4 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

hopefully Sim Update 6 will spell the end of major regressions.

That’s is a lovely day dream I may take up. Ha 

26 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Now that they've got the Xbox version out of the way and merged all the relevant branches, hopefully Sim Update 6 will spell the end of major regressions.

 No improvement expected but a least, hopefully, no regression or at least no major regression ? Hopefully indeed. This is the only conclusion that I also draw from this interview. 

What Fuentes says is, roughly speaking (correct me if I am wrong),  they had to fit everything in the S box, knowing that the code for the PC and boxes is the same. In a nutshell, SU5 is a derivative product of the S. And he enjoys himself  explaining how they trimmed here and there and cut and trimmed and cut and trimmed etc. etc.   The guy is likeable (and this is why MS chose him for the interview,  make no mistake about that) what he says is not.  He has a pure technical vision to adapt the sim to the lowest common hardware denominator.  

As the great Bruce sings "Still at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe". Never been so true for the MFS adventure.

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

4 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

No improvement expected but a least, hopefully, no regression or at least no major regression ? Hopefully indeed.

Sim Update 5 was a special case. We did not get any patch notes because the team were working on that update for several months (which means it would take days or even weeks to assemble a list of of what changed), and several branches got merged. This also resulted in a few minor, cosmetic fixes from Sim Update 4 getting reverted and old bugs (like the installation manager issues and the USB freezing) making their comeback.

They said several months ago in a Q&A that they had an exorbitant amount of active branches that they needed to cut down, so this was probably it. It's the only reason I feel we should give them time to iron out these regressions, and I expect Sim Update 6 and future patches to aggressively tackle them.

4 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

In a nutshell, SU5 is a derivative product of the S. And he enjoys himself  explaining how they trimmed here and there and cut and trimmed and cut and trimmed etc. etc.

In this interview he talked more about the stuff that you don't see or optimisations that have a near-invisible impact (like the new object LOD system which needs four LODs to properly work, the new art/audio formats and compression, changing allocations, unifying computations etc.), but this is essentially correct since both PC and console use the same build.

However I don't think this means it can't be made more scalable in the future. For example we're getting a tree draw distance slider in 2021, which the Xbox is definitely not getting. Or ray-tracing, which they plan to utilise for lighting, shadows and reflections. There is not a whole lot that can be done on consoles, but on PC there is a lot more hardware headroom. They just need to use it, which means giving users the option to boost the LOD distances and reduce the amount of culling if their system can take it. But we don't know much about these plans yet, and I hope they will address these concerns in the next Q&A (and of course, expect them to deliver).

Edited August 2, 20214 yr by ChaoticBeauty

12 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

(and this is why MS chose him for the interview,  make no mistake about that

Umm, or the reason that he's their tech director? We have seen him before. He's not some new face they brought out. He focused on what was cut to fit everything onto the Xbox because that's what the interview is about. 

If they were only interested in PR, only Jorg would ever speak.

13 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

There is not a whole lot that can be done on consoles, but on PC there is a lot more hardware headroom. They just need to use it  /.../ But we don't know much about these plans yet

Will they or is Microsoft’s philosophy to have an homogenized product over the platforms ? Not clear in what I’ve read so far but Fuentes doesn’t fill me with a lot of undue optimism in what he says he was directed to do.  He reminded me when, very long ago, I was living in India and when in business trip back to Paris I bought an enormous quantity of fancy stuff and had to stand on my suitcase to have a friend lock it 😁. Not everything was in good shape back in Delhi and some stuff had to be left in Paris. How to stuff a PC code in a S box.

Again thank you for your balanced explanations of an honest observer to the laymen we most of us are. Appreciated.
 

 

Edited August 3, 20214 yr by Dominique_K