Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has "overwhelmingly negative" Steam reviews due to launch issues, including endless load times caused by server issues.
  • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    21 days ago

    God I love having a future where my ability to play a fucking flight simulator depends on both internet access and server reliability.

    Completely unnecessary to boot. Store a low res copy locally, offer the high res as regional packs. 0 reason to stream this data in.

      • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        For low res, no.

        Hi res, sure. Make it optional, or let players download the region they like. Or just the airports with much lower res landscapes, etc etc.

        Or just, let them have it all and make these choices. Memory is CHEAP nowadays. If you’re a flight sim enthusiast, a few terabytes for the map data is the least expensive part of your setup by far.

  • Artyom@lemm.eeEnglish
    17·
    21 days ago

    Kinda wild that their previous flight simulator was met with near flawless reviews across the board, then the complete opposite for the immediate successor that probably shares 90% of the same code.

    • lustyargonian@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      21 days ago

      I think the issue was precisely that. They didn’t plan for the surge of users coming in on day one and whatever cloud hybrid system they have for this game got overwhelmed. We’ll get to know about the game’s actual quality a week from now I guess.

  • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    21 days ago

    Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.

    X-plane 12 is looking better and better.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      20 days ago

      This is one of the most dumbest Parts of this game, everyone’s complaint of the last iteration was the massive download times, and the inefficiencies in the game causing it to lag even on high end systems. And their solution to that was to increase the specs that it’s required to run the game and require a high speed internet on top of that? They more or less made it so anyone running satellite internet can’t buy their game and anyone that lives in like 70% of the US that still has absolute dog shit internet speeds couldn’t even imagine playing it. My mom still has a 5/5 mbit/s, that’s the fastest anyone offers in her area, even downloading the previous game took ages there’s no way in hell I’m going to recommend her buying this game

  • tourist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    21 days ago

    game was too hard for my smoothie brain

    also the AI voice actors are kinda rude and sound very bad by today’s standards

    the engine is off
    you left the brakes on
    stop fucking with the egg yoke I swear to god I will BSOD;you

    anyone have recommendations for flying games that were made for dipshits like me?

    • barryamelton@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      21 days ago

      Sims are a captive market: all enthusiasts just buy it once, and there’s limited number of enthusiasts. Companies either have finite money and resell the same sim again and again with a different coat of paint, or over promise and under deliver. Long gone are the days of a company that doesn’t need to be profitable (like Microsoft with the early flight sims, made at a loss to showcase and sell their OS), and games are more expensive to make nowadays, not less.

      To break a captive market you either increase customers (not gonna happen, in fact simmers and interest in aviation is trending down compared with the 80s and 90s), or remove the market part altogether.

      Removing the market is the solution: be need an open source sim for the community by the community. Sims and libraries that can aglutinate all work done in academia, gaming, and different styles of sims under one umbrella, bringing a symbiotic work that is way better than the separate parts. We need to pull a Blender.

      We are in 2024. Sims suck. They are barely multi threaded. They reimplement all planes again and again, losing all info in what they falsely call themselves “a sim museum”.

      We can do better.

        • barryamelton@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          21 days ago

          In soul yes , in reality no. I mean:

          • Something with a cutting-edge game engine like Bevy: Entity-Component-System architecture, Rust, immensely multi threaded, new graphic tecnhiques like Meshlets (same as nanite tech from UE5, the other only game engine I know that has it), physically based rendering, highly performing, customizable, with good multiplayer capabilities, using new techniques of software engineering (it’s not the 90s anymore).

          • Something with a community that embraces collaboration and the new tools (again, it’s not the 90s anymore). Git forges, chat platforms, RFCs.

          • Something that from the game engine to the flight models is open to be reused across academia, different types of sims such as land vehicle sims, civil aviation sims, combat sims. Something that wants to foster that kind of relationships.

          All of this is possible, but not particularly easy. It doesn’t need to start big, just with libraries and utilities for academia and developers that one can build on top of.

          Hence why I think the formula is “Bevy + Blender + some Copyleft licensed parts (GPL) + Community”. I’ve given quite the thought to the topic, and a custom ECS engine is paramount. One that is designed for working collaboratively and not by in-house devs with UI tools for it. One that is massive in the cutting edge of tech and at the same time easy to collaborate on remotely. That is Bevy: the shortcomings (no UI tooling l for now) don’t matter for Sim games, as we normally need just one model in Blender, rigid animations, and no level editors. It also is written in Rust, is performant, a bliss to work on iteratively and grow the size of, and people are actually looking forward to work on for free, contrary to C++.

          Whatever we do, the best we can do with fellow enthusiasts is recognise that sim games are a captive market. This way we can change the Zeitgeist, and move away our attention from the hype and drama of this companies (Microsoft, DCS’s eagle dynamics, IL2’s 1C), and into collaboration.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
    3·
    21 days ago

    If anything this reflects badly upon Microsoft’s cloud business. Dynamically spinning up enough servers shouldn’t be an issue nowadays.

    • Voytrekk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      21 days ago

      It’s a consistent issue for Microsoft releases. You would think a company that sells cloud services would be capable of having a smooth launch.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        21 days ago

        One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is “the cloud”.

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        21 days ago

        There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what’s provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.

        • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          21 days ago

          There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts

          Well yeah, that’s why you would put some cloud experts on the project besides the game devs if you’re doing things like this. It’s not just game developers working on the game.

          Doesn’t even have to be people feom the Azure team. Microsoft has plenty of resources to teach someone to be a cloud expert in other branches, they even offer certifications for outside people, surely they can manage a few of their own.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.

      This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        01·
        21 days ago

        Hey you! You with your logic and reasoning and reading the issue notes from developers. You aren’t a real gamer, get out of here with that! We’re here to dogpile on a new game here!

        • superkret@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          21 days ago

          From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
          Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn’t able to deliver what was promised in exchange.

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      21 days ago

      I’d say it’s more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.

      The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don’t let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft’s systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.

    • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      21 days ago

      the cloud services are probably fine, their willingness to actually use the resources for a game may not be.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        The asset streaming requirements are insane- they recommend having a 150mbps connection for a smooth experience with 50mbps as a minimum. Microsoft says they only planned for 250k players at launch, which is stupid considering FS 2020 had over a million sales at launch…

        • andyburke@fedia.io
          2·
          21 days ago

          ✋ Hi, person here who bought 2020 but refuses to buy 2024 because they didn’t deliver on half their promises for 2020, including that it would be the last sim they sold.

          Maybe they were suprised this many people actually signed up for their next level bullshit. 🤷‍♂️

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    20 days ago

    After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.

    The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.

    I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run

  • Matriks404@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    There’s a new flight simulator? Shit, I still haven’t played the one I bought like a year or two ago.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    45·
    21 days ago

    Let me guess,it doesn’t work on Linux.