Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI(bbc.com)
bbc.com
Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-53811956
105 comments
How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail? Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?
It’d be kind of amazing if GTA 6 was using this kind of tech to create its open world environment when it releases.
Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure up for delivering the open world imaging.
Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure up for delivering the open world imaging.
GTA is supposed to be satire on the real world. That's why you have your Cluckin Bells and Ammunations. If it was just a 3D environment based on the current world it would be pretty boring.
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Moreso if they donate resources to OSM to make such data more reliable and accurate and then they just freeze a snapshot when they contribute to make a game from.
Considering GTA V has made literally billions of dollars I doubt they'll need any free to play mode.
“Making lots of money” does not seem to suppress companies from trying to make more money. See, Apple and App Store.
I think their point was that GTA 5 was not free-to-play and still made billions. It could be sold at full price up until 6 releases and then 6 could be sold at full price for years and people will still be interested.
GTA 5 has an interesting revenue model, the game itself has to be bought, and you can play all the single player with just that. Once you get into multiplayer it’s much of a free to play model, with the usual choice of grinding through to acquire resources or just paying real money for in game money.
Generally speaking, mapping out an area in high quality requires imagery that was captured not only relatively close to the subject (flying at a few thousand feet vs on orbit) as well as capturing objects from multiple oblique angles. This requires intensively flying a "waffle fries" pattern over a subject area of interest with a plane with a bunch of cameras on it pointing in multiple direction. E.g. https://www.sanborn.com/oblique-imagery/
So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.
So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.
Depends on how much money you throw at the problem. It's a problem that's easy to parallelize.
I wish this game launched with xCloud. I understand that simulation enthusiast won't be interested in that but for many people like me who don't want to worry about streaming and storing all that world data, as well as people not having enough resources to run the game it would be the perfect opportunity to try game streaming.
I think, it's down to the Xbox version not being available yet. I'm sure once it's out, it'll be available through xCloud.
The cities they picked to hand model are bizarre as hell. Major ones like London and Paris are missing but completely unknown ones are in.
London and Paris have fairly uninteresting airspaces from an aviation standpoint. Flat, not many airports. If sightseeing is your thing, there are better ways.
I wonder if it’s based on usage from previous versions of Flight Simulator.
I wonder if it’s based on usage from previous versions of Flight Simulator.
I'd say the approaches into Heathrow (as least on westerlies) are pretty iconic, being that they tend to turn final over central London.
Maybe those are so well known that errors would get easily noticed so they’d have to do a much more thorough job?
I think they must be release a map/navigation app by using this data.
It’s based on Bing so it already exists.
I hope not. My city of 400k is barely recognizable.
The results are super iffy, if your area matches the designed solution it’s great otherwise you are in for the weird version of the place. Which seems par for the course with these AI based solutions. There’s some obvious funny issues that have cropped up in the media but in general the results are mediocre from the perspective of actually representing places you know. Iceland for example has a loooooot of trees and the height data is just bizarre in a lot of cases.
It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it’s great fun.
It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it’s great fun.
Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright:
First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.
Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.
Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.
Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:
- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.
- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.
I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.
(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)
Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.
Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)
Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.
Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.
Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...
Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.
First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.
Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.
Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.
Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:
- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.
- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.
I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.
(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)
Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.
Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)
Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.
Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.
Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...
Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.
Welcome to the world of flight simulation! I've been in to flight simulation for a long time, and while there are definite rough edges that need to be improved, this really does represent the next leap forward in what's available for this hobby. X-Plane with ortho scenery installed on my system has much longer load times. Prepar3d has lower framerates when you get some good scenery and a good aircraft loaded. I wish flight sim performed like AAA games. But this really does represent a significant improvement to the genre relative to what we've had before. It'll be a while before the high-quality add-on aircraft are ported over and available, as well as other types of content where hand-made airports and such are much better than the mostly-auto-generated content that comes with the game... but out of the box the new MSFS really does look so much more realistic (not just the earth but the sky: weather) and performs better than what we're used to.
So from the perspective of existing simmers, a game that seems to be pretty bad relative to mainstream AAA titles is actually looking really great compared to that status quo.
As for the download system -- yes, there's no excuse for that. I'm not sure how they got that so wrong given the abundance of prior art that does it better. The seeming relationship between Azure load and FPS/stutters is concerning and certainly a new condition that didn't exist in existing sims. Overall I do think the new sim suffers from being released prematurely, as we see so often with software now. But the reason for all the hype and praise is because the flight sim community really is excited about the potential this represents because we've been stuck with such ancient platforms for so long.
So from the perspective of existing simmers, a game that seems to be pretty bad relative to mainstream AAA titles is actually looking really great compared to that status quo.
As for the download system -- yes, there's no excuse for that. I'm not sure how they got that so wrong given the abundance of prior art that does it better. The seeming relationship between Azure load and FPS/stutters is concerning and certainly a new condition that didn't exist in existing sims. Overall I do think the new sim suffers from being released prematurely, as we see so often with software now. But the reason for all the hype and praise is because the flight sim community really is excited about the potential this represents because we've been stuck with such ancient platforms for so long.
Thanks! I did spend lots of hours in Falcon 3.0 in the early 90s, so I'm viewing this as a comeback. :)
I remember being saddened about how first person shooter games took over from flight sims as being the ones which the smartest people worked on, starting circa 1993 with Carmack's master piece.
I think you flight sim enthusiasts have been so starved for atttention since FSX that you've kind of lost perspective. ;)
I remember being saddened about how first person shooter games took over from flight sims as being the ones which the smartest people worked on, starting circa 1993 with Carmack's master piece.
I think you flight sim enthusiasts have been so starved for atttention since FSX that you've kind of lost perspective. ;)
According to many long-time flight simmers, the performance of this title is about the same as previous ones, with the addition of 10x improved graphics. So that's why they don't care and you're getting downvoted on Reddit.
PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.
PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.
I must have different expectations for games, 'minute or two' loading times sounds completely fine to me. Bugs are probably fairly typical of modern 'release broken now, patch later' development.
For me, the biggest issue is the complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD, on a fast PC that is suggested to use the high spec profile!
At least some progress screen to show you've started the program would help.
One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU. I can't see any reason for that, especially when the game often runs at 90% GPU for me.
It seems to be multi-core aware, but multithreading is definitely leaving a lot to be desired. Modern CPUs with 8 cores (16 vcores) seem woefully under-utilised.
Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
This is definitely a "release broken, patch later" build. I do like the game, but I fear the extent of "patching" might not fix the fundamental performance issues that probably need a rewrite of much of the core simulator engine itself. No software should take 30+ seconds to appear on screen with any indication it's loading. I get the feeling the devs have focused so much on feature development that no time at all went into performance optimisation, and that's a shame as this game has such real potential.
At least some progress screen to show you've started the program would help.
One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU. I can't see any reason for that, especially when the game often runs at 90% GPU for me.
It seems to be multi-core aware, but multithreading is definitely leaving a lot to be desired. Modern CPUs with 8 cores (16 vcores) seem woefully under-utilised.
Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
This is definitely a "release broken, patch later" build. I do like the game, but I fear the extent of "patching" might not fix the fundamental performance issues that probably need a rewrite of much of the core simulator engine itself. No software should take 30+ seconds to appear on screen with any indication it's loading. I get the feeling the devs have focused so much on feature development that no time at all went into performance optimisation, and that's a shame as this game has such real potential.
>complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD
Eh, splash screen wouldn't hurt but I'm surprised that anybody is strongly bothered by that. Maybe even it is caused by some DRM-silliness.
>One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU.
Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages.
>Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected. Also managing multiple windows/contexts from single applications is quite inconvinient, might clash with system compositor, etc, so I wouldn't hold that against them.
Note that I didn't actually play the game and cannot comment on game performance itself. Certainly omission of DX12/Vulkan rendering backend is rather disappointing.
Eh, splash screen wouldn't hurt but I'm surprised that anybody is strongly bothered by that. Maybe even it is caused by some DRM-silliness.
>One major issue is that sitting in the menu seems to use 100% GPU.
Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages.
>Turning on vsync tanks frame rate by about 6 or 7 fps for me. "Popping out" a navigation window and putting it onto my second screen also causes around a 4 to 6 FPS drop.
Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected. Also managing multiple windows/contexts from single applications is quite inconvinient, might clash with system compositor, etc, so I wouldn't hold that against them.
Note that I didn't actually play the game and cannot comment on game performance itself. Certainly omission of DX12/Vulkan rendering backend is rather disappointing.
> Without vsync? I guess its shifts from being more GPU-bound to more CPU-bound when running simulation proper, thus changing load percentages.
Yes, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.
> Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected.
Interesting - my setup has freesync screens and GPU, although admittedly I'm not too sure about any of these newfangled display things. I have 2 displayed enabled, tomorrow I'll try it with just 1 display in case that helps.
And absolutely agreed, lack of DX12/Vulkan is a real shame and missed opportunity.
Regards lack of splash screen, perhaps I'm getting old, but this is a regression from older versions - FSX took a while to load but had a progress bar. If I had to ship a game in this state, I'd quickly write a shim executable to show a loading bar immediately. There's an exe that loads it (without startup intro videos) in the SDK, so clearly possible.
I guess maybe my expectations are out of line with the modern "release broken, patch often" mindset, but it seems disappointing they didn't optimise for multi core CPU, or handle regressions in basic UX, or do performance optimisation. But nonetheless, there's clearly some great work in this sim, and hopefully they'll have the confidence to try address some of these issues in patches - perhaps even moving to Vulkan or DX12. Nothing is impossible in a world where the entire game is downloaded and updatable, I guess.
Yes, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.
> Vsync delays game loop to next screen refresh, so excluding these newfangled Freesync/Gsync monitors framerate reduction is expected.
Interesting - my setup has freesync screens and GPU, although admittedly I'm not too sure about any of these newfangled display things. I have 2 displayed enabled, tomorrow I'll try it with just 1 display in case that helps.
And absolutely agreed, lack of DX12/Vulkan is a real shame and missed opportunity.
Regards lack of splash screen, perhaps I'm getting old, but this is a regression from older versions - FSX took a while to load but had a progress bar. If I had to ship a game in this state, I'd quickly write a shim executable to show a loading bar immediately. There's an exe that loads it (without startup intro videos) in the SDK, so clearly possible.
I guess maybe my expectations are out of line with the modern "release broken, patch often" mindset, but it seems disappointing they didn't optimise for multi core CPU, or handle regressions in basic UX, or do performance optimisation. But nonetheless, there's clearly some great work in this sim, and hopefully they'll have the confidence to try address some of these issues in patches - perhaps even moving to Vulkan or DX12. Nothing is impossible in a world where the entire game is downloaded and updatable, I guess.
>es, without vsync, idling in the main menu uses 100% GPU in task manager. GPU fan confirms this. Clearly a bug, as nothing in the menu looks to me to tax the GPU in even the slightest.
"I told my GPU to work as hard as possible and it did so! The game is so poorly optimised".
That's kind of the point of Vsync. Not rendering unnecessary frames.
"I told my GPU to work as hard as possible and it did so! The game is so poorly optimised".
That's kind of the point of Vsync. Not rendering unnecessary frames.
Was meaning from the perspective of "I'm viewing a menu, this shouldn't max the GPU out". From another comment it does seem the video running in the background is being rendered in realtime, and maxing out the GPU.
I am not sure vsync would help in the menu, since the FPS is sitting below 60 in any case. Otherwise I'd agree with you that vsync should be turned on. It seems for FS that vsync is generally causing more issues than not at this point.
I am not sure vsync would help in the menu, since the FPS is sitting below 60 in any case. Otherwise I'd agree with you that vsync should be turned on. It seems for FS that vsync is generally causing more issues than not at this point.
> For me, the biggest issue is the complete lack of visual feedback you've actually launched FS... It's at least 30 seconds on a fast SSD, on a fast PC that is suggested to use the high spec profile!
It's just one of at least 50 similarly severe P1 showstoppers, sadly. But, yeah, I definitely agree.
It's just one of at least 50 similarly severe P1 showstoppers, sadly. But, yeah, I definitely agree.
to return to the menu?
Also: ignore the 8GB minimum RAM requirement. Whoever built that chart ignored the fact that Win10 needs a gig or two of its own to run. And FS20 needs about 7.5GB to boot.
Get 32GB and give yourself some breathing room.
Get 32GB and give yourself some breathing room.
16 GB should be fine based on what I've seen in terms of actual memory usage so far. To be clear
- that's not what caused the issues I mentioned though - I've got 64 GB.
Oh of course, your observations are totally spot on. But even when you get through the grind of loading this game, the performance goes completely to hell once Windows starts swapping out RAM pages.
I also agree with that note on how the credits were stacked up. And that’s literally how this game got built. Asobo came to MS with this awesome visualization tool and MS pretty much said “ok, why don’t we hand you FS14’s code and we can call it FS20?”
The product was literally built backwards.
I also agree with that note on how the credits were stacked up. And that’s literally how this game got built. Asobo came to MS with this awesome visualization tool and MS pretty much said “ok, why don’t we hand you FS14’s code and we can call it FS20?”
The product was literally built backwards.
> The product was literally built backwards.
Yes, exactly. I't infuriating. I hope there is a strong enough enough backlash to get Microsoft to spend 50% more than they intended to, to fix the product so that it matches what they sold it for.
Yes, exactly. I't infuriating. I hope there is a strong enough enough backlash to get Microsoft to spend 50% more than they intended to, to fix the product so that it matches what they sold it for.
It also seems the menus were designed by designers that had no "performance budget" cap - looking at performance, the menus only hit a sensible FPS when on the loading screen. The sheer amount of animation and transparency in the main menu seems to be the cause of poor performance and GPU fans resembling jet engines, and totally needlessly at that!
I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on performance - it really does seem like the overall game missed out on any real performance optimisation.
I can't see anything else bottlenecking the system elsewhere on performance - it really does seem like the overall game missed out on any real performance optimisation.
The hangar animation behind the main menu is a big part of that GPU hit.
That's the same conclusion I reached here. I also think when you pause (i.e. hit escape, not talking live pause where the sim keeps running), the game continues to render the full scene in the background, even though there's content in front. This just feels wasteful to me - the power delta on my GPU between active and idle is something like 100 W!
The intro sequence is a pre-rendered video - I reckon if Asobo used a pre-rendered hangar video, they could swap that out in a patch and nobody would notice or care, but it would knock GPU utilisation to < 5%.
The intro sequence is a pre-rendered video - I reckon if Asobo used a pre-rendered hangar video, they could swap that out in a patch and nobody would notice or care, but it would knock GPU utilisation to < 5%.
I've experienced most of the issues you described, and yet, I have to conclude that the game is absolutely fantastic despite them. The visual clarity is mind-blowing, and the UI and all the helpers make all the difference between this game and all other sims that I've, as a completely casual player, have tried before.
But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model, which gives me confidence that most of the bugs will be sorted out and game polished.
But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model, which gives me confidence that most of the bugs will be sorted out and game polished.
> But more importantly, it's not a game that's defined by it's release; developers are clearly following the service model
Are you sure? Got a source for that?
The french developer company Asobo has typically been launching one great-looking, abysmally performing game per year so far:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio#Games_developed
Why would they spend more than a year on MSFS?
Are you sure? Got a source for that?
The french developer company Asobo has typically been launching one great-looking, abysmally performing game per year so far:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asobo_Studio#Games_developed
Why would they spend more than a year on MSFS?
They’ve been posting weekly development updates. Here’s one from last week that has a roadmap based on feedback from the beta - https://www.flightsimulator.com/august-13th-2020-development.... It definitely seems this will be more of a service model.
Because it's a different kind of game with a different kind of audience. Simmers are accustomed to paying for additional content, and this is a much more stable and lucrative strategy than abandoning the title. Just look at Paradox.
I'm on a fairly new machine (i9-9900K OC'd to 5.1 GHz, 32GB RAM, NVMe, RTX 2080 Super), and I was expecting smooth, stable frame rates at 1080p. Unfortunately, the game seems to be limited by one or two CPU threads consuming a constant 90-100% of those cores, while the other cores hover around 10-25%. As a result, I get fairly decent frame rates (25-50fps, depending on the area), but even in the best cases, it has a really annoying "micro stutter" that randomly - yet consistently - interrupts what would otherwise be an amazing experience.
I'm hopeful that an update could improve performance, especially with respect to spreading CPU load over more cores, but it sounds like a lot of other simmers are mostly content, so maybe that will never happen.
I'm hopeful that an update could improve performance, especially with respect to spreading CPU load over more cores, but it sounds like a lot of other simmers are mostly content, so maybe that will never happen.
The inability to take advantage of large numbers of cpu cores is my biggest disappointment from a technical perspective. I don't know why you'd rewrite the game and fail to design it for modern core counts.
The micro stutter is very much real (AMD gpu here, Ryzen CPU), and annoying. I have tried to do some tracing to see what's going on. The fact sitting idle in the menu takes gpu usage to 100% doesn't inspire me with confidence. Frame pacing seems to be causing the stutters but I haven't managed to link it to an IO delay or similar yet.
My fear is the developers will focus on fixing functionality and never really optimise performance - I suspect getting good usage of 8 core CPUs (16 vcore) would require another full rewrite, which doesn't feel too likely.
The micro stutter is very much real (AMD gpu here, Ryzen CPU), and annoying. I have tried to do some tracing to see what's going on. The fact sitting idle in the menu takes gpu usage to 100% doesn't inspire me with confidence. Frame pacing seems to be causing the stutters but I haven't managed to link it to an IO delay or similar yet.
My fear is the developers will focus on fixing functionality and never really optimise performance - I suspect getting good usage of 8 core CPUs (16 vcore) would require another full rewrite, which doesn't feel too likely.
Edit: no longer a problem!
Original comment: I've seen reports that the Steam refund window of a few hours of 'gameplay' is used up by the mammoth download time. Steam only downloads the installer, and the installer then downloads the game data. Steam considers the installer to be the game itself and starts the clock ticking.
Original comment: I've seen reports that the Steam refund window of a few hours of 'gameplay' is used up by the mammoth download time. Steam only downloads the installer, and the installer then downloads the game data. Steam considers the installer to be the game itself and starts the clock ticking.
Valve have said they will (somehow) not count the time taken to download the game content against the 2 hour refund clock [1].
[1]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-20-valve-assu...
[1]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-20-valve-assu...
I will still take more than two hours to figure out if this game is playable or not, especially since everything is so random/buggy. And the framerate when loading scenery (looking in a new direction) currrently seems to depend on the the time of the day, because the geometry servers are overloaded or somthing.
After 6 hours of game play (sort of - half of that been spent looking at loading screens and trying out different settings) I'm still not sure. It's oh so promising but also so insanely buggy and random.
After 6 hours of game play (sort of - half of that been spent looking at loading screens and trying out different settings) I'm still not sure. It's oh so promising but also so insanely buggy and random.
You could just sign up for a month of Game Pass and get the game for 1 £/€/$.
Valve have explicitly stated that that won't be a problem:
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/amp/valve-says-the-time-it-takes-...
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/amp/valve-says-the-time-it-takes-...
Maybe you are new to the Flight Simulation scene. This is the game that FS fans have been waiting for over 10 years. Yes, it has problems but we're talking about absolutely groundbreaking technology that didn't settle for incremental improvements. There are very few games, if any, that look like FS2020 with full detail on. It absolutely blew me away to fly over my home town and point to my high school, malls and other recognizable parts of town.
Please don't listen to the parent and go support this new technology. This is a game that needs more funding that many startups quoted and even celebrated on Hacker News. This is revolutionary stuff and, despite the glitches, I was able to have a blast with it even in my modest Core i5 with a $150 GPU. It literally brought tears to my eyes.
Please don't listen to the parent and go support this new technology. This is a game that needs more funding that many startups quoted and even celebrated on Hacker News. This is revolutionary stuff and, despite the glitches, I was able to have a blast with it even in my modest Core i5 with a $150 GPU. It literally brought tears to my eyes.
Second this, visually its impressive, but on the rest of the simulator it feels weird, specially the control sensitivity.
I haven't done a full comparison yet because the plane I could compare more directly would involve stock vs payware, which is not really fair.
I do think that they can improve it with time but definitively feels rushed.
I haven't done a full comparison yet because the plane I could compare more directly would involve stock vs payware, which is not really fair.
I do think that they can improve it with time but definitively feels rushed.
Flight sim noob, but that Cessna Citation CJ4 model behaves very oddly. It has this very weird pumping up/down behavior. The 747 model behaves a lot better.
This is not a tolerable release. My gut feeling is that Microsoft needs to get this french studio (Asobo) to spend at least 50% more time on making this work. I don't think they will.
This is not a tolerable release. My gut feeling is that Microsoft needs to get this french studio (Asobo) to spend at least 50% more time on making this work. I don't think they will.
Tbf, the cessna and the 747 will behave very differently. I do think some jerkiness is added by the head camera effects that have been added.
Also the default controller profiles don’t include any dead zone, so at least on my setup, the control inputs were way too sensitive. Once I added some dead zone, and reduced the sensitivity curve in the options, it became much less twitchy.
Yeah, the two subreddits are full of solutions for this for the most stereotypical controller (the xbox one controller). That would be another showstopper in a good launch, sigh.
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Never, ever, buy a large game until it gets at least a few months of updates. You don’t want to pay to be a beta tester.
Just wait 6 months and if it’s not smooth by then it probably never will be.
Just wait 6 months and if it’s not smooth by then it probably never will be.
I signed up for Xbox Game Pass and downloaded this yesterday. I ran into the problem with the app hanging during the initial download ("update.") I had to restart it once, then it downloaded all 91 gigs. I'm not sure what it was doing the first time... I figured it was just a glitch.
The game does load very slowly. This is on a system with 32 gigs of RAM and NVME SSDs.
It looks amazing though!
The game does load very slowly. This is on a system with 32 gigs of RAM and NVME SSDs.
It looks amazing though!
Yeah, the load times on this are crazy. 1-2 mins to start the app and get to the main menu, another 30s-1min after you pick your itinerary to get to the runway. And I have one of the fastest chips (3900x), m.2 SSD, and RAM. How long are people willing to wait to play it, especially given how often I crashed in my first few flights.
Funny, I have the same loading times on an hdd with a 2700 and 64gb of ram, so the slowdown seem something relatively indenpendent.
I’ve been running the task manager on a separate monitor to see where the bottlenecks are. Those long load times appear to be, for me, GPU bound. It’s probably pre-rendering something. I'm running a 3700X, 32GB RAM, M2 SSD, GTX 1070, gigabit internet.
I've been doing similar, although reached a slightly different conclusion. It seems to me that the menus (even idling in them) use full GPU. I'm not convinced it's necessarily rendering stuff (and if it was, it really ought to cache it after the first time!) - I think this is just the result of a really bad performance UI they got away with launching.
I don't seem to max anything out when flying - even GPU has a little headroom according to task manager.
Hopefully Asobo will spend time on performance, rather than just bare functionality, as there's definitely lots of scope to fix things like frame pacing and overall performance.
I don't seem to max anything out when flying - even GPU has a little headroom according to task manager.
Hopefully Asobo will spend time on performance, rather than just bare functionality, as there's definitely lots of scope to fix things like frame pacing and overall performance.
I was watching my task manager as I played. On my 4k @60fps on the Very High graphics settings and the GPU was spiked at 100% the whole time (GTX 1660). Sounded like the propellor was in my computer room. On my 1440p monitor are @75fps I was at Extreme graphics settings and GPU was at 40%.
I also been running the task manager, mostly to check when it seemed to hang it was using 100% of the transfer with the hdd, didn't look at gpu usage though, will have a look the next time.
Loads times don’t bother me, it’s the really buggy aircraft systems that do. Multiple times I’ve gotten the avionics bugged out where they flat out don’t respond anymore. Autopilot also flys like a drunk.
First thing you should do though is disable live traffic and no online players. It greatly improved performance for me. Visuals are amazing now.
First thing you should do though is disable live traffic and no online players. It greatly improved performance for me. Visuals are amazing now.
Your system is pretty underspec’d for anything other than 1080p on this game. It runs pretty smoothly on my 3950X/2080 TI. 4K is bit underwhelming, running between 30-40 FPS. But I’m expecting that to improve a fair bit when the RTX 3xxx cards come out.
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To be honest, I expected the AI to be a lot better and nuanced. It‘s good enough but does not catch a lot of things who should be obvious based on satellite and street view data. I think the google data would be a better source than bing but I understand the issue there.
Can I ask a different question, putting the scenery apart, is it a decent flight sim?
It's a very good (and new) simulation model. The issue is that it's pretty buggy, and performance is varied. I think there is real potential for it to be optimised into being much better (very poor use of multi core CPU for example), but that's a pretty fundamental rewrite you'd need for that. That it isn't built with DX12/vulkan is again disappointing and I doubt will be something that's addressed in an update, though I'd love to be proven wrong!
It’s probably the best flight sim to date. I see huge potential for addons to leverage the map data. Perhaps an arcade mode to make it more accessible to casual gamers.
Overall maybe, but I'd say the jury's out on the flight model vs X-Plane, and it (currently) doesn't model airliner systems quite to the level of the payware X-plane airbuses or the Zibo boeing. It really crushes X-Plane on weather currently.
Apparently yes. I watched a few pilots on YouTube that were beta testing and praising the way different planes behave as highly realistic.
Yep, there’s just the usual post launch bugs from complex systems. If you’re just flying GA then it’s for sure the best out.
I feel like Microsoft needs to take this a step further and just put the simulation on the server too.
Considering their current global footprint (latency) and the fact that the game already requires a massive amount of always-on bandwidth, it would seem like this is a less painful conversation in this case.
Considering their current global footprint (latency) and the fact that the game already requires a massive amount of always-on bandwidth, it would seem like this is a less painful conversation in this case.
With some hilarious results:
https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg
Notice the little porches added by the AI. It's actually impressive how good the 3D models turned out.
https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg
Notice the little porches added by the AI. It's actually impressive how good the 3D models turned out.
What is the explanation of what happened there?
It can be OpenStreetMap again (like the obelisk).
There's a tag for museum aircraft, 'historic=aircraft', but the tiles rendered for openstreetmap.org don't show it, so people add a tag saying it's also a building.
It's only a theory, I haven't correlated a picture from the game with matching data.
Here's an example from the USS Intrepid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026
There's a tag for museum aircraft, 'historic=aircraft', but the tiles rendered for openstreetmap.org don't show it, so people add a tag saying it's also a building.
It's only a theory, I haven't correlated a picture from the game with matching data.
Here's an example from the USS Intrepid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026
If I had to guess it's an AI going wild on some kind of military (swept wings?) airfield - they looks like plane's but I'm assuming the AI system they use assumes everything not terrain is a house or a road or similar.
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I think this is a quite impressive piece of tech, especially the AI generated landscape, flora and fauna.
Of course there is always a gap to 100% accuracy, this is the case with every AI model I know, no matter what domain. I wonder how they measure accuracy here?
I don't have Flight Simulator, but someone on Facebook posted a screenshot of a friend's house in a suburban area in Florida, and I duplicated the image in Google Earth. It's just one data point, but here's what I noticed.
- The water looks better in Flight Simulator. A large pond has ripples and reflections in Flight Simulator but it's just flat in Google Earth.
- Trees and houses look better in Google Earth. Flight Simulator put trees in the middle of a house and in the middle of a street, and they seem a bit more crumply.
- Neither one gets palm trees right. On a major road with palm trees next to it, Flight Simulator turned them into green stalagmites and Google Earth didn't model them at all, leaving them as flat shadows on the ground.
It seems like if you like good-looking water or clouds (which Google Earth barely has) then Flight Simulator would be better, and obviously clouds are important for flight simulation. But if you just want to see the sights, Google Earth is pretty good and Flight Simulator isn't necessarily going to model things better.
- The water looks better in Flight Simulator. A large pond has ripples and reflections in Flight Simulator but it's just flat in Google Earth.
- Trees and houses look better in Google Earth. Flight Simulator put trees in the middle of a house and in the middle of a street, and they seem a bit more crumply.
- Neither one gets palm trees right. On a major road with palm trees next to it, Flight Simulator turned them into green stalagmites and Google Earth didn't model them at all, leaving them as flat shadows on the ground.
It seems like if you like good-looking water or clouds (which Google Earth barely has) then Flight Simulator would be better, and obviously clouds are important for flight simulation. But if you just want to see the sights, Google Earth is pretty good and Flight Simulator isn't necessarily going to model things better.
Half the point is the delay of gratification. If you want to see the different islands of Hawaii, there will be some downtime while you're cruising.
The tension starts building once you get closer and closer, until you finally get to see the absolutely epic view.
Comparing Google Earth vs Flight Sim is the same as watching 3D images of hiking trail end points vs actually walking through the trail.
Comparing Google Earth vs Flight Sim is the same as watching 3D images of hiking trail end points vs actually walking through the trail.
I guess, but in practice, wouldn't you speed up the simulation for the boring parts? Can't you put the plane wherever you want and start flying?
Lots of folks here saying “it’s impressive but...”
The game was probably released faster than what one would expect from a super polished title, but the game is still extraordinary. The visuals are superb, the detail is spectacular (I can see my real house with our pool as I fly over), the mechanics are incredible for a base flight simulator (lots of stuff you’d normally pay extra via addons for), and the game has been out less than a week.
They’re going to make the game better, and if you’re into flight simulators it’s a super easy purchase.
I went into this week with high expectations and my expectations were greatly exceeded.
The game was probably released faster than what one would expect from a super polished title, but the game is still extraordinary. The visuals are superb, the detail is spectacular (I can see my real house with our pool as I fly over), the mechanics are incredible for a base flight simulator (lots of stuff you’d normally pay extra via addons for), and the game has been out less than a week.
They’re going to make the game better, and if you’re into flight simulators it’s a super easy purchase.
I went into this week with high expectations and my expectations were greatly exceeded.
> if you’re into flight simulators
I think this will be a problem a bit - apart from initial WOW effect, not that many people are into civilian flying. Its way too complex for casual gamers and learning curve is almost vertical, you need ultra-expensive hardware (how many want to spend 1000s in covid times?) and to be honest, non-combat realistic flight sims are really not for everybody, I would say not for most gamers.
People rave about details, but plenty of places look on similar level as if I would take google earth's built in flight sim - I am talking about what I've seen around Mont Blanc, not exactly a remote place. Yes, few more nicer buildings and slightly more detail, but that's hardly enough for non-geeks.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, it is a fantastic game in its own tiny little niche and I am sure most issues will be resolved over time, I just think nowadays that niche is pretty small and won't expand that much because its not something that's easy to grasp and have fun quickly.
I think this will be a problem a bit - apart from initial WOW effect, not that many people are into civilian flying. Its way too complex for casual gamers and learning curve is almost vertical, you need ultra-expensive hardware (how many want to spend 1000s in covid times?) and to be honest, non-combat realistic flight sims are really not for everybody, I would say not for most gamers.
People rave about details, but plenty of places look on similar level as if I would take google earth's built in flight sim - I am talking about what I've seen around Mont Blanc, not exactly a remote place. Yes, few more nicer buildings and slightly more detail, but that's hardly enough for non-geeks.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, it is a fantastic game in its own tiny little niche and I am sure most issues will be resolved over time, I just think nowadays that niche is pretty small and won't expand that much because its not something that's easy to grasp and have fun quickly.
I will agree that it’s definitely a niche and not everybody likes it, that said you really don’t need thousands of dollars of gear to enjoy it. The breadth of controller support is actually one of the most incredible aspects of the game to me - Basically everything is supported including an Xbox One controller. I’ve actually used the gamepad a little bit and it was a perfectly enjoyable experience. I think you would get more out of it with some more specialised gear. For less than 100 bucks you can get a perfectly good joystick and yoke combo that will give you quite a bit of depth.
I wish I had a PC powerful enough to run it. It sounds amazing looking at all the memes.
I've been watching a few unboxing videos on youtube where MS has sent influencers a box with the Deluxe Premium Ed (comes with 10 DVDs for install) with full HOTAS controls.
(Even after the install there's a 19g download update.)
I wonder if everyone who gets one has a system with the specs to run it?
(Even after the install there's a 19g download update.)
I wonder if everyone who gets one has a system with the specs to run it?
I have an 8 year old workstation as a gaming PC, with a 3GB GTX 1060, and a 2.5" HDD as a data drive, and it works fine for me on medium graphics at 1080p.
Yeah, I'd only seen a spec list from a guy playing max setting on 4K.
But he was on a brand new stupid level hardware PC.
But he was on a brand new stupid level hardware PC.
This game has been a ton of fun for me. The load times are annoying, but it runs well for me most of the time on my two-years-ago-it-was-high-end PC (6th gen i7, 1080 not-TI, m.2 drive, 16Gb RAM). I managed to find my 10 year old flight stick from when I played FSX and thats been great as apparently this game has caused a flight stick shortage. I would recommend people try it out, I have not encountered any game-breaking bugs (except for maybe the rudder control being weird but that could be the aforementioned flight stick). My recommendation is lower the sensitivity way, way down. I have mine at -60% on all axes. Medium graphics look pretty good too.
Microsoft Flight Simulator's (69,99€) AI is so good they'll charge you not to use it!
The Deluxe Edition (89,99€) includes everything from Microsoft Flight Simulator plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
The Premium Deluxe Edition (119,99€) includes everything from the Microsoft Flight Simulator Deluxe edition plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
The Deluxe Edition (89,99€) includes everything from Microsoft Flight Simulator plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
The Premium Deluxe Edition (119,99€) includes everything from the Microsoft Flight Simulator Deluxe edition plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.
Or, you can pay $1 and use it for one month via xbox game pass for PC, or $5 if you’ve already used the $1 offer in the past.
I’d strongly recommend this if you’re not very sure you’ll like the game.
I’d strongly recommend this if you’re not very sure you’ll like the game.