By now everyone knows that the online MSFS online environment is one not totally controllable by Microsoft so some of use may suffer especially when loading the Sim.

My recommendation is if it takes a long time to load the sim when looking for updates is to pull your internet OR go ofline in the config settings before you shutdown MSFS.

The benefit is that MSFS will load almost instantly and once you are into the main screen you can once again turn the online mode to on.

I realize that this is a PIA for some of us but we only want to get the sim up and running.

sp

 

I find it a little depressing that at some point in the future many games will simply be completely unplayable as the online services that allow them to run are discontinued. In the future it might be possible to still play FS9, FSX, etc... while FS2020 will be unplayable.

Edited November 23, 20223 yr by s0cks

Yeah but that's MSFS in its core - without online functionality terrain would look worse than FSX.

We have the whole world in incredible detail. Not possible to save this local. So no, without online services, you will never play MSFS. Imagine you would "download" Google Earth with all data...

6 hours ago, s0cks said:

I find it a little depressing that at some point in the future many games will simply be completely unplayable as the online services that allow them to run are discontinued. In the future it might be possible to still play FS9, FSX, etc... while FS2020 will be unplayable.

This. The online dependency is just bad.

EDIT: It won't be unplayable, there's always default scenery, but the experience will be much poorer.

Edited November 23, 20223 yr by Nuno Pinto

And that is why I use P3Dv5.3 99.99 % of the time

3 minutes ago, Nuno Pinto said:

This. The online dependency is just bad.

That may be true for some but in the past 2 years I had 2 or 3 updates that were slow and maybe got 5 times disconnected or other server related problem.

2 minutes ago, airservices said:

And that is why I use P3Dv5.3 99.99 % of the time

...missing the greatest flightsim we ever had this time.

2 minutes ago, hansb57 said:

That may be true for some but in the past 2 years I had 2 or 3 updates that were slow and maybe got 5 times disconnected or other server related problem.

I didn't have many problems myself, but some things like the annoying windows that come up whenever a disconnection happens need to go away. It's intrusive in the worst possible manner.

15 minutes ago, airservices said:

And that is why I use P3Dv5.3 99.99 % of the time

Many of us don't want to use P3D though, despite the online issues with MSFS. I can also play FSX and not worry about the online issues. But no thanks, I don't want to play FSX (I have FSX installed but that was only because I wanted to go through the excellent tutorial series in FSX, and the tutorials in FSX helped me immensely when I use MSFS).

Is there really much point in being concerned that MSFS might be unplayable in 15 years? Just step back and think about that for a moment.

I wonder how many vampire simmers there are.  These are folks that fly in the wee hours to avoid online contention.

For myself I like sleep more than simming.

sp

Edited November 23, 20223 yr by Sky_Pilot071

5 hours ago, Paladin2005 said:

We have the whole world in incredible detail. Not possible to save this local. So no, without online services, you will never play MSFS. Imagine you would "download" Google Earth with all data...

If MSFS or its descendants stick around long enough, storage capacity will increase to where we can have the whole world locally stored.

Remember, it wasn't too terribly long ago that a 100-megabyte hard drive was seen as extreme overkill for home applications. Not too long before that, entire games and productivity applications were stored on 360-kilobyte disks.

Someone awhile back did a calculation that you can store imagery of the whole planet in around 54,000 TB. That seems huge now, but it's not as big of a leap as going from floppies to commonly having several terabytes of local storage as we've already done. 1 terabyte of storage would require 3 million and change of those floppies. When you frame it like that, going from several terabytes to only 54,000 terabytes really isn't that big of a deal; it's only a matter of time.

 

 

 

Local storage is terribly inefficient.  Just like going to 10 different stores versus ordering from Amazon.

I already look forward to MSFS 2035 and I'm pretty sure I won't care much about MSFS2020 with my 320 Mbit/s connection.

Cheers,

2Low2Slow