Regarding Your Feedback + Upcoming Hotfix

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

40 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

I would hope that folks know that I wouldn't just be going around and lying to the community.

The focus was delivering a smooth sim, honestly. That required some engineering and engine changes, as these things always do. The intention was to give more headroom for more, added detail. Obviously, not everyone is happy, and more sliders are coming. If you want to dial offscreen terrain caching up, soon you'll be able to. If the intention was truly to soak up that XBox cash and ride off into the sunset, someone definitely forgot to tell the team to do the whole ride off into the sunset part. 🙂

-Matt

...until M.S. does just that...as they did to the FSX DEV gang....what was the name of that Studio?  The one that was disbanded by the then C.E.O. of M.S.?   

[DylanM 1,069]

17 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Sure, and I understand that. At the same time, while I did see some extra load-in, I was also able to crank up the settings in other ways and get more detail than I could get before, personally, and that felt like it would be on average a win for everyone. And definitely some people in flighting did sound the alarm, but in general it's hard to tell how beta tester feedback will translate, because beta testers are a self-selected segment, and so you tend to get a big bias, even if the pool is really large.

Nonetheless, of course, nobody is ignoring the lessons that can be taken away from this, from the dev end.

-Matt

Much appreciate the honesty and transparency, Matt. And since you chat directly with the team, please tell them they're still rockstars for sticking with this crazy flightsim thing... 😉

I was one of the unlucky ones with install, control and graphic quality issues, and would have been glad to put any troubleshooting / tweaking on hold if the team were already on it. Perhaps in future, a simple nod / acknowledgement of those issues through more extensive release notes would take the wind out of a lot of speculation (particularly if they were already known during the testing phase, and were planned to be fixed anyway). 

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

@Slides
Are you a game engine expert, just curious. 
Though true it is like saying all movies are remastered, sure but not equally.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[abrams_tank 7,470]

7 minutes ago, MultiMediaWill said:

That's how this game engine works as of July 27th 2021. Before that we had something much better in my opinion. Glad the sliders are on the way at least.

Nope.  For me, Sim Update 5 is a huge improvement.  I get much better FPS and it's much more smoother, at the cost of culling and pop-ins, but personally, I don't mind the way that Asobo implemented the culling and pop-ins.  What Asobo did with the culling and pop-ins is perfect for my usage of MSFS, and my system specs (my computer is not that good).

So everyone's opinion is different.  You dislike Sim Update 5, while I love it. Anyways, a slider will fix this so everyone can set the slider to whatever they want.

Edited August 5, 2021 by abrams_tank

[MultiMediaWill 14]

4 minutes ago, Slides said:

All game engines use culling to some level. You wiring optimization in quotes won't change the fact what this is.

I understand that. The point you're missing is that whatever they changed in Sim Update 5, made the culling way too aggressive. In prior updates, the scenery may have culled, but it was likely hundreds of miles out in the distance in a way that the user never noticed. Now, it's all I see when I change views which bothers me to the point where I don't really want to fly anymore. So for me and my setup, their 'optimization' was a big downgrade. 

Edited August 5, 2021 by MultiMediaWill

[Slides 1,552]

1 minute ago, Alpine Scenery said:

@Slides
Are you a game engine expert, just curious. Though true it is like saying all movies are remastered, sure but not equally.

Not an expert but educated enough on the topic to be able to have an understanding what they did here at a high level.

[urthgental 181]

2 minutes ago, Sesquashtoo said:

...until M.S. does just that...as they did to the FSX DEV gang....what was the name of that Studio?  The one that was disbanded by the then C.E.O. of M.S.?   

It least the motivation of your comments are now understood…

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

I wouldn't know everything they did just by a single description, only way of knowing is to see the code. Game engines really are quite complex beasts, and I could just make educated guesses based on what I saw. I have never personally coded a game engine, but I've worked with the end-result.

For instance, let's take culling, here are just a few other types of culling:
Shaft Culling, Horizon Culling, Culling Switching, Culling Blending, etc...

-- I think there are about 30 more types of culling

 The differences weren't mind-blowing so i can see how it got through, rather it was the cumulative difference of everything that seemed to stack up in the end.

 

Edited August 5, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[MattNischan 3,840]

18 minutes ago, Sesquashtoo said:

You'd be called upon the corporate matt, or even be fired....for that negligence.

I can assure you, over the 2 decades in the business, that if you've never shipped software to production with bugs, you've never shipped software. 🙂

Look, I'm not saying bugs are acceptable or great or that people should just look at them and be happy, but the calls that folks would be readily terminated for failing to catch a bug or for coding a bug are just unrealistic and silly. Software is just way too complex for that. Truly, there isn't a single engineering discipline that doesn't have bugs in production, every day. Every car I've owned has had design flaws. Every house small (and sometimes large) construction errors. Phone hardware with occasional glitches. Servers with funky backplanes. Audio gear with quirks 40 years old. Guitars with imperfect truss rod designs. All with one thing in common, they were designed and constructed by human beings.

If I fired every developer who had a bug sneak into production on one of my teams, or every QA who failed to catch one, I would have easily fired every one of the developers and QAs I've ever worked with, and fired myself. I'd be on a lonely island, with no technology, creating yet more bugs in the rain catcher system I made with coconuts and banana leaves.

-Matt

[Maxis 1,886]

Yeah ... this is getting a bit much on both sides. Opinions are entrenched (mine included) and short of adding people to the ignore list (which i have had to do twice today alone. There is no new information being discussed.

Once again Thanks Chaotic and Matt for your efforts. Hopefully the oncoming hotfix addresses my issues with the sim. 

There are a few aspects that the Publisher and the Developer need to work on . Matt you said they are learning from this experience.. I sincerely hope so and despite the understandably low morale at this stage i hope they can figure out how best to move on and push the sim forward not only for someone using a lower end PC but also for users like myself who spent quite a sum of funds to purpose build a pc to enable them to run full stock ultra at launch and even upgraded their pc a second time in hopes of having their cake and eat it as well.

I also acknowledge and respect the fact that for MS to make money and demonstrate the capabilities of Azure it had to be on Xbox. However, Promises about graphics were made and i think MS needed to be a bit more transparent about what was going to happen if they were planning to make substantial changes to the engine without putting in those sliders at the same time. So hopefully,, someone in the Communications or Marketing department can take notes.

Yes this community is full of know it all's sticklers, blind boosters and very vocal people who put a lot of emotion into their displeasure when something doesn't go the way it was expected to..I know i myself can get very blunt and matter of fact when irritated and  considering I've had to put @kaosfere on my ignore list temporarily (Hopefully no hard feelings Kaos) Thank you for your work) last year speaks volumes about how badly communication can get between two people when the correct tone isn't used but we are all here to have this sim succeed in their own way and use case scenarios. 

I've dealt with my own frustrations with the sim and its not so stellar updates by my simply not using it and finding other things to do until it gets fixed. I then read the forums for info..

So Info given and appreciated. See yall when the Hotfix drops. 

Cheers

 

 

Edited August 5, 2021 by Maxis

[Bobsk8 12,847]

34 minutes ago, MultiMediaWill said:

That's where I believe that you're wrong. Asobo 'optimized' memory by reducing the amount of scenery stored in RAM when not viewing it directly with the camera. Therefore, when I quickly change my view (to see down the wing for example), the scenery now has to load in for the new view. So in this case, their 'optimizations' certainly changed what we see. 

From the time I have flown sims, decades ago, almost everyone understood that if you moved the sliders to the left, you FPS increased. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. So in reducing what we see on the screen in SU5, we get more FPS and less memory usage. What is ground breaking about that? I see the target of 6GB of memory used, why did they pick that amount, why not 10, or 8 GBs? Could it possibly be that this is what is available  in an X box? Just trying to figure out what happened here causing the roll back of quality in the images we are seeing. So many are saying this has nothing to do with X box, but it sure smells like  it does.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Bobsk8

[ADamiani 470]

19 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

A game LOD system is a super complex beast, ..............

However, it's clear that a part of the community disagrees, and the team listens to that. And that's why you'll see more options going forward.

-Matt

The best possible solution: in this way we all can choose what we prefer. 

A.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

10 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

From the time I have flown sims, decades ago, almost everyone understood that if you moved the sliders to the left, you FPS increased. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. So in reducing what we see on the screen in SU5, we get more FPS and less memory usage. What is ground breaking about that? I see the target of 6GB of memory used, why did they pick that amount, why not 10, or 8 GBs? Could it possibly be that this is what is available  in an X box? Just trying to figure out what happened here causing the roll back of quality in the images we are seeing. So many are saying this has nothing to do with X box, but it sure smells like  it does.

You bring up a very good point...

Some of the issue is in the end is no matter how much post-processing you do, you are limited by the source imagery, in this case the aerial imagery. Certain engines like the one used in Death Stranding had somewhat of a revolutionary terrain system in that it could almost appear infinitely high-res, but they also started with incredibly high res textures.

The aerial imagery and the # of objects on the screen is a post-processing nightmare, it's always been tough to make look better. Asobo has an overlay blend texture on top of the aerial textures, this can be good and bad, but if you suddenly make one texture too high-res, I'm assuming you create artifacts or unnatural blending. Then the aerial imagery is compressed, so it goes through compression for bandwidth reasons I assume, this causes some loss. Compression by itself isn't too bad, but post-processing it without degrading is trickier than uncompressed.

So I'm aware of what they are dealing with, i wouldn't want to be in their shoes personally, aerial imagery is really tough to work with.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[HiFlyer 9,372]

Now, I have a 2080ti (11GB) card and in normal usage I often saw MSFS hovering right at the edge of using every bit of it.

It made me wonder about ram and if some stuttering was caused by paging, especially as I heard that 3090 users were seeing the sim nab 20GB of Vram or more.

I had also heard that Dx12 tended to use more ram.

Coupled together, I was actually happy with the lower ram usage, and suspected that it was at least part of the explanation for the increased FPS.

I also thought it was a downpayment on the eventual introduction of DX12

The Xbox theories....... Eh.

[jarmstro 2,405]

11 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

I can assure you, over the 2 decades in the business, that if you've never shipped software to production with bugs, you've never shipped software. 🙂

Look, I'm not saying bugs are acceptable or great or that people should just look at them and be happy, but the calls that folks would be readily terminated for failing to catch a bug or for coding a bug are just unrealistic and silly. Software is just way too complex for that. Truly, there isn't a single engineering discipline that doesn't have bugs in production, every day. Every car I've owned has had design flaws. Every house small (and sometimes large) construction errors. Phone hardware with occasional glitches. Servers with funky backplanes. Audio gear with quirks 40 years old. Guitars with imperfect truss rod designs. All with one thing in common, they were designed and constructed by human beings.

If I fired every developer who had a bug sneak into production on one of my teams, or every QA who failed to catch one, I would have easily fired every one of the developers and QAs I've ever worked with, and fired myself. I'd be on a lonely island, with no technology, creating yet more bugs in the rain catcher system I made with coconuts and banana leaves.

-Matt

Of course no one should be fired or terminated! It's just a pc program. But are you seriously suggesting that Asobo didn't notice the graphical degradation and the bugs before SU5 was released? I find that very hard to believe to be honest.