Interesting article. May serve as a clue on how things would work on the MSFS2020.

https://infiniteflight.com/blog/how-infinite-flight-streams-data/

Edited September 5, 20196 yr by ca_metal

That part is interesting to calm down people afraid they would need a really good connection for the scenery streaming feature:

Quote

Caching

Since we have users connecting from all over the world, it is essential that requesting a tile is fast regardless of where they are. Our tiles are in a server cluster (multiple servers that share the load) located in the US, but are cached all over the world by using a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

CDN traffic

When a tile is requested, that request first goes to a CDN server that is physically close to you. If it is the first time this CDN server sees this exact request, it will download the tile from our server cluster in the US, cache it locally and send you the tile. If the tile was requested recently by someone else in your region using Infinite Flight, then the tile is already in the cache and will be sent to you right away, without having to request it from our servers. Depending on your physical location, a tile request could take a few hundreds milliseconds to complete if it is not cached. If the CDN server closest to you already has a copy of the tile, that same request usually completes in less than 10 milliseconds.

Our CDN provider has a network of 150+ servers located all around the world, ensuring that scenery streaming is fast and reliable no matter where you are using Infinite Flight from. It's important to note that we also cache the scenery tiles locally on your device. The local cache has a maximum size of 512MB at the moment, and will automatically delete tiles that haven't been used in a long time when you reach that limit.

At the time of this post being published, our CDN saw more than 2 billion requests and delivered more than 70 TB of data in one month. That's 64.5 million requests per day, 2.6 million requests per hour, 44,800 requests per minute, and 746 requests per second. Roughly! We are always looking for ways to deliver higher quality and more content, while minimizing the requests required to the servers.

 

Edited September 5, 20196 yr by ca_metal

2 hours ago, ca_metal said:

MSFS2020

What is this?

3 hours ago, ca_metal said:

Interesting article. May serve as a clue on how things would work on the MSFS2020.

https://infiniteflight.com/blog/how-infinite-flight-streams-data/

Thanks for the info and that does provide a good insite of how it could work. As with all new things it does also create more questions. I went over and had a look at that infinite flight website and I must say that the blurred scenery especially at low altitude is a real cause for concern. It may be possible to improve on that with MS working on the problem. Only time will tell but for low and slow and I would imagine tubliners as well that is a show stopper. LOL I had to look away from the screen to get my eyes to focus. Not looking for a fight just hope someone knows of a solution.

40 minutes ago, shivers9 said:

Thanks for the info and that does provide a good insite of how it could work. As with all new things it does also create more questions. I went over and had a look at that infinite flight website and I must say that the blurred scenery especially at low altitude is a real cause for concern. It may be possible to improve on that with MS working on the problem. Only time will tell but for low and slow and I would imagine tubliners as well that is a show stopper. LOL I had to look away from the screen to get my eyes to focus. Not looking for a fight just hope someone knows of a solution.

My point was just to show which techniques can be used to stream orthoimagery to the sim. The most important points in my view are: cache and servers streaming all around the world. Microsoft is a lot bigger than Infinite Flight developer, so I would expect things to work even better.

From the screenshot of their last dev update, I would say blurriness isn't something noticeable on the MS Simulator:


This seems good enought to me and it is a close to the ground shot.

3 hours ago, ca_metal said:

This seems good enought to me and it is a close to the ground shot.

I agree that shot looks pretty good when viewed in full screen.

Thanks for sharing this.

However, this still doesn't solve the issue of low bandwidth.  The CDN server could be located right down the street with all the data cached on that server ready for instant upload, but you will still be limited by your internet connection speed.

Dave

50 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

The CDN server could be located right down the street with all the data cached on that server ready for instant upload, but you will still be limited by your internet connection speed.

If your internet is that bad you probably shouldn't be simming lol

 

Infinite Flight does not even have 3D buildings. Their satellite imagery is quite low resolution.

17 minutes ago, Krakin said:

If your internet is that bad you probably shouldn't be simming lol

I've been flying flight sims on a PC for 30+ years, and I can still fly fine on XP11 with a 7 Mbps connection. It doesn't stop me downloading large files like Orbx TE scenery, it just takes a long time. It doesn't stop me from playing any game I want to download on Steam, including the latest AAA games.

So now suddenly, I "shouldn't be simming" because my connection is slow?!!

If that's where MS is going with this, it's going to be a game for the Xbox crowd, and not something a large percentage of the traditional audience of flight sim fans will be flying.

ETA: I'm not assuming that's the case. But it's ridiculous to assume that a modern flight sim can't reach the largest possible audience regardless of their Internet connection speed. Whether that requires a very fast connection to get the most out of the sim, is something we don't know yet.

Edited September 6, 20196 yr by Paraffin

3 hours ago, dave2013 said:

Thanks for sharing this.

However, this still doesn't solve the issue of low bandwidth.  The CDN server could be located right down the street with all the data cached on that server ready for instant upload, but you will still be limited by your internet connection speed.

Dave

Precisely. I do not doubt a minute that MS will have an adequate network of servers to feed the users with a low lag.

But it won’t help people living at more than 3 km from an exchange and connected to it with a twisted pair on ADSL2.

For them, they need to minimize the quantity of data streamed (if any).

Thanks for the link, it is interesting indeed and i have to say that even tho it's an app for mobile phones, you'll find their tutorials and videos to be quite informative and for some features to be superior to certain pc sim offerings too.

Let's hope there will be a way to manually download the scenery offline and keep it in storage so you don't have to stream it every time.

Edited September 6, 20196 yr by france89

11 hours ago, Lawy said:

MFS2020

What is this?

It's just a thumbsuck name. among others, that the community have taken upon themselves, in their wisdom, have given, to what Microsoft has officially named their new flight sim called Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Other names you might see are FS2020, FS20, MFS20 & other 'odd' madeup names. 

7 hours ago, Krakin said:

If your internet is that bad you probably shouldn't be simming lol

Newsflash, but a lot of the USA still has very slow internet speeds.  It's not the fault of the people who live there, it's simply due to bad infrastructure.  I have 10Mbit DSL (it actually measures 7Mbit) and I literally have no other options to get faster internet.  I do not have access to cable, and satellite internet is unreliable in my area.  Trust me, I'd love to have faster internet but at this time it's just not available to me.

I think a good enough benchmark should be if you can scroll around google or bing maps without much or any buffering you should be relatively fine. Just a speculative guess.