this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
137 points (97.2% liked)

Games

32631 readers
1337 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours 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.

[–] ocassionallyaduck 40 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that end up being hundreds of gigabytes per region file?

[–] ocassionallyaduck 8 points 3 hours 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.

[–] DuckWrangler9000 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

This is what happens when you have monopoly status. They're too big to fail.

[–] barryamelton 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Deway 1 points 34 minutes ago* (last edited 34 minutes ago)

be need an open source sim for the community by the community.

You mean something like FlightGear ?

[–] [email protected] 72 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

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

[–] Voytrekk 54 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] CosmoNova 1 points 1 hour ago

Reminds me of Amazon Games' disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at launch.

[–] halcyoncmdr 18 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 hours 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.

[–] ampersandrew 15 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours 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!

[–] acosmichippo 16 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

✋ 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. 🤷‍♂️

[–] dual_sport_dork 11 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the "last Windows," too. We know how their track record goes on that.

I've had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it's served me pretty damn well so far.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

they promised Windows 10 would be the "last Windows," too.

Iirc, they didn't. There was one person who didn't really have the authority to make such claims say something that could have been understood as win 10 is the last windows.

I hate to defend Microsoft, they're an awful company, but this just was never really true.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Your not wrong. I worked for the company, and we were told that it wasn't actually true like 6 months after launch. I had been communicating it for .o the to my clients.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

"This is the last time, baby. I swear!"

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod 11 points 10 hours ago

I bet the beancounters don't like keeping excess capacity ready to go

[–] halcyoncmdr 6 points 10 hours 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.

[–] JusticeForPorygon 11 points 9 hours ago
[–] tourist 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (4 children)

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?

[–] TheBat 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

anyone have recommendations for flying games that were mae for dip shit likee lik m

Ace Combat?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Ace combat is dope but I had to use my flight stick to make it playable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

VTOL is better, but you hafta have a good VR system :c

[–] sailingbythelee 11 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Wooki 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

DCS is amazing much higher fidelity sim but its at the complete opposite end of easy.

[–] sailingbythelee 1 points 3 hours ago

Haha, yes, I was being cheeky. :)

[–] breadsmasher 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Wooki 7 points 8 hours ago

Most renown as a cloud storage provider for classified military documents

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

I was surprised at the long load time initially and had a quick fly of an A10 warthog from a local small airfield.

This was on my Xbox Series S and it was a bit stuttery in places. It's clearly not meant for this console. This is for the pcs with big GPUs.