As Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Steam reviews collapse to ‘Overwhelmingly Negative,’ its developer has admitted it "completely underestimated" the excitement for the game.
The way they simulate you flying through places is by offloading all the scenery information to MS servers.
The game calculates that you are approaching world tile #1527473 (since all scenery is split into large squares) and asks MS servers to download that tile, which is high resolution satellite images from Bing and topographic data.
In a 30 minute flight while flying an airliner, you may fly through 50+ tiles. One tile (just the orthographic satellite map at high detail resolution) are 5Gb or more (usually more but I’m being conservative since this is napkin math).
As a result, the way the last MSFS and this one rely on terrain streaming to make things work.
If you want a flight simulator that does not rely on streaming and forever load times, check out XPlane 12 or my favourite: Aerofly FS4
I believe it’s how they get the graphical data among other things. Instead of storing textures and stuff on your PC they steam it all in. I don’t think it’s something that can be deactivated.
Fuck most of Microsoft’s shit, but this is the only way you can realistically do the real world at any recognizable level of detail at all. You might be able to cache an area with an obscene amount of storage, but it would have to be a pretty constrained flight path at pretty low detail to really work.
Can data streaming be turned off?
No it cannot.
The way they simulate you flying through places is by offloading all the scenery information to MS servers.
The game calculates that you are approaching world tile #1527473 (since all scenery is split into large squares) and asks MS servers to download that tile, which is high resolution satellite images from Bing and topographic data.
In a 30 minute flight while flying an airliner, you may fly through 50+ tiles. One tile (just the orthographic satellite map at high detail resolution) are 5Gb or more (usually more but I’m being conservative since this is napkin math).
As a result, the way the last MSFS and this one rely on terrain streaming to make things work.
If you want a flight simulator that does not rely on streaming and forever load times, check out XPlane 12 or my favourite: Aerofly FS4
I believe it’s how they get the graphical data among other things. Instead of storing textures and stuff on your PC they steam it all in. I don’t think it’s something that can be deactivated.
A step closer to just let you have a terminal, and not access to your data.
Fuck most of Microsoft’s shit, but this is the only way you can realistically do the real world at any recognizable level of detail at all. You might be able to cache an area with an obscene amount of storage, but it would have to be a pretty constrained flight path at pretty low detail to really work.