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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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3d terrain tile streaming takes a crazy amount of data. it essentially downloads hundreds of png files at a time and overlays them over 3d terrain data. Everytime you move an inch or pan the camera, it pulls down new data.
That seems like a wildly inefficient way to render things
MSFS implements optimizations on top of that (progressive detail, compression, etc), but that's how almost all map systems work under the hood. It's actually an efficient way to represent real environments where you don't have the luxury of procedural generation.
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?
it's not the same. 3d games use polygons and shaders and whatnot. you can optimize things much easier in that space since it's a lot more computational. 3d tiling is literally a bunch of png files being streamed down.
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.
Other games store those png tiles locally. Which, sure, increases the installed size of the game. Storage is cheap though, might as well use it right? Like, even if this article is off by an order of magnitude, 8Gb/h is still a ton of data to stream just to play a video game. If other games also do that, that's news to me. But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking. Storing all your texture tiles in the cloud and making your clients download and redownload them seems the opposite of efficient, or at least that they optimized for the wrong thing.
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.
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
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.
K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you're gonna need to store it locally anyways?
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.
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.
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.
A highly compressed, global base map at 1m resolution is somewhere on the order of 10TB. MSFS is probably using higher resolution commercial imagery, and that's just the basemap textures, most of which you'll never see.
The world they built for the game is hundreds of terabytes, it's really the only way to do it without forcing players to preload tiny chunks of the world and restrict their flight to only the ones they've downloaded.