Decq

joined 2 years ago
[–] Decq 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've never really like the convoluted docker tooling. And I've been hit a few times with a docker image uodates just breaking everything (looking at you nginx reverse proxy manager...). Now I've converted everything to nixos services/containers. And i couldn't be happier with the ease of configuration and control. Backup is just.a matter of pushing my flake to github and I'm done.

[–] Decq 3 points 1 week ago

I dont know what study it is or how they define general purpose technologies. But i do miss a few world changing discoveries in that list. Like modern medicine/vaccines and radio/telecommunications. Although that last one might fall under electricity? Though I feel like it should be it's own thing.

It kinda feels like a subjective arbitrary list

[–] Decq 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Sure its not perfect but if they can narrow it down from a few million people to just a few 100/1000's that makes fibding someone much easier .

[–] Decq 43 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

No, they could pinpoint you just by dna of relatives. Hence why the whole 23andme is such a terrible idea.

[–] Decq 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

My 10 year old machine can do that. No need for internet. Just set an end time. I would think basically every washing machine could do that unless you get the cheapest model around?

[–] Decq 14 points 1 month ago
[–] Decq 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?

Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play? Or only stream what you actually need when you play while you play?

Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?

Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.

You do that by, hear me out, playing! And the game figures out where exactly you want to play and what you need. Besides, it probably will be an option to preload anyway but I don't know enough about MSFS. And in the case of preloading, you would hit the exact same data cap.

No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.

Yes and you only don't fly everywhere in game that you would have to download in these preloaded chunks/regions you're so happy with. If you just intend to stay in the same location, the streaming will stop! Because, everything will be cached....

You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.

So you cancel your ISP subscription ever time you finished downloading a game, movie, whatever? No you keep paying so you might as well use it. And if you a data cap, I'm sorry for you. That's a real bummer. But, I don't know why i have to keep repeating this point, the amount of data is at worst the same! (if you have enough storage to keep it all in cache) If you don't want to use more data don't fly to regions you haven't downloaded yet... But this is the exact same as with preloading..

[–] Decq 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Thats why there is a cache, so you don't re download every time.. So only new locations you visit will be streamed, but it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game... I don't get why this is so hard to grasp.

Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it? No you don't, you let the program figure out which parts you actually need and stream it to you. Same exact thing, fot the exact same reason.

Storage is cheap

So is bandwidth. 8gb/h is only 2mb/s which was maybe a lot 25 years ago. These days you can't even get a connection slower than 50/100mb/s

But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking.

Games try to be as efficient possible with their network code for real-time updates, so latency is minimalized. This is not at all important if you prefetch stuff minutes before you actually need it.

[–] Decq 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

Yes, just like msfs does. They still use polygons and shaders.. Polygons that make up the terrain and more and shaders that sample png tiles as textures... Msfs really does not do anything different than other games, outside of streaming in the assets instead of pre-installing them. Not sure why people think it's any different.

[–] Decq 7 points 2 months ago (9 children)

That's literally how every 3d game works (barring a few procedural games maybe). Now they just stream those texture and meshes as needed and presumably cache them.

Don't get distracted by this terrible piece of an article. It never states how long this peak was. It could have been just 100ms. So interpolating this to 81gb/h make no sense at all. It's just pure click bait.

In the end only the total volume downloaded matters (which the article of course doesn't mention). Why wouldn't you want to receive that as fast as possible?

[–] Decq 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

First of all, the textures probably are already compressed, so compressing them more doesn't do all that much. Secondly, streaming is just downloading, so you can just compress the stream. Sure you might lose a little bit of compression possibility when you don't present it as one big archive. But that probably saves way less than the tricks I mentioned before.

They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.

No they did not, you have to download it either way.... And streaming the render output is not at all the same as rendering locally on your own PC. Neither as an user experience nor as a cost benefit for Microsoft.

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