2 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

You do see the tree obelisks and that was my point - doesn't matter how fast the connection, melted buildings/tree obelisks will be evident.

Well, I don’t expect every single tree and building on the entire earth to be perfectly true to life, and I do agree that there will always be some flaws in a digital representation of the entire planet. 
 

MSFS 24 is a lot better btw - not sure if you were on the alpha, but the trees especially are VASTLY better. That really makes a huge difference!

22 minutes ago, JonathanC said:

Well, I don’t expect every single tree and building on the entire earth to be perfectly true to life, and I do agree that there will always be some flaws in a digital representation of the entire planet. 
 

MSFS 24 is a lot better btw - not sure if you were on the alpha, but the trees especially are VASTLY better. That really makes a huge difference!

Yes I was in the alpha and I agree the trees were great!

On 9/22/2024 at 4:18 PM, VeryBumpy said:

The elephant has been already mentioned and yes I'm very concerned about this being a majority streamed game nearly like Stadia.

Before purchase, I need to hear solid specifics and experiences on how offline play works in FS2024.

 

This may have already been pointed out by others, but the reality is that both MSFS2020 and MSFS2024 are designed to use data streaming, and offline play is at best a temporary fallback option if the streaming isn't working. Personally I never use it -- on the very rare occasions when I have issues, I just exit the program and try again later (the offline scenery takes me back 10 years or more, and I'm not interested). I think we need to recognize that we are in a new era where streaming is normal, for MSFS2024 and many other applications. That's not going to change; there is no going back. 

1 hour ago, cobalt said:

I think we need to recognize that we are in a new era where streaming is normal, for MSFS2024 and many other applications. That's not going to change; there is no going back.

I think this is the key point; MSFS2024 is a streaming game and if you are not interested in streaming games -- you do not have a capable connection, you will not accept relying on the internet, cannot tolerate the predictable periodic outages that will occur, or you like to think that you physically own and have control of the program if it is downloaded to your computer -- then it is not a title for you.

No one really owns any software unless you developed it yourself or you paid for its development; the rights can be revoked at any time pretty much for any reason. We all rent our software and are always subject to eviction.  And as Cobalt said, pretty much every modern application is designed to be internet aware and to depend on an internet connection. I use a wide range of applications in my work and personal use of a computer -- from Microsoft Office, to collaboration tools like AirTable, to Power BI and GIS software, and every single one of them requires an active internet connection. I also store nothing, that is absolutely nothing, locally on my computer. Every file I work on is stored in a cloud and backed up to another cloud. 

There are weaknesses to this approach, they are well documented and there is a growing movement for greater decentralization of data and programs, but I agree we are not likely going back to a time when we bought a DVD or downloaded a program and it all sat entirely on our hard drive. We would lose so much capability across virtually every application.

Edited October 29, 20241 yr by Cognita

3 hours ago, Cognita said:

I think this is the key point; MSFS2024 is a streaming game and if you are not interested in streaming game

So is 2020. 2024 will just rely on it more.

Edited October 29, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

12 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

2024 will just rely on it more.

Absolutely, and that is my fear. 

For the record, I did not have any connection problems when I repeated the flight from Sumburgh to Aberdeen

5 hours ago, Rocky_53 said:

Absolutely, and that is my fear. 

Sadly, that ship has sailed. Pretty much everything modern on my machines rely on the internet. That's our lives now.. the internet is becoming (has become, for most urban dwellers across the world) as necessary as electricity. 

On the flip side, just like electricity changed our lives, you can now do stuff like stream the entire world in high def to your local PC. I'll take that tradeoff. if the servers are down, I'll do something else till they come back up in a few minutes/hours. 
 

If the net went down for days/weeks... I have no idea what would happen haha.. everything would stop.

I had a thought, wouldn't this be bad for SSD health? The constant downloading and writing, especially if you don't set a cache?

8 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

I had a thought, wouldn't this be bad for SSD health? The constant downloading and writing, especially if you don't set a cache?

Fair point. I wonder how much of the *core* sim (that 2024 will be grabbing from the cloud) will go into the cache. My understanding was that most of the cache (in 2020 anyway) was scenery.

1 hour ago, Adamski_NZ said:

Fair point. I wonder how much of the *core* sim (that 2024 will be grabbing from the cloud) will go into the cache. My understanding was that most of the cache (in 2020 anyway) was scenery.

in the tech alpha at least, the default cache was 12GB, but you could increase it. IIRC the cache now includes aircraft and other things, not just the scenery.

You will also be able to manually download packages from the new content manager, whatever it's called now, in the final release.

But by default everything is streamed.

Edited October 31, 20241 yr by Tuskin38

21 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

in the tech alpha at least, the default cache was 12GB, but you could increase it. IIRC the cache now includes aircraft and other things, not just the scenery.

You will also be able to manually download packages from the new content manager, whatever it's called now, in the final release.

But by default everything is streamed.

Thanks! :)