Mega Corp that operates its own infra can’t manage its servers for a paid product…
Nobody to blame, nobody at fault. Y’all keep paying folks
So a studio owned by the company that also owns the azure infrastructure and has real time access to sales data was caught by surprise by the sales of their game and failed to boot up a couple more Vms to serve paying customers… Right, sounds totally legit and not penny pinching at all.
Jesus Christ people…
I can almost understand most mmos when this happens, but you designed your freaking game to constantly stream gigantic amounts of data what the actual fuck?
I’m glad I didn’t buy it, but that was because of the incoming administration and their plans to allow data caps to go nutty… Can’t play a game that’s going to cost me tons of money just to play it :(
That’s how mfs 2020 works as well, it’s not new
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.
I purchased MSFS several months ago. I was excited to fly the entire world. The game kept crashing (i5 13600k and RTX 4070 Super). After maybe 5 attempts I got past opening the .exe, only to find that the game required 150 gb of updates. No worries, I’ve got fast internet.
But guess what? You’re limited to Microsoft’s server speeds, which appeared to be capped at 320 kbps. I would have run through my refund window ages before I’d even have the game downloaded. Do I risk $90 CAD on the hopes that an already struggling to run game actually works? Or do I refund? Tough choice it was for me. Hah.
Also special fuck you to Thrustmaster. NEVER waste your money on their absolute garbage. I bought the Boeing 787 yoke and it worked for 3 months before the roll sensor gave out, making it impossible to fly straight because the yoke is detecting random spastic motions all over the place, making the entire thing unusable. If you search this issue online you’ll find tons of people with the same issue. They use a first gen cheap hall sensor for the roll axis that keeps picking up interference from everything (especially the left throttle axis)
Also special fuck you to Thrustmaster.
100% fuck thrustmaster. I gave up on them and got a pair of VKB Evo gladiators and absolutely love them.
I grabbed literally the cheapest HOTAS from Aliexpress a few years ago and it has been awesome.*
*It required tweaks. The stick centering spring was WAY too tough and had to be shortened. And the measured range of motion was only about 80% of the physical range of motion so there were deadzones at the end of each axis. Resistors can be added to each POT to stretch out the measured range.
Wouldn’t that be covered by warranty though? 3 months is a pretty short period.
A completely ridiculous lie on their part. What sane person would give /Microsoft/ any benefit of the doubt whatsoever? (nobody here so far, just saying in general) Microsoft owns insane cloud infrastructure and are also the publishers of the game. If there’s a problem, it’s one they chose not to address, not one that was simply “underestimated”.
and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure."
By underestimated excitement they meant player count straining their ridiculous approach of streaming massive amounts of data through the game instead of preinstalling.
I’m calling it now: for Flight Simulator 2025, they’re going to pull a Windows update “energy saver” and have it stream data peer-to-peer wherever possible.
