Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#81

Post by tpmx »

joezydeco wrote: post #55
tpmx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#82

Post by tpmx »

racingmars wrote: post #62
tpmx wrote: post #10

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 optimi…

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…

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. ;)

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#83

Post by garaetjjte »

g_p wrote: post #79
garaetjjte wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% GP…

>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.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#84

Post by tpmx »

alkonaut wrote: post #76
tpmx wrote: post #10

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 optimi…

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.

So true.

But it's also so, so tempting.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#85

Post by tpmx »

mrcarrot wrote: post #71
ornitorrincos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#86

Post by tpmx »

g_p wrote: post #79
garaetjjte wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% GP…

> 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.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#87

Post by g_p »

garaetjjte wrote: post #83
g_p wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% GP…

>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…

> 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.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#88

Post by g_p »

jimnotgym wrote: post #16

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!

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#89

Post by TylerE »

Stevvo wrote: post #75
ppod wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

X-Plane's flight model is unquestionably better.

I think that is very questionable.

X-Plane handles some edge cases better for sure, like stall/spin.

The feel of MSFS is much much much more real... like how there's always a little bit of turbulence.

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI

#90

Post by [deleted] »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #3
bitxbit wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN