August 29th, 2019 [Update]

[Wobbie 938]

Just a though, a simple analogy would be that simple flight simulator in Google Earth...(or not?) That scenery is live streaming

[pmb 5,138]

50 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Just a though, a simple analogy would be that simple flight simulator in Google Earth...(or not?) That scenery is live streaming

You may consider Flyinside Fligthsimulator as well, which is based on real-time streaming scenery since a couple of months ago. Quality of the streamed scenery (obviously caused by suboptimum source imagery) is far from the MS previews (but, well, this is live-streaming contrary to just images/videos we have from MS so far). Anyway, streaming as such does work over my 100 MBit/s DSL connection.

Kind regards, Michael

[Paraffin 2,197]

55 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Just a though, a simple analogy would be that simple flight simulator in Google Earth...(or not?) That scenery is live streaming

Yeah, and it's not smooth at my connection speed when the scenery is complex enough. 

I was looking at downtown Osaka in Google Earth recently. Not in the GE flight sim, just zooming in and tilting down to see the 3D view. Google has good (photogrammetry?) detail on 3D buildings, but it took almost a full minute to load all the facades. Many of the buildings were just ugly gray, low polygon count shapes until the data streamed in.

Maybe that could be mitigated with progressive loading if I was flying a plane into the area instead of zooming in with Google Earth to a fixed view, but it would have to be done invisibly. Count me skeptical until I see it working, at least on low speed connections like mine.

[F737MAX 5,776]

3 hours ago, Paraffin said:

If that method was used, you're still going to need humongous hard drive space and possibly days to pre-load the scenery if you're on a slow connection.

I have just two of the Orbx TE scenery addons on my system. TE Great Britain South takes up around 124 GB of space, and TE Washington State takes up around 206 GB of space. On my relatively slow connection, both were overnight downloads. And the Orbx TE scenery may not be as data-intensive as the scenery shown in the MSFS trailer.

 

2 hours ago, dave2013 said:

Here's a calculation I did to estimate how much data would need to be loaded:

Photoscenery for Washington State = 206GB (based on the disk space that ORBX TE Washington uses)

Scenery for a 30 mile radius around your location: app. 8-10GB

Time to download scenery based on 50MB/sec speed: almost 30 minutes.

Quick interjection here. You are both quoting disk space usage for TrueEarth in XP.
P3D with its (admittedly archaic) compression system has a much smaller footprint on the drive at 57GB for TE GB South.

Also, the quoted time taken to download scenery doesn't seem right.

Quick math(s) based on P3D size: π * (30 mi.)^2 gives a 2,827.43 sq. mi.
TE GB South is 42,000 sq. mi. / 57 GB = 736.84 sq. mi. per GB.
2,827.43 / 736.84 = 3.83 GB for the 30 mile radius.
At a speed of 50 MB/sec, you get (50*60) = 3,000 MB or 3 GB per min.
3.83 GB / 3 GB per min = 1 min 16 sec. download time for the 30 mile radius.
Max ground speed before buffering = 1,421 mph

Based on XP size: π * (30 mi.)^2 gives a 2,827.43 sq. mi.
TE GB South is 42,000 sq. mi. / 127 GB = 330.71 sq. mi. per GB.
2,827.43 / 330.71 = 8.69 GB for the 30 mile radius.
At a speed of 50 MB/sec, you get (50*60) = 3,000 MB or 3 GB per min.
8.69 GB / 3 GB per min = 2 mins 54 sec. download time for the 30 mile radius.
Max ground speed before buffering = 621 mph

Both these values are well within normal airliner speeds, the trouble would come from using fast jets or if the same data requirement for high altitude (unlikely, we see different LOD being used in all the popular sims).
Biggest issue will be; "can I maintain 50MB/s download speeds?"
 

Edited September 3, 2019 by F737NG
I forgot about Mbps to MB conversion

[Wobbie 938]

That speed, here in South Africa, equates to about $100.00!

Our average speed is about 10Mbits, and is about $63 per month

Edited September 3, 2019 by Wobbie

[bonchie 2,305]

11 hours ago, domkle said:

I do not know whether what Matthew proposes is possible or not but one thing is sure, MS’d be welcome to find a solution for those with a poor connection without having them to run a dumbed down version of the sim.

This is IMO a major issue.

What do you want them to do?

In some cases, you can't have your cake and eat it too. What they are showing us simply isn't possible to be localized on a HD. Even one, smaller country could be over 1TB. 

No game developer, even if it's a flight sim, can release a game where a tiny portion of the overall game world takes up that kind of HD space. 

The only solution here is 1) Don't give us a next gen sim or 2) have a dumbed down, land class mode for those without good internet connections. 

The other factor is that streaming orthos may not be nearly as intensive as streaming an entire scene with everything being done on the cloud. There's no reason everything else can't be localized. Streaming highly compressed ortho files surely requires less internet connection speed than a 4K movie. 

Edited September 3, 2019 by bonchie

[Wobbie 938]

It seems that scenery will probably be streamed, and not actually downloaded, thus not filling hard drives, with no read/write lag.

You can stream a movie without download, as an example! (or like any 3D online game)

[Paraffin 2,197]

 

13 minutes ago, F737NG said:

Biggest issue will be; "can I maintain 50MB/s download speeds?"

Well let's see, my connection taps out at 7 Megabits per second. And that's if my wife isn't watching something on Netflix. 

I can upgrade -- I know there's an option, but I'm not sure it goes up to 50 Mbps and I'm not sure I'd want to pay for it. I haven't needed to upgrade the speed yet, because it works fine for what we do at home. There's no monthly cap, which is good, but the options are still somewhat limited.

 

1 minute ago, Wobbie said:

It seems that scenery will probably be streamed, and not actually downloaded, thus not filling hard drives, with no read/write lag.

You can stream a movie without download, as an example! (or like any 3D online game)

Netflix works fine here at home with our 7 Mbps connection at HD resolution *if* nobody else is downloading big files or playing an online game at the same time.

You need 25 Mbps for 4k Netflix, and the new MSFS is supporting 4k.

I'd be happy with HD resolution for MSFS because I'm running that right now (technically 1920x1200) for games and flight sims. So that might be enough if the new MSFS is streaming similar amounts of data to Netflix. That is, if nobody else in the house is using the connection, which will be the case for many of us. 

[DadJokeCinema 145]

The question is also - what is being streamed? For example, when you are flying over Google Earth, it's streaming down satellite images with LOD determined by zoom and (I believe) connection speed in addition to whatever else. Is it reasonable to guess that MSFS will be streaming down landmass, vector data, and photogammetry data, while constructing the underlying texture layers from installed tilesets like FSX did?

[bonchie 2,305]

9 minutes ago, NotASenator said:

Is it reasonable to guess that MSFS will be streaming down landmass, vector data, and photogammetry data, while constructing the underlying texture layers from installed tilesets like FSX did?

That doesn't look like what it's going to be. Every single picture/video we've seen, from places all over the world, including very remote places where they wouldn't be hand annotating things, showed orthos underneath the scenery. 

If there's a texture tileset for the ground like FSX, it's only going to be used in places with little to no satellite data or as a backup when a user can't stream ortho data. 

That's my best supposition right now. Now, perhaps they've got some top secret compression technology that's going to blow our minds, but at this point, streaming orthos appears to be the only solution. 

[DadJokeCinema 145]

1 minute ago, bonchie said:

That doesn't look like what it's going to be. Every single picture/video we've seen, from places all over the world, including very remote places where they wouldn't be hand annotating things, showed orthos underneath the scenery. 

If there's a texture tileset for the ground like FSX, it's only going to be used in places with little to no satellite data or as a backup when a user can't stream ortho data. 

That's my best supposition right now. Now, perhaps they've got some top secret compression technology that's going to blow our minds, but at this point, streaming orthos appears to be the only solution. 

Okay thanks. I hadn't analyzed the screenshots that closely I guess.

[dave2013 1,155]

On 9/3/2019 at 2:27 PM, F737NG said:

 

Quick interjection here. You are both quoting disk space usage for TrueEarth in XP.
P3D with its (admittedly archaic) compression system has a much smaller footprint on the drive at 57GB for TE GB South.

 

Ah, thanks for pointing out the Xplane disk space being much larger.  That makes a significant difference, although the download time would still be about 8 minutes.

My download calculation was based on a 50 Megabit download speed, not Megabytes.  Sorry, I used the wrong abbreviation.

Dave

[F737MAX 5,776]

1 hour ago, dave2013 said:

Ah, thanks for pointing out the Xplane disk space being much larger.  That makes a significant difference, although the download time would still be about 8 minutes.

My download calculation was based on a 50 Megabit download speed, not Megabytes.  Sorry, I used the wrong abbreviation.

Yup, you had it about right - that's why I crossed out my calcs. It's downloading at 50 Mbps, not MB [massive note to self].

As being discussed in this thread, I (and quite a few others over the past couple of months) believe that instead of downloading and being limited by read/write speeds of user's PC / console hardware, we may actually see at least some imagery streamed.

Microsoft Project xCloud goes up against Google Stadia with both promising the streaming of a vast library of games to any device (PC, laptop, console, TV, tablet, smartphone, [watch?]). Microsoft has opened another 30 new Azure sites worldwide in preparation for next month's expected launch of their new cloud gaming service.
It would be bizarre if they didn't leverage this new capability. It would also kill photo scenery in MSFS stone-dead if anyone had to wait ~10 minutes to download just a paltry 30-mile radius of ground textures.

It might be on 26th we finally find out what is coming our way.
 

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

Dynamic loading in FSX is a disaster in that it loads huge chunks of land at once if I recall correctly. That’s why it was heavy metal flyers crossing continents with add-on scenery who hit the 4GB ram limit first. In a cub this was never an issue.

Dynamic loading has dramatically improved since FSX. You don’t need to load San Diego at high resolution if you’re in LA. If you’re at high altitudes it needs less resolution but a broader horizon. Low and slow aircraft tend to need higher resolution but less horizon. Really there’s only so many paths you can take from a single location so the sim will target those paths for buffering. Low flying military jets would be a disaster though as they would need to load high-detail quickly.

People who aren’t familiar with “open-world” games might want to see how they handle buffering. These games simulate an entire city, for example, down to small 3D objects like guns, but clearly they only load small portions of the city at once.

As for file sizes, OrthoXP (which is basically a community project) just rams pure image files into the sim. I don’t think MS is going to be as clumsy.

In any case MS will have to innovate, but these are the people who write DirectX.

 

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by carbonbasedlifeform

[dave2013 1,155]

15 hours ago, F737NG said:

Yup, you had it about right - that's why I crossed out my calcs. It's downloading at 50 Mbps, not MB [massive note to self].

As being discussed in this thread, I (and quite a few others over the past couple of months) believe that instead of downloading and being limited by read/write speeds of user's PC / console hardware, we may actually see at least some imagery streamed.

Microsoft Project xCloud goes up against Google Stadia with both promising the streaming of a vast library of games to any device (PC, laptop, console, TV, tablet, smartphone, [watch?]). Microsoft has opened another 30 new Azure sites worldwide in preparation for next month's expected launch of their new cloud gaming service.
It would be bizarre if they didn't leverage this new capability. It would also kill photo scenery in MSFS stone-dead if anyone had to wait ~10 minutes to download just a paltry 30-mile radius of ground textures.

It might be on 26th we finally find out what is coming our way.
 

I actually do think that the scenery data will be streamed.  The question will be how much bandwidth one needs.  Plus, the streaming rate will need to increase the faster one's velocity.  When a flight is started, especially in mid-flight, there will still need to be an initial loading of scenery within a certain radius of the aircraft's location, which will take some time.  A possible solution to this is that when the user saves a flight, some scenery data will be stored for that flight so that startup will be faster, sort of a scenery cache.

Hopefully we'll know soon how MS is going to implement this.

Dave