Oddly? This is not odd at all.
It’s been a while sincce I wrote code, but I’ll try to remember. Basically disk size and ram size have no connection. Disk size is for already generated assets (maybe you need to remember how the planes look like, so you create assets for all the planes. Or you want to have textures for the scenery, or for the Lincoln monument, or whatever).
But then you need to load those resources into RAM to access them faster, because if you try to load them directly from disk, it’s a lot slower. So some part of those 64GB of RAM is because you are loading some premade assets.
But aside from this, there’s also dynamically generated data that you have no way of knowing about at the beginning of the program, so you can’t prepare in advance and generate assets for it. Like say for example the player wants to begin flying the plane - he’s gonna have some different inputs than any other player. Maybe he drives slower at the beginning, or goes a little to the right when he takes off. Or his destination will be completely different. You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane’s weight and who knows what else, I’m not a pilot. All of this, you allocate memory dynamically, based on user changes, and this uses the RAM as well.
Not to mention - you can make a 1kb program that takes 64 GB of RAM. You just ask the operating system for that much memory. You don’t even need to fully use it. It’ll take you one line of code.
All this to say - nothing odd about the program being smaller than the RAM requirements. It can mean it’s not optimized, but it can also mean it has a lot of dynamic calculations that it’s doing and a lot of stuff it needs to remember (and in the case of a flight Sim this wouldn’t surprise me).
Technically correct, but if I’d have any input into hiring a person whose background involves making a flight simulator requiring 64GB RAM, that doesn’t emulate every mol in that plane for that cost (I’m exaggerating a bit), I’d ask many questions.
This game feels like the perfect candidate for streaming from XCloud/GeForce Now since all those data doesn’t really need to be transferred all the time. And the game’s design can tolerate a bit input latency.
30GB plus unlimited data streaming while using it…
That said, I suppose one plus is that this hopefully wont need as many 10+GiB updates literally right when I finally have an hour free and want to play it.
Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
flightgear better
Great. Now I’ll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.
Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
That’s exactly what they’re doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.
Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.
My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
Also… this is the kind of game that kind of requires a “live service” element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable.
I’m certain Soviet General Staff maps turned into a flight sim map, with a few thousands of buildings being modeled and textured individually and the rest with similar (like buildings made of hexagon modules in some games have variety, but the separate components are not too numerous) procedurally-generated repeated kinds of meshes, textures and shaders, would take weigh little enough that you wouldn’t notice download times.
What else do they do for flight sims?
Weather data? A lot, but not that much.
I just can’t imagine what would need 64GB. I think it’s an intentional waste for the purpose of this game not being playable after its end of life.
A bit like Heinlein’s “Door into summer” future economics. Only there such stupid things are done to reduce unemployment, while here they are done to keep markets predictable for corporations and controlled, so that they wouldn’t, you know, die, as they would in a normal market because of competition.
Which reminds me of one important thing I’ve already changed in my life to not support such malicious actions. I don’t buy products that are intentionally made this way.
Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable.
You shouldn’t have to download the entire planet though.
The game 100% should support installing local specific areas you wanna fly around, that anyone could then keep a copy of.
If a user wanted to cache an entire 8 TB of the entire world on a drive, they should be able to just do that (and thus have forever support without worrying about internet services staying online)
At least, as a snapshot of what the world looked like in 2024.
I don’t see why users shouldn’t have the option to locally HD save the data if they want to, to avoid maxing out their internet bandwidth in one sitting.
Leveraging something they already run makes a lot more sense than building a bespoke thing for streaming the data for just MSFS. (In my defense, it is a game and game devs have done much sillier things than doing something like that.)
I just have begun to accept that I’m not the market for games anymore, because I’m unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there’s no more money to be squeezed out of it.
I’m just very opposed to renting entertainment because everything is temporary.
(Thankfully there’s ~30 years of games to play that don’t suffer from any of this live-service-ness so I’m not exactly short of things to spend time on.)
I just have begun to accept that I’m not the market for games anymore, because I’m unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there’s no more money to be squeezed out of it.
Most games still aren’t like this though and this is really one of the few games where it’s justifiable because of the nature of the technical challenges in letting players explore the real world.
You must really hate going to the movies. If I spend $60-70 on a game and get 50-100+ hours of entertainment from that money spent that’s a dub in my book.
If someone enjoys flight simming it’s not really a question, they will buy this game because it’s one of the best all-around sims.
Rant but mostly venting to the void - reply to both you and parent comment, my thoughts:
I have games that are 20+ years old that I’m still clocking gametime in. Games with dedicated communities, still-going multi-player, mods, game improvements…
If a game becomes intentionally unavailable, I - and everyone else - should get a full refund. Full stop, no exceptions, no bullshit store credit. Money back in my account. You don’t expect someone to repo your phone, car, or house after 3 years of “ownership”, why is literally anything any different?
In current times, I’m super pissed at The Crew getting axed, and I plan to only yarr content published by ubi now. They can’t be trusted, so it’s not my fault, but theirs.
I have unannounced/anticipated games on my radar that I’m already planning on ‘wait, see’ or ‘only the base game’ because I see the shift to ‘lease ownership’ and ‘everything is a bundle of parts’. Current games that I have thousands of hours in, but due to bugs, cheating (with no response from devs), added after-purchase ‘packs’ when I bought the fancy bullshit version to have the “whole game”, etc that I now value at 1/5th of the full asking price I paid - I’m tired of this garbage. Being a “beta” (alpha, in some cases) early access guinea pig is not a fucking perk. Promises of content later is not a fucking perk. Always online is not a fucking perk.
Game time isn’t the only metric; for me, at the bare minimum, the game has to be good - I shouldn’t fight a game every step of the way to draw enjoyment from it (related: stop trying to use players’ in-game creations to prop up the game itself and it’s core content) - and it has to remain mine, forever. Maybe I’m getting old, but at least I’m not a fool. A purchase is a purchase, not a temporary allotment.
And (because why not) I fucking despise going to the theater. Other people are annoying, can’t pause the film to take a piss, sticky/cum-soaked floors adhering fuck-knows-what to your shoes, noisy phones going off, $12 for a midday showing + a snack and drink is another $9. If you go to a fancy theater, you can order a microwaved burger and fries right from your seat for only $31. They cannot go away fast enough.
Games used to be $20, you got the full game, forever, sometimes with multi-player that you can host yourself, forever, sometimes with free DLC, forever. Now they want $80 and are trying to say that they have the right to take it back and still keep the money. Fuck em all. Except indie devs. But I’m watching you.
Anyway. That was cathartic. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt – and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo’s (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.
Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.
But it is a really good game for the time being
Call me when it’s a really good game forever.
Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn’t mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money
The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
I’ll admit I haven’t played much (or possibly even any?) online MSFS stuff and am generally just a fart around in a Cessna in a random city type of player so I don’t even necessarily know what the online features are, other than the Install New Locations minigame wherein you spend hours downloading shit, heh.
Live weather, live traffic, multiplayer traffic, and photogrammetry are all disabled in offline mode.
FS2020 downloads 600GB of something ROUTINELY
There are some 3d demoscene programs that use miniscule amounts of disk space but still need a fair bit of memory for working space.
Rememeber how “no one will ever need more than 8gb of ram”? Up until fairly recently (a few years ago) you could not talk about anything having to do with ram online without someone coming along and being like “ACKTCHUALLY no one needs more than 8gb of ram for anything even gaming”.
I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much
Pcs are clearly inferior, that’s like 32gb on a Mac. /s
Comparing a person computer to another personal computer
Oddly? The game needs ram to store data like variables that the game generates, like physics simulations, among other game systems. The game’s asset size alone doesn’t really matter.
I know. That statement was weird. In just a few lines of code I can chew up all available ram on a machine.
malloc knows no limits.
Except
SIZE_MAXI suppose 🙄
Quick! Name one thing that has nothing to do with the other and make that your headline!
_
Most games, most textures are compressed, which leads to something like Diablo 2’s remake having ridiculous load times considering it’s a simple reskin of a 20 year old game. That 30GB footprint probably gets unpacked to something twice the size, and if you’re caching literally every single thing for the sake of smoothness (flight sims rarely have loading screens when you enter another country’s airspace or a different biome), and a little bit of overhead for OS etc, gonna need heaps of RAM
Interesting—D2R only had 1-3 seconds’ load time for me! Was it bad on consoles without SSDs?
Nowadays 2 seconds is an eternity considering M.2 drive speed and DDR4 bandwidth. Baldur’s Gate 1 for example, nothing is compressed and load times are in single digit milliseconds. Sure BG1 is loading like 1/8th the stuff but load times are 1/300th
There’s actually a program people use for D2R to unpack textures and it cuts load time significantly, but the install and the uncompressed files have a massive footprint
It probably streams the content during play.
It definitely does, it pulls satellite data of the whole world
