55 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

And how do you know that this iniBuilds A320 crashing problem on XBox is occurring because of memory? 🙂 

What about PCs that have 16GB of RAM, are they always crashing with MSFS?

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/november-dev-stream-2023-transcription/619372

Jorg said something:

I can answer the question about the scrutiny of Xbox performances. Obviously, we have statistics every time we publish a new build, whether it’s on flighting or for updates like SU13. We know that we are still facing more scrutiny on Xbox, especially regarding the A320. We recently had some issues on Xbox, most of which should have been fixed. Jorg, you can speak about the A320 later on.

Yeah, I mean, first off, any participation helps. We get more data when users participate, and that information goes to the dev team. It helps us identify areas where we are struggling, especially with more sophisticated and memory-intensive elements like airliners. There seems to be an issue with some third-party add-ons using very large textures for liveries, causing problems on a memory-constrained platform like Xbox. We are investigating this, and it manifested itself with both the Airbus A310 and later with the Airbus A320. We’re looking into it for sure, and the feedback was helpful. Thank you.

Jorg is smart here and mentions liveries to minimize the perception of the issue. A livery is something that can be resized easily without a big graphics impact (although they removed the aircraft from the sim instead 🙂). But the reality is that whatever element involves complex aircraft systems, textures, large amounts of assets (to deliver a better scenery and weather for example), has to fight with memory and elaboration capacity constraints.

In my opinion a true next gen sim will come out in 2028, after the release of the new XBox. 4 years after FS 2024 which will come out 4 years after MSFS.

P.S.: PCs with 16 GB of RAM have separate VRAM, unlike the XBox.

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by MrFuzzy

48 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

But the iniBuilds A310 (on my list) got certified for use on XBox right. As did a bunch of their airports. And even if they were memory hogs (or despite that), they certainly didn't crash the XBox-X or -S enough for MS to not certify them.
 

They had several reports of crashes for the A310 on XBox too, as you can read from the transcript of the last interview and posts on the official forum.

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by MrFuzzy

4 hours ago, MrFuzzy said:

It means that any complex aircraft, scenery element or feature of the sim is actually held back by the limitations of the XBox platform.

MSFS is specified to run on PCs which are weaker than an XBox. So this does not mean what you say at all.

35 minutes ago, fsiscool said:

MSFS is specified to run on PCs which are weaker than an XBox. So this does not mean what you say at all.

The fact that MSFS can run at low settings with 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 770 does not contradict what I - and Jorg Neumann! - are saying in any way.

I am talking about the upper limit of what MSFS can deliver, not the lower limit.

6 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

What about PCs that have 16GB of RAM, are they always crashing with MSFS?

Good question. That's the configuration I run and I can't recall the last time I had a crash. Of course, this is the smallest of sample sizes (N = 1), so take it for what it's worth. I certainly haven't read a lot of forum posts anywhere from individuals running 16 GB PCs complaining about crash scenarios. That doesn't exclude the possibility that it might happen, but almost surely not on a regular basis.

25 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

Good question. That's the configuration I run and I can't recall the last time I had a crash. 

I already answered to that. Your PC has 16 GB of RAM and 8 GB of VRAM, the XBox 16 GB of shared memory only.

6 hours ago, MrFuzzy said:

They had several reports of crashes for the A310 on XBox too, as you can read from the transcript of the last interview and posts on the official forum.

I didn't follow the history of the A310 on XBox, but did these crash reports come *after* the A310 released? (I'd assume so since it's coming from external users). If so, it must've passed the certification threshold tests in order to be released in the first place.
 

3 hours ago, MrFuzzy said:

The fact that MSFS can run at low settings with 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 770 does not contradict what I - and Jorg Neumann! - are saying in any way.

I am talking about the upper limit of what MSFS can deliver, not the lower limit.

So to be clear, you're saying the upper limit of what MSFS can deliver is being held back by the XBox right? So by that same line of reasoning, aren't the PC specs lower than XBox (that MS has certified MSFS to run on) *also* then holding back the upper limits of what MSFS can deliver?

I just don't see this being plausible. Let alone MSFS, all the other games that are available for both PC and XBox including MS's hallmark titles like Forza, etc.. are they also somehow being held back?

We'll have to wait to get the specific reason(s) from MS/Asobo and/or iniBuilds as to why exactly the current iniBuilds A320 was causing crashes beyond their threshold (i.e. something that's pretty serious).. but I'm not convinced it'll be something that then causes them to to scale back and reduce in the ini A320 for PC users, in order to fix the crashing on XB.

Once again this is not some new technical hurdle software devs are facing here.. ove the years/decades software written for a wide spectrum of hardware capabilities, if written properly and well, can and should scale to the hardware, along with allowing for users to configure settings (i.e. on PC) so that those with more powerful hardware aren't losing out. If serious crashing is occurring on some systems due to inefficient use of hardware resources, then the fixes for that software is bound to be beneficial for all the hardware out there from low-end to high-end.
 

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by lwt1971

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

I didn't follow the history of the A310 on XBox, but did these crash reports come *after* the A310 released? (I'd assume so since it's coming from external users). If so, it must've passed the certification threshold tests in order to be released in the first place.

Plenty of crash reports for the A310 on XBox:

 I only opened these threads, I don't use the XBox so I don't read them but I reported Jorg Neumann words about the A310 and A320 in my previous post.

He explicitly said that the memory limitations of XBox make the development of these aircraft challenging and they have stability issues. Jorg, not MrFuzzy! 🙂

 

Quote

So to be clear, you're saying the upper limit of what MSFS can deliver is being held back by the XBox right? So by that same line of reasoning, aren't the PC specs lower than XBox (that MS has certified MSFS to run on) *also* then holding back the upper limits of what MSFS can deliver?

No, as I said the minimum PC specs only dictate how the sim will look with all the settings on low.

Quote

I just don't see this being plausible. Let alone MSFS, all the other games that are available for both PC and XBox including MS's hallmark titles like Forza, etc.. are they also somehow being held back?

Absolutely! 🙂 It's not just about Microsoft, all the videogames that are available both on console and PC deal with the limitation of the lesser platform. On PC you can play Forza at higher framerate and resolution but certain constraints such as the draw distance which make objects pop in, remain. It is true that you can push the graphics settings up on PC, but you can never use all your VRAM or all of the cores of your processor.  

There are examples of games that were ahead of their time, and they were developed on PC only, for example Half Life 2 and Crysis.

I don't want to put on my tin-foil hat here, but I wondered whether the iniBuilds A320 being taken out of the Beta might have more to do with the purported legal issues surrounding the origins of some of the iniBuilds A320 Neo aircraft. An allegedly anonymous FBW team member shared some details on Reddit about a lot of the source code in the ini builds plane coming from the FBW A32N.

I read about this a lot elsewhere a week or so ago, but didn't see any posts here about it — wasn't sure if it was missed, or if it had been removed by moderators (if so, sorry, and I guess this might be about to be cleaned up as well).

But as soon as I heard that the plane was removed from the beta (before hearing Jörg's reasoning) I assumed it was because of the legal issues.

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by Redge

36 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

Plenty of crash reports for the A310 on XBox:

I only opened these threads, I don't use the XBox so I don't read them but I reported Jorg Neumann words about the A310 and A320 in my previous post.

He explicitly said that the memory limitations of XBox make the development of these aircraft challenging and they have stability issues. Jorg, not MrFuzzy! 🙂

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that these crash reports came *after* the A310 released right? So that means it met the minimum requirements for stability, and therefore certification, in order to be released in the first place... something that their A320 has not, so must be rather more serious/catastrophic that's holding back the A320 release.

 

36 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

No, as I said the minimum PC specs only dictate how the sim will look with all the settings on low.

Ok, so let me ask my question differently.. given that MS is targeting PC specs *lower* than XBox for use with MSFS, how is XBox the culprit here holding back anything? Obviously MS/Asobo hardcode the settings in MSFS tailored to match the hardware capability of XBox. Are you saying these hardcoded settings on XBox are too ambitious maybe? 

 

36 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

Absolutely! 🙂 It's not just about Microsoft, all the videogames that are available both on console and PC deal with the limitation of the lesser platform. On PC you can play Forza at higher framerate and resolution but certain constraints such as the draw distance which make objects pop in, remain. It is true that you can push the graphics settings up on PC, but you can never use all your VRAM or all of the cores of your processor.  

There are examples of games that were ahead of their time, and they were developed on PC only, for example Half Life 2 and Crysis.

But you see that's the thing.. a) if allgedly game developers are holding back due to XBox being supported, then they are also holding back due to equally spec'd PCs being supported, and PCs with even lower cpu/main-memory/gpu/vram specs. or, b) they are writing software that can scale properly across wide range of hardware capabilities (as most modern software written for a wide variety of hardware should). I think it's b) and not a).

Bottom line, the XBox is immaterial in all this since it's just equivalent to a certain spec of PC. On the scale of hardware systems that game developers support, i.e for the sake of discussion let's say this scale:
1) PC with lowest supported specs
2) PC specs + 1
3) XBox
4) PCs with higher specs than XBox
...
N) PCs with highest specs

If one were to argue game developers are holding back and not maximizing the capabilities of 4) thru N), then it's not because of XBox (or just XBox alone), it's because of 1)
 

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by lwt1971

3 minutes ago, Redge said:

I assumed it was because of the legal issues.

Absolutely! And btw FBW had a contract with Asobo/MS for this plane. This means plane as intellectual property fully belongs to Asobo/MS. It's not FBW ..... business anymore. 

The more Jorg and his gang is trying to hide the real reasons the more it smells fishy. There is one good point though. It means Xbox users will not slow down future projects as many believe here.

For what on Earth Xbox users need complex planes? They have to enjoy Reno races. 🤪

I'm starting to regret having put on my tin-foil hat 😅

I think you've just made a whole host of assumptions there about the legal status of the FBW project and their works, most of which I suspect are wildly wrong!

The FBW work is created under a GPL license GNU General Public License (having originally been created under the MIT license) and I am certain they wouldn't have abandoned that concept in order to try to get their aircraft available in the MSFS Marketplace.

Edited December 1, 20232 yr by Redge
Clarification of license type

4 minutes ago, Redge said:

The FBW work is created under a GPL license

 Is it not an assumption as well?

I've corrected the specifics of the license type, but here it is on their GitHub: https://github.com/flybywiresim/aircraft/blob/master/LICENSE

30 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

Bottom line, the XBox is immaterial in all this since it's just equivalent to a certain spec of PC. On the scale of hardware systems that game developers support, i.e for the sake of discussion let's say this scale:
1) PC with lowest supported specs
2) PC specs + 1
3) XBox
4) PCs with higher specs than XBox
...
N) PCs with highest specs

If one were to argue game developers are holding back and not maximizing the capabilities of 4) thru N), then it's not because of XBox (or just XBox alone), it's because of 1)
 

Potato PCs are a very small minority among MSFS players. Never heard of anyone trying to run MSFS with 8 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 1200 and anyway they wouldn't be in a position to complain, because the minimum declared specs imply only that the game will work (at low settings) without any warranty of a decent experience. 

With XBox players the matter is different because they are many more in number and they cannot upgrade their platform even if they wanted. A game MUST run properly on an XBox, otherwise people get angry and ask refunds.

Then again, it is JORG NEUMANN that talked about memory limitations on XBox (not on PC). A PC with a GPU has RAM and VRAM, the XBox has shared memory only.