Microsoft Flight Simulator

[pinholestar]

'Straya World Update out now.

 

 

 

[Harrisown]

why does this game take so long to load. surely it's the worst offender in console history.

[Meers]

9 hours ago, Harrisown said:

why does this game take so long to load. surely it's the worst offender in console history.

 

Even if it's installed on the SSD?

[Gotters]

Looking forward to flying over the Aussie cities and landmarks now they've had the world update magic applied to them.

 

I'm a sucker for paid content in this game like no other, couldn't resist the extreme weather presets in the store for a tenner, gives you 50 presets they claim can't be replicated thru just manipulating sliders - I'm intrigued to see what the weather engine is capable of in this.

[K]

The loading times on Xbox are unreal. It’s not so bad when you’re loading into the game from the main menu, but if you’re booting from scratch, the initial load takes forever - several minutes, it feels like. 

[layten]

3 hours ago, Meers said:

 

Even if it's installed on the SSD?

I have it installed on a very fast PCIE4 SSD and it still takes an excruciatingly long time to load.

[Stanley]

3 hours ago, Meers said:

 

Even if it's installed on the SSD?

There’s no other way. 

[Meers]

3 minutes ago, Stanley said:

There’s no other way. 

 

Well my laptop's out of SSD space so I have it installed on the HDD. Can you imagine my pain?

[Stanley]

😬

[Meers]

15 minutes ago, layten said:

I have it installed on a very fast PCIE4 SSD and it still takes an excruciatingly long time to load.

 

That's horrible. As I said, I've got it on the HDD and it takes about 12 minutes to load. Shocking to read that it's still slow on an SSD.

 

Still faster than a C64 though!

[layten]

7 minutes ago, Meers said:

so I have it installed on the HDD

[Meers]

2 minutes ago, layten said:

 

[Valver]

12 minutes ago, Meers said:

 

it takes about 12 minutes to load.

 

You could play and *finish* one run through of this entire game in the time it takes to load MSFS 😆

 

Keeping this thread more on topic - that Oz world update trailer looks *gorgeous*!

[footle]

2 hours ago, K said:

The loading times on Xbox are unreal. It’s not so bad when you’re loading into the game from the main menu, but if you’re booting from scratch, the initial load takes forever - several minutes, it feels like. 

 

Assumptions:

- From looking, it seems like most of the files are individual XML files and all those get parsed on every startup.

- If they're also validated, then XML schema validators are, and remain, slow - particularly if you're not reusing a session for each type of file but loading all the schema in every time.

- Also some checks to some slow external servers.

[metallicfrodo]

The one advantage on the Xbox is that it does at least seem to quick resume pretty well (assuming there hasn't been an update).

[K]

Quick resume definitely makes it a lot more tolerable. For some reason, the game seems to stay in the Quick Resume buffer more consistently than other games, which drop out unpredictably, and doesn't seem to glitch out the way other games sometimes do.

[NoVisAnima]

4 minutes ago, footle said:

 

Assumptions:

- From looking, it seems like most of the files are individual XML files and all those get parsed on every startup.

- If they're also validated, then XML schema validators are, and remain, slow - particularly if you're not reusing a session for each type of file but loading all the schema in every time.

- Also some checks to some slow external servers.

XML! Well that explains a lot. That has been the root cause of our simple webservice slowdowns. Someone should take the time to convert that shit to literally any other format.

[footle]

11 minutes ago, NoVisAnima said:

XML! Well that explains a lot. That has been the root cause of our simple webservice slowdowns. Someone should take the time to convert that shit to literally any other format.

thing is they could convert them all to some internal binary, then just check modification times. But they don’t, so there must be something else going on. 

[Gotters]

I think I saw a video when this was launching on consoles that talked about how much legacy tech is in the game from previous versions, they didn't start with a clean slate.

 

IIRC they were talking about how the dashboards for planes was some sort of proprietary in game browser of sorts that was very fiddly to code for, I've always thought the load times must be variants of this legacy tech issue.

 

It makes so little sense to me that it takes 3-4mins on X series to get to the first menu but I can load up a major city like London from that menu and be flying in what seems like 30s-1m.

[NoVisAnima]

If it is XML i don't think it can be stated just how bad the overhead can be especially if there is any binary data in base64 in there. I've witness some shockingly bad performance handling that stuff.

An internal binary can make sense unless the data is designed to be loaded differently for different environments. It's also "human readable" but JSON is better on that front and has fewer overheads in my experience.

If it's doing any online server shenanigans that can always give some excuse for loading times.

I guess we can guess that it's not storage speed limited and my internet says it's not limited on that front. I would say that it is either server side limited or doing a single threaded nonsense maybe involving repeated `reallocs` which waste CPU cycles.

Just a guess.

[PikaStu]

Am I right in saying DX12 mode is now available? If so, has it improved performance? Last time I tried VR it ran like shit (RTX 3070). 

[CrichStand]

Had my first proper go on this today and it’s totally blown me away. Turned off all the hud and flight aid stuff then just took off and hit the skies, with the intention of finding where I live. Had no idea where I was or what direction I was heading in but then came up with the idea of sticking Google Maps on my iPad and figuring out my location. Felt like an episode of Treasure Hunt or the Interceptor. “I like it Mikey”!!!! Lol.
 

Eventually managed to figure out I was near Carsington Water due to its shape, then using Google Maps and matching it up to what I could see in game, figured out my way into the Peak District following the River Derwent before going fully Dambusters and skimming over Lady Bower. Flew through Matlock Bath, Chatsworth and onto Crich (Crich Stand is missing though.....pfffft), before finding the tiny village I grew up in......which is represented really well, with all the tracks in the hills and valleys and stuff. Absolutely bonkers! Then just flew for ages taking in the sights and ended up at Manchester. The graphics, the scale of everything, especially considering I’m playing on the Series S and it runs flawlessly.......just breathtaking. Possibly the most “nest gen” experience I’ve had so far. 
 

Next trip......divebombing Narrow Moor and Derwent Water in the Lakes!

[Boozy The Clown]

I can't recommend the Scottish Highlands and Lochs at dawn and dusk, highly enough.

 

 

[CrichStand]

On 09/02/2022 at 20:37, Boozy The Clown said:

I can't recommend the Scottish Highlands and Lochs at dawn and dusk, highly enough.

 

 

Will have to give that a go!

 

It has to be said.......this game is fucking astonishing! Been doing little flights using Google maps on my iPad and just checking stuff out. Took off from a random airfield yesterday, and headed to where I live. “Fucking hell, it’s a bit windy like! Shit, can’t see anything with all the huge storm clouds and rain”. Next minute, in the real world the heavens open outside and the wind picks up. I’m literally flying into the same weather on the game, as the real weather outside my window! Next minute, the clouds clear and the sun comes out on both the game and in real life. Mind blown! Lol.

 

So then I decided to try a discovery flight. Opted for New York. Now this probably sounds weird as all fuck, I mean I think it sounds pretty fucking weird.......but it’s true. Was flying over New York, my jaw pretty much on the floor at the graphics and the scale of what was onscreen, the huge clouds drifting by, the sun hitting the water, at how it’s genuinely fucking photo realistic and then.......BOOM........I had this massive wave of empathy hit me. Felt really moved like you sometimes get with an amazing film or piece of music. I was like......”man, look at this place, all the millions of people that are down there day after day, going about their business, living their lives.......and we’re just tiny grains of sand on an enormous beach stretching out to infinity. Look at how blue the water is, the suns rays, the vastness of the clouds........we’re on a fucking massive lump of rock hurtling through space.......and it’s absolutely astonishing!!!”.
 

I then detached the camera from the plane and pulled it back, going higher and higher and higher up through the clouds, the sound slowly falling away, until I was finally up above the clouds and there was just the white noise of the wind left. It was like some kind of trippy near death experience. Now that’s proper next gen!

 

All that from a flight sim! Lol. Like I say, absolutely astonishing game.

[RJames]

On 17/02/2022 at 23:19, CrichStand said:

Will have to give that a go!

 

It has to be said.......this game is fucking astonishing! Been doing little flights using Google maps on my iPad and just checking stuff out. Took off from a random airfield yesterday, and headed to where I live. “Fucking hell, it’s a bit windy like! Shit, can’t see anything with all the huge storm clouds and rain”. Next minute, in the real world the heavens open outside and the wind picks up. I’m literally flying into the same weather on the game, as the real weather outside my window! Next minute, the clouds clear and the sun comes out on both the game and in real life. Mind blown! Lol.

 

So then I decided to try a discovery flight. Opted for New York. Now this probably sounds weird as all fuck, I mean I think it sounds pretty fucking weird.......but it’s true. Was flying over New York, my jaw pretty much on the floor at the graphics and the scale of what was onscreen, the huge clouds drifting by, the sun hitting the water, at how it’s genuinely fucking photo realistic and then.......BOOM........I had this massive wave of empathy hit me. Felt really moved like you sometimes get with an amazing film or piece of music. I was like......”man, look at this place, all the millions of people that are down there day after day, going about their business, living their lives.......and we’re just tiny grains of sand on an enormous beach stretching out to infinity. Look at how blue the water is, the suns rays, the vastness of the clouds........we’re on a fucking massive lump of rock hurtling through space.......and it’s absolutely astonishing!!!”.
 

I then detached the camera from the plane and pulled it back, going higher and higher and higher up through the clouds, the sound slowly falling away, until I was finally up above the clouds and there was just the white noise of the wind left. It was like some kind of trippy near death experience. Now that’s proper next gen!

 

All that from a flight sim! Lol. Like I say, absolutely astonishing game.

This inspired me to boot it up again - I forgot how astonishing it was. Just flew around where I'd recently been in the Lake Distrcit.
What sort of view/s do people use to see amazing places?

The fact I don't have any really decent joystick set up puts me off playing but just with a gamepad+keyboard last night was actually totally fine.
Then of course it crashed after 20 mins, but eh.

I think it's the one game where undervolting my CPU/GPU is harming stability.

[Gotters]

Since the updates on Monday my X-Series version of this has been locking up and struggling with the content manager and updates.

 

Taken me several days to narrow it down but seems it was not liking something in World Update II for the US, I was able to delete that content then baby sat it applying just one world update at a time and the few other bits  and eventually its 100% fully updated.

 

I think I put more time into the updates for this in the last few days than I've spent playing several games I paid full whack for. I've also not actually flown one minute.

[K]

The game seems to be in a bit of a state at the moment. I had the same issue downloading the world updates, and I've got another issue whereby I keep getting the 'bandwidth too low to use photogrammetry' warning. Big cities like London & New York look awful, because it takes 10+ seconds to download the detailed models of buildings, so unless you pause the game and wait for the streaming to catch up, you end up flying over a smeary surrealist nightmare. It seems have started with the last update.

[Kevvy Metal]

Edit: wrong thread

 

[Venice Cull]

No matter what 'time of day' I set, I always (well, last night), seem to be flying at night. Nothing I do in the settings seems to make a difference. Anyone experienced this? (I'm going to assume I'm doing something wrong, but in case its a known bug or something...)

[Boozy The Clown]

Switch off live weather then you can adjust time in game on the weather drop down menu.

 

Have you downloaded the offline part of the game ?

 

Check in game management games and apps >mfs>Start> manage game and add ons .