nobody asked them about the AI Traffic? or ATC? Are there any plans to implement any AI ATC using Microsoft Cortana?

to put it in simple words 

i think Microsoft walked back in the room and said IM BACK B______S  and dropped the mic 😁😂this looks really niceee ...

8 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I've setup servers in a variety of environments and spec'd them out with their associated costs to operate (from in-house servers to AWS).  I know the monthly costs of providing data to end users since I was in charge of that since about 2005 until 2019 in my prior company.  To serve data to about 4000 concurrent nodes (users on at the same time which is not a lot) at reasonable levels of performance, cost my prior company about $2500/mo just for the servers (4 in total with 2-8 CPUs each) and bandwidth excluding (excluding maintenance, licensing, etc.). 

Microsoft will be serving much more data across the globe than my prior company, in orders of many magnitude more (I hope).  In fact, the last data point I got was about 300,000 servers Microsoft own and operate for XBOX Live alone.

As server loads increase so do costs.  Are you suggesting that unleashing 1 Million+ MFS users is not going impact XBOX Live servers and/or cost Microsoft any money to ensure they provide data at a sufficient performance level?  If so, how does that work?

Cheers, Rob.

good to know theres people like you aroud here in the past i worked for foxconn building HP and SISCO servers  .our customers  took us around a few buildings with entire floors full of the servers we built there was a time we went into an area where there was nothing but xbox used servers there was about 19000 in one floor that was a few years back . i figure now there has to be more than 300K 

1 hour ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I don't need everything in the first release come Nov 2020, just the basics so I can build airports and maybe...

November 2020? Have they announced the release date?

23 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

As server loads increase so do costs.  Are you suggesting that unleashing 1 Million+ MFS users is not going impact XBOX Live servers and/or cost Microsoft any money to ensure they provide data at a sufficient performance level?  If so, how does that work?

Well, like I said above, it could work as a peer-to-peer system where the bandwidth and server costs are basically offloaded onto the end user. MSFS high-end scenery as a BitTorrent.

Not that I think they're going there, but it's one way to serve this much data very inexpensively.

This is all so fantastic. I, for one, am delighted to see that our experience will again be shaped by the quality of a new platform. Since the slow death of FSX, add-on developers have come to regard themselves as the core of the hobby, a bit of the tail wagging the dog. But it has been my experience that even the "best" addons ultimately distort the experience of the platform, either burying its core processes under layers of tetchy code, or absorbing so much memory that, again, the core experience, simply flying, is gradually compromised.

MSFS2020 is what DTG had aimed at, an all-in vanilla simulator that makes no compromises. Our collective wow is evidence how the market niches occupied by both Lockheed and Laminar really constitute a fraction of the possibilities of what flight simulation can be as an entertainment experience in 2019/20. 

 

29 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

As server loads increase so do costs.  Are you suggesting that unleashing 1 Million+ MFS users is not going impact XBOX Live servers and/or cost Microsoft any money to ensure they provide data at a sufficient performance level?  If so, how does that work?

Cheers, Rob.

Go ask Google why its working for Stadia. Again, your example does not work because the company you worked for probably isn't operating anywhere near the level Google and MS does. They're not renting the servers, they own them.

57 minutes ago, Krakin said:

They're not renting the servers, they own them.

they lease servers amazon google MS not all are owned by them .by the way i did not google this . i actually  worked  building servers from scratch and also spent a few years dealing with leased setups for all the big players like MS .

2 hours ago, Paraffin said:

 peer-to-peer system where the bandwidth and server costs are basically offloaded onto the end user. MSFS high-end scenery as a BitTorrent.

 

It might not work , because p2p is basically data send / recv from the client , so if the client ain't connected then there is no data xfer. from what  i feel this is purely cdn based.

They might be renting the servers or they are probably owning them, both costly , they will probably be connected in HA / Load balance / RAID and also probably not containing normal xbox data or whatever that is , because the system would  need amazing resources  , azure servers might  be located all over the world  depending on the users geolocation the client will connect to that local server.  It just does not make sense that me sitting in India - Mumbai will get that high bandwidth data from the US oh heck i would rather not use it then. Though the current internet bandwidth has got way faster.

if MS is adding new data everytime time than these servers are syncing with the main servers for data update like scenery / AI etc.. .  I also feel some servers would be dedicated to stuff like Weather generation from METAR / rendering / number crunching etc.. 

All companies make a loss that's nothing new. The way the visuals are looking  simply does not look like a loss making product. I just feel developers like orbx might suffer with this new sim simply because the footage shows just amazing stuff and makes me feel scenery addons are not required , well that's just a thought.

Hey MS give me your server orders i will install linux and Pfsense 😀 

Edited October 1, 20196 yr by HumptyDumpty

1 hour ago, flyingcarpet89 said:

November 2020? Have they announced the release date?

Indeed - you've mentioned this a couple of times in this thread Rob, is November 2020 published as a release date anywhere?

Alpha is due October 2019 I believe

2 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

As server loads increase so do costs.  Are you suggesting that unleashing 1 Million+ MFS users is not going impact XBOX Live servers and/or cost Microsoft any money to ensure they provide data at a sufficient performance level?  If so, how does that work?

1 million FS users at, let's guess $60 per user - even if you halve that to deduct development costs, $30 million provides a significant amount of additional server infrastructure

Microsoft are already serving Bing through Azure, and anyone who works in cloud knows that it's "elasticity" is it's main selling point - you assign more resource as demand increases

Bandwidth would be a potentially more complex issue

10 hours ago, Wobbie said:

Reading with interest with regard to backward compatibility, as one of the devs said, the new aircraft will have 1000 'contact' areas per surface compared to FSX planes having 1 per plane.. 

Imagine how the FSX planes Wil compare with stalls, ground effect, and so on. 

No, a new sim, for me, has no place for older planes that are not optimized for it. 

You make a good point and I agree with you, I would prefer the newer planes too. 

I wonder if the new SDK will account for the inadequacies of older planes and give them the contact points and other characteristics needed so they will/can be optimized.

If the SDK does not do this, I suppose it will be up to the developers and users, whether it will be worth the task of updating or going fresh.

It may just be a matter of wait time for fresh add-ons; will the community wish to wait for their favored aircraft or at least have a less than optimized model in the mean time. Cost will be a factor too.  

20 minutes ago, EGLD said:

Microsoft are already serving Bing through Azure, and anyone who works in cloud knows that it's "elasticity" is it's main selling point - you assign more resource as demand increases

Bandwidth would be a potentially more complex issue 

Presumably the data will be replicated to Azure data centres throughout the world... so that helps mitigate any compute or bandwidth issues.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/

 

Streaming will be through your nearest Azure server farm and the load increases then more severs kick in, there is a good YouTube Video showing how they have now developed the server farms that can be upgraded. 

4 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Interesting, good news ... no doubt MFS is visually stunning and from the technical tid-bits of information I got from the developer interviews with Asobo is the cloud renders the world as pixels (not really geometry) which moves and the aircraft (view point) is a stationary point in that virtual space.  Take note of the specifics on "view distances" ... the developer said a real horizon, that's significant .. given how Asobo are implementing this virtual world it would make perfect sense there is NO LOD in terms of scenery (provide the pixel data can stream fast enough).

That's not what's going on, per say, but as in many of the videos that came out today, a lot of the reviewers simply said "they said a lot of technical stuff" 🙂 It is tough for the Asobo developers to explain how this works to a flight simulator crowd who is not necessarily familiar with current 3D world generation techniques.

Note: I am not a developer on this game.  However, there are LODs, and the world is not pixels as you are thinking, it is triangles as you are familiar with.  I say this as having experience with engines of this scale, but certainly not this impressive.

When they said they stream "pixels", it's because the reports are asking them if they are basically streaming high quality orthos out to 600 KM which they are obviously not.  But there isn't really a good way to explain to a non-tech reporter exactly what structures are going over the wire.