requirements and Google have released the data you would need to stream different resolutions. Many people still don't have the required internet speed and would probably be excluded from streaming a full game even at 1080p. That would also reduce their number of customers. Same with the cap scenario. Adding to that is the fact you'll probably want to do other internet stuff, too, like streaming movies or download large files which would mean serious cuts in terms of internet usage for many people to make room for a compromise between streaming games and other internet usage. Now think about living together with other people who also want to stream things. Unless you have an exceptionally good internet connection it will quickly turn into a real hassle.

There would probably be other factors, too, but I would claim this is one of the most compelling reasons to only stream the scenery, if any streaming is involved. The streaming of full games, let alone a full sim with all kinds of addons, is a thing of the future but not really of the present, imo.

On the positive side , this may drive MS to be imaginative in finding technical ways to stream  hires sceneries to "bandwidth challenged" users.  I may add they would be welcome to address this issue in a future update. This is a central worry.

Lack of VR support.