• SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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    17 days ago

    It’s not weather, it’s terrain and textures. It’s a high resolution stream of where you are flying over so you don’t need to keep the earth on your PC. The base install is supposed to be only ~30GB data, that’s not enough to see your house.

                  • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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                    17 days ago

                    FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.

                    You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.

                    FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.

      • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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        17 days ago

        I don’t think requiring online functionality is the death knell of a game in the year 2024. Personally, I’m excited. Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install and I hated MSFS2020 taking up a quarter of my game drive.

          • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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            17 days ago

            Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.

              • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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                17 days ago

                Were you streaming at 180mbps?

                More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.

                That’s not how cache works.

                In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.

          • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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            17 days ago

            The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.

            Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.