MicroSoft Flight Simulator 2024 to have only 50 gb install size due to cloud streaming of assets

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Marees

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are we looking at a future where all our next-generation gaming is done through a compact thin client, reaching out to the big wide world for the majority of its assets?

having an entire game's worth of local assets on your machine strikes as something that may well become old-fashioned.

There are downsides, of course. As gamers, we're already—I think it's fair to say—wary of games that require a constant internet connection to function, especially for single player experiences.


polonyc2 said:
Will Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 have improved loading times?

One of the biggest priorities for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is to improve the simulator’s data management. One of the major changes to the simulator’s architecture being made is using Cloud streaming to help ensure that the client becomes thin. When users load into the sim, only the textures, meshes, and map data that they need will be downloaded to avoid unnecessary bandwidth and disk space usage
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Of course, services like Nvidia's Geforce Now, in which entire games are played on data center PCs and streamed to a thin client capable of running on low powered devices, already exist. But what Neumann is talking about here seems like a different thing entirely. Your PC is still handling the heavy lifting of rendering the game, it's just the data it's pulling from is coming in from the cloud, keeping your install sizes low and allowing developers the freedom to go bananas with the assets.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/we...simulator-and-likely-many-more-games-to-come/


Allocation of storage space (for game installation) has become larger and larger.
Take God of War Ragnarök, for example: 190 GB. 190 precious gigabytes for a single game, and it's not even one of the worst offenders. Ark Survival Evolved made headlines with a ludicrous 330 GB install requirement, and with all DLC's attached some players reported that total topping 400 GB.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 isn't exactly light on the install size either, with the base game coming in at 130 GB, and various world updates bringing the total to around 500 GB. And the Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorge Neumann, says it could well have been a lot worse than that:

"We are more and more confident that you can offload more and more things. When you look at our data set, it's exploding… we launched with 40 airports or something. Now we have 180, and those are all, like, 10 GB.

"We have two and half petabytes (2,500,000 GB) of aerial data, obviously we can't install that, so we stream that. The same is true for the digital elevation map. It's also huge, and we stream that as well. What we do now is, we stream a bunch of the measures, almost all of them, actually.
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According to Neumann, MSFS 2024 is aiming for around a 50 GB install size, thanks to offloading even more data requirements to the cloud.
 
So with a model like that in 5 years or so when the cloud hosting server is taken offline or repurposed, does the flight sim game work at all on the local machine?

Is it only a shell of the functionality and experience delivered prior to server shutdown?
 
Remember folks, when they say that a change is for your benefit, you can be sure it is not.

I think they are fudging the numbers on that 2.5 petabytes, I suspect that is the size of the data when uncompressed, but we have extremely effective compression methods for aerial and elevation data.
They also might be extrapolating the the highest resolution to the entire covered area, but you are not going to have the same resolution imagery for every territory.
 
CVNet1 said:
So with a model like that in 5 years or so when the cloud hosting server is taken offline or repurposed, does the flight sim game work at all on the local machine?

Is it only a shell of the functionality and experience delivered prior to server shutdown?
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As long as newer versions of the game can share the same assets it will work, but as soon as it becomes inconvenient to maintain older versions they'll pull an ubisoft.
 
Everything will move to a subscription based model, SaaS. When they deem that the subscriptions no longer meet the needs to cover the costs of hosting/supporting then they will decom the service....simple as that. You will no longer be buying the game...you will be buying the subscription service to a game. Why charge people $60-$90 one time when you can charge monthly subscription fees plus sell skins/mods/etc on top of that.
 
Jabroni31169 said:
Everything will move to a subscription based model, SaaS. When they deem that the subscriptions no longer meet the needs to cover the costs of hosting/supporting then they will decom the service....simple as that. You will no longer be buying the game...you will be buying the subscription service to a game. Why charge people $60-$90 one time when you can charge monthly subscription fees plus sell skins/mods/etc on top of that.
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Yup. Did you guys see the article about some Final Fantasy mobile game that some guy spent 3 years archiving? You will own nothing and be happy. Games will be ephemeral.

Meanwhile, you can still play the original Mario or Zelda and they have been ported to new systems. Old games are enduring.
 
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Not necessarily, it is hard to predict future (look how many 2024 cars has real buttons for stuff you do while driving) most prefer real buttons, the shifts to tactile screen reverted at both options co-existed and people will decide which they prefer. Same for game, lot of people could prefer local install and ran game, they will buy those and thus people will make those.

Flight sim, being a giant tech demo-innovation-azure ads going toward having a low res of the whole word and high res of a lot of the popular part that has real world current meteo and airtraffic that want to run on a series S with 512 GB (which not a big harddrive in 2009, 15 years ago)...
 
uOpt said:
I rather prefer to download the game in one rush when I want. My Internet line might be busy with other things when I play.
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My internet might be down when I play, or worse go down while I'm playing.
LukeTbk said:
Not necessarily, it is hard to predict future (look how many 2024 cars has real buttons for stuff you do while driving) most prefer real buttons, the shifts to tactile screen reverted at both options co-existed and people will decide which they prefer. Same for game, lot of people could prefer local install and ran game, they will buy those and thus people will make those.
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I get what you are saying but it doesn't translate to games. People don't just choose a game from all available options based on features. I'd like to play all games that fall within my areas of interest, and as such I'd prefer if all such games were playable offline.
 
I'd prefer having a very large game stored locally rather than relying on any online resources for game assets. The only things I want to come from online are game updates and multiplayer mode. If I wanted an online gaming experience, I’d subscribe to something like NVIDIA GeForce NOW. This is stupid.
 
M76 said:
Remember folks, when they say that a change is for your benefit, you can be sure it is not.

I think they are fudging the numbers on that 2.5 petabytes, I suspect that is the size of the data when uncompressed, but we have extremely effective compression methods for aerial and elevation data.
They also might be extrapolating the the highest resolution to the entire covered area, but you are not going to have the same resolution imagery for every territory.
Click to expand...

Probably not too far off. My DCS install is 450GB, and I don't have all of the maps or planes. If I did it would be 650GB or more. Add in the entire world and things can start taking up a lot of space.
 
Jabroni31169 said:
Everything will move to a subscription based model, SaaS. When they deem that the subscriptions no longer meet the needs to cover the costs of hosting/supporting then they will decom the service....simple as that. You will no longer be buying the game...you will be buying the subscription service to a game. Why charge people $60-$90 one time when you can charge monthly subscription fees plus sell skins/mods/etc on top of that.
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It isn't working as well as companies would hope. Microsoft is either doing this because it's their way of dealing with the fact that Flight Simulator 2024 has very high storage needs while their Xbox Series consoles don't have the storage, or Microsoft wants to slowly push people to depend on them for the software they paid.
 
DukenukemX said:
It isn't working as well as companies would hope. Microsoft is either doing this because it's their way of dealing with the fact that Flight Simulator 2024 has very high storage needs while their Xbox Series consoles don't have the storage, or Microsoft wants to slowly push people to depend on them for the software they paid.
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Also, it's not all textures, it's global map data, so when you are above it will stream the ground area from Bing Maps. I'm not sure it would be feasible to include every town and city around the world as a detailed map and have that local.
They introduced it in 2020 and they have just been expanding on it since then. The game uses map data and generic textures to keep things minimal, there are mods for the existing flight simulator to replace the Bing maps data with Google's as it is higher resolution, as well as mods to replace the generic textures with higher quality ones as well.

I assume that Microsoft will try to use some sort of AI voodoo to improve the local texture mapping further from the map data.
 
Marees said:
having an entire game's worth of local assets on your machine strikes as something that may well become old-fashioned.
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Maybe, but not if Seagate and WD have any say about this. :LOL:
Marees said:
There are downsides, of course. As gamers, we're already—I think it's fair to say—wary of games that require a constant internet connection to function, especially for single player experiences.
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Marees said:
So much for playing on your laptop when your on an airplane or somewhere else without WiFi.- actually My text.
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Marees said:
Allocation of storage space (for game installation) has become larger and larger.
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Not only games. MS Office 365 takes .3.4 GB, and you can't install some of the programs. Photoshop wants 4.0 GB.

Marees said:
Take God of War Ragnarök, for example: 190 GB. 190 precious gigabytes for a single game, and it's not even one of the worst offenders. Ark Survival Evolved made headlines with a ludicrous 330 GB install requirement, and with all DLC's attached some players reported that total topping 400 GB.
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Yeah, that is hard to believe.
 
Nasty_Savage said:
Thin client has been a wet dream in IT since just before VMWare dropped. Its a big old yawn…
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It makes sense for computationally intensive but visually simple tasks, but not much else. As soon as something needs expensive visualization the thin client becomes a huge bottleneck.
 
1723386893077.jpeg
 
Marees said:
are we looking at a future where all our next-generation gaming is done through a compact thin client, reaching out to the big wide world for the majority of its assets?
Click to expand...

I think it's a bad idea in general; but flight sims (and other open world titles) might be one of the rare cases where it actually is reasonable. They need to have global maps; but I suspect most players won't be trying to fly into every airport in the game so lots of the map data will never be needed. That stands in contrast to more story or quest driven games where typical players will end up encountering most of the content in the game eventually.

This honestly feels like a buzzword compliant equivalent to regional map packs. Except that back in the good old days we'd probably have to buy each region separately.
 
1_rick said:
If people don't stop buying that kind of game they deserve what happens to them.
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:) Many people are playing iRacing, it is very popular. If MS where to suddenly switch to a subscription based MSFS I think it would still attract many people. At least those real fliers, not occasional fliers like myself :)
 
Johan Falk said:
:) Many people are playing iRacing, it is very popular. If MS where to suddenly switch to a subscription based MSFS I think it would still attract many people. At least those real fliers, not occasional fliers like myself :)
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Do MS / Nvidia / Amazon have a pay as you go model for cloud gaming (rather than subscription 🤔)
 
Marees said:
Do MS / Nvidia / Amazon have a pay as you go model for cloud gaming (rather than subscription 🤔)
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Have no idea, that sounds good though. A future scenario could be that you pay per hour you play something. Maybe login to a server through a web browser and then just start your particular game :)
 
Johan Falk said:
Have no idea, that sounds good though. A future scenario could be that you pay per hour you play something. Maybe login to a server through a web browser and then just start your particular game :)
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Sounds like that would get expensive, encourage padding the length, and defeat the purpose of part of why people shifted to buying games instead of going to arcades for gaming.
 
Johan Falk said:
Have no idea, that sounds good though. A future scenario could be that you pay per hour you play something. Maybe login to a server through a web browser and then just start your particular game :)
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That would be the worst idea in the history of gaming.
 
Some of you guys are wanting an install size in the petabytes. When MSFS2020 launched they said the streamed world data totaled 2PB. Here's my MSFS 2020 install folders.
Left is just MSFS, right is everything including mods.
1726834199478.png


All that and if I fly offline it looks like MSFS X outside a few relatively small areas world wide that are covered in the world & city updates that I've downloaded. MSFS 2024 is touting 4000 (yes, thousand) times more ground detail than 2020, and it looks it in the previews released this week.

I would have to kill A LOT of hard drives by the streaming cache to even come close to buying as many as it would take to install all the streamed data. Amazingly, in the couple thousand hours I've been streaming and caching data I've killed zero. I'm all for not streaming data when it makes sense, but if you want a digital copy of the entire world in detail it's just not a realistic expectation.
 
I guess we don't want everything on our disk.

But our disk is a cache and many of us are willing to let a couple hundred GB go for better performance. There's also the aspect that excessive swapping in and out of content wears out our SSDs, compared to writing all that nonsense just once.

But hey it is "new cloud tech", so it must be awesome, right?
 
IcePickFreak said:
Some of you guys are wanting an install size in the petabytes. When MSFS2020 launched they said the streamed world data totaled 2PB. Here's my MSFS 2020 install folders.
Left is just MSFS, right is everything including mods.
View attachment 680909

All that and if I fly offline it looks like MSFS X outside a few relatively small areas world wide that are covered in the world & city updates that I've downloaded. MSFS 2024 is touting 4000 (yes, thousand) times more ground detail than 2020, and it looks it in the previews released this week.

I would have to kill A LOT of hard drives by the streaming cache to even come close to buying as many as it would take to install all the streamed data. Amazingly, in the couple thousand hours I've been streaming and caching data I've killed zero. I'm all for not streaming data when it makes sense, but if you want a digital copy of the entire world in detail it's just not a realistic expectation.
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Yeah, the "everything must be stored locally" camp is going too far in this case. Half a terabyte (and that's not even close to the full world set) just isn't realistic for a game that's supposed to sell in significant numbers, not in 2024 at least. And whatever you think of SSD makers' pricing, that kind of storage requirement would be too much even if you had a 4TB drive.
 
Aurelius said:
Yeah, the "everything must be stored locally" camp is going too far in this case. Half a terabyte (and that's not even close to the full world set) just isn't realistic for a game that's supposed to sell in significant numbers, not in 2024 at least. And whatever you think of SSD makers' pricing, that kind of storage requirement would be too much even if you had a 4TB drive.
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I have a fast SSD dedicated to DCS and msfs2020 of course :) Only way to go with those monsters.
 
It seem to be able to take advantage of 64GB and ssd wear do sound a bit 2015 ishhh
 
I think there is a good fine line. Slimming the install down to 30GB is a bit much, many games are 200GB now like God of War. I think most people buying a niche simulator would realize that and have a higher end system in general. Though of course the entire world cannot be installed on a single PC. But 30GB seems like you'd need to stream more assets than necessary. Though most will end up with paid expansions I suppose, which I assume will be local installs only. Do any 3rd party addons stream?
 
XboxS come with a 512GB harddrive and could not support a god of war 200GB title, it could

Xbox for us to develop a tech than a an expensive PC do not exist.
We do not need now to do the take advantage of the expensive PC version as the alternative is already made and working.

A bit like the fast loading from ssd type of tech on the fly, how many of that is necessary if you have 16 core and 128GB of ram, could you not just load everything you eventually need in ram as a backbround task, tech that make it work on 16GB system already exist and will work
 
uOpt said:
I have a fast SSD dedicated to DCS and msfs2020 of course :) Only way to go with those monsters.
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Storage spaces with a least three spindle drives and two SSDs and it will handle storage and caching in the background.

If it’s fast enough for Hyper-V and a bunch of VMs it should be fine for flight simulator, hell throw a single NVME into that group for the extra oomph if you want.
 
Flogger23m said:
I think there is a good fine line. Slimming the install down to 30GB is a bit much, many games are 200GB now like God of War. I think most people buying a niche simulator would realize that and have a higher end system in general. Though of course the entire world cannot be installed on a single PC. But 30GB seems like you'd need to stream more assets than necessary. Though most will end up with paid expansions I suppose, which I assume will be local installs only. Do any 3rd party addons stream?
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I'd wager money that you'll still be able to optionally download stuff like airplanes and airports at the very least. Up until a few days ago you had simmers complaining for 4 years about the install size of MSFS2020. They offer an option to lower the install size and the pendulum abruptly swung the other way everywhere MSFS2024 is being discussed (read: complained about) that the install is too small and relying too much on streaming. Funny enough, that's how it started out with 2020 because even with the large install size as I showed above, it's still heavily reliant on streaming unlike what's really been seen before outside of third-party solutions for older sims that streamed satellite data much like 2020 does. As for 3rd party add-ons, I believe for 2024 only marketplace stuff will have the option to be streamed. Add-ons outside of that will still be placed locally in the Community folder just like in the current sim.

Interestingly, in MSFS2020 you can create a local cache for areas you pick that will stay on your local disk indefinitely so the option was always there and I'd wager even more money that less than 0.1% of the user base ever used it. I definitely never seen anyone showing off their several petabyte storage array because they locally cached the entire world even though the option has been there. Just complaining that too much is streamed, or not enough is streamed and the install size is too big.

I've come to the conclusion that they could put a camera in the cockpit allow people to remotely control an actual airplane and people would still complain about: the flight model, the weather, colors on their monitor don't look the same as the real world, the feeling of flight control from their $300 joystick/yoke doesn't feel like an ACTUAL $30 million dollar jet, the inability to move the camera around the cabin, the lack of smell, the bug splatted on the windshield.. ie. everything and anything, still.
 
IcePickFreak said:
I'd wager money that you'll still be able to optionally download stuff like airplanes and airports at the very least. Up until a few days ago you had simmers complaining for 4 years about the install size of MSFS2020. They offer an option to lower the install size and the pendulum abruptly swung the other way everywhere MSFS2024 is being discussed (read: complained about) that the install is too small and relying too much on streaming. Funny enough, that's how it started out with 2020 because even with the large install size as I showed above, it's still heavily reliant on streaming unlike what's really been seen before outside of third-party solutions for older sims that streamed satellite data much like 2020 does. As for 3rd party add-ons, I believe for 2024 only marketplace stuff will have the option to be streamed. Add-ons outside of that will still be placed locally in the Community folder just like in the current sim.

Interestingly, in MSFS2020 you can create a local cache for areas you pick that will stay on your local disk indefinitely so the option was always there and I'd wager even more money that less than 0.1% of the user base ever used it. I definitely never seen anyone showing off their several petabyte storage array because they locally cached the entire world even though the option has been there. Just complaining that too much is streamed, or not enough is streamed and the install size is too big.

I've come to the conclusion that they could put a camera in the cockpit allow people to remotely control an actual airplane and people would still complain about: the flight model, the weather, colors on their monitor don't look the same as the real world, the feeling of flight control from their $300 joystick/yoke doesn't feel like an ACTUAL $30 million dollar jet, the inability to move the camera around the cabin, the lack of smell, the bug splatted on the windshield.. ie. everything and anything, still.
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It’s not a proper flight simulator unless I can pick out my cabin crew, have it connected with my local food delivery for simulated in flight dinners, and have a random chance of hijacking, passenger fist fights, and Godzilla attacks.
 
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