Oddly? This is not odd at all.
It’s been a while sincce I wrote code, but I’ll try to remember. Basically disk size and ram size have no connection. Disk size is for already generated assets (maybe you need to remember how the planes look like, so you create assets for all the planes. Or you want to have textures for the scenery, or for the Lincoln monument, or whatever).
But then you need to load those resources into RAM to access them faster, because if you try to load them directly from disk, it’s a lot slower. So some part of those 64GB of RAM is because you are loading some premade assets.
But aside from this, there’s also dynamically generated data that you have no way of knowing about at the beginning of the program, so you can’t prepare in advance and generate assets for it. Like say for example the player wants to begin flying the plane - he’s gonna have some different inputs than any other player. Maybe he drives slower at the beginning, or goes a little to the right when he takes off. Or his destination will be completely different. You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane’s weight and who knows what else, I’m not a pilot. All of this, you allocate memory dynamically, based on user changes, and this uses the RAM as well.
Not to mention - you can make a 1kb program that takes 64 GB of RAM. You just ask the operating system for that much memory. You don’t even need to fully use it. It’ll take you one line of code.
All this to say - nothing odd about the program being smaller than the RAM requirements. It can mean it’s not optimized, but it can also mean it has a lot of dynamic calculations that it’s doing and a lot of stuff it needs to remember (and in the case of a flight Sim this wouldn’t surprise me).
You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane’s weight and who knows what else, I’m not a pilot.
You’re not wrong per se, but I’m having trouble fathoming gigabytes of data being consumed by these types of parameters. You could probably track hundreds of thousands of airplanes with that much space. The only thing that I could imagine taking up that much memory is extremely detailed airflow simulation.
However, as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of memory data for video games is in most cases textures and geometry, and not so much the simulation. Based on the article, it seems this game streams high resolution geometry data based on your current location on earth, which I would say is the most probable reason it asks for so much memory.
lol i remember when you’d get called an idiot for installing 16 gb ram
I remember being asked what I needed 64 MB of RAM for. My answer, of course, being “because I can.”
after years of dealing with emm386 trying to get ultima 7 to run on DOS, i always bought all the ram i could afford. fuck all that “you don’t need that much” bullshit
I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much
It probably streams the content during play.
Oddly? The game needs ram to store data like variables that the game generates, like physics simulations, among other game systems. The game’s asset size alone doesn’t really matter.
Nah, most of the space is filled with textures in a graphical game. Which is odd in 2:1 RAM:disk ratio, since most of the textures are in ddx nowadays, a format the GPU can use 1:1. You can’t really compress ddx.
They’re taking ram, though not vram.
30GB plus unlimited data streaming while using it…
That said, I suppose one plus is that this hopefully wont need as many 10+GiB updates literally right when I finally have an hour free and want to play it.
30GB to install then 100+ after you open the game and it downloads updates and scenery. Same deal as 2020.
I’m thinking 30 before opening the game and then 100+ after.
Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning
There are some 3d demoscene programs that use miniscule amounts of disk space but still need a fair bit of memory for working space.
That’s exactly what they’re doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.
Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.
I doubt it’s pulling in massive amounts of data.
But the maps data it does pull in will be messed about with, a bunch of trees splatted all over it, buildings extrapolated, water flows, etc. That’ll be what’s taking the RAM.
The actual flying seems like the least interesting part of this game, and what they’ve really made is Google Earth on steroids.
Yeah, the Google Maps equivalent that you’re flying around in is the massive amount of data. The flight sim part isn’t insignificant, but the massive amounts of canned data will be all those maps.
The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
I’ll admit I haven’t played much (or possibly even any?) online MSFS stuff and am generally just a fart around in a Cessna in a random city type of player so I don’t even necessarily know what the online features are, other than the Install New Locations minigame wherein you spend hours downloading shit, heh.
Live weather, live traffic, multiplayer traffic, and photogrammetry are all disabled in offline mode.
My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
Also… this is the kind of game that kind of requires a “live service” element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
But it is a really good game for the time being
Call me when it’s a really good game forever.
Just because downloading everything would be tedious doesn’t mean you take the option away entirely from people who would like to be able to play the game they paid for past the point Microsoft decides they made enough money
FS 2020 reportedly already used 2 PB of data as it’s base. Good luck downloading that!
Leveraging something they already run makes a lot more sense than building a bespoke thing for streaming the data for just MSFS. (In my defense, it is a game and game devs have done much sillier things than doing something like that.)
I just have begun to accept that I’m not the market for games anymore, because I’m unwilling to buy something that is most probably going to end up broken some point in the future once there’s no more money to be squeezed out of it.
I’m just very opposed to renting entertainment because everything is temporary.
(Thankfully there’s ~30 years of games to play that don’t suffer from any of this live-service-ness so I’m not exactly short of things to spend time on.)
You must really hate going to the movies. If I spend $60-70 on a game and get 50-100+ hours of entertainment from that money spent that’s a dub in my book.
If someone enjoys flight simming it’s not really a question, they will buy this game because it’s one of the best all-around sims.
Rant but mostly venting to the void - reply to both you and parent comment, my thoughts:
I have games that are 20+ years old that I’m still clocking gametime in. Games with dedicated communities, still-going multi-player, mods, game improvements…
If a game becomes intentionally unavailable, I - and everyone else - should get a full refund. Full stop, no exceptions, no bullshit store credit. Money back in my account. You don’t expect someone to repo your phone, car, or house after 3 years of “ownership”, why is literally anything any different?
In current times, I’m super pissed at The Crew getting axed, and I plan to only yarr content published by ubi now. They can’t be trusted, so it’s not my fault, but theirs.
I have unannounced/anticipated games on my radar that I’m already planning on ‘wait, see’ or ‘only the base game’ because I see the shift to ‘lease ownership’ and ‘everything is a bundle of parts’. Current games that I have thousands of hours in, but due to bugs, cheating (with no response from devs), added after-purchase ‘packs’ when I bought the fancy bullshit version to have the “whole game”, etc that I now value at 1/5th of the full asking price I paid - I’m tired of this garbage. Being a “beta” (alpha, in some cases) early access guinea pig is not a fucking perk. Promises of content later is not a fucking perk. Always online is not a fucking perk.
Game time isn’t the only metric; for me, at the bare minimum, the game has to be good - I shouldn’t fight a game every step of the way to draw enjoyment from it (related: stop trying to use players’ in-game creations to prop up the game itself and it’s core content) - and it has to remain mine, forever. Maybe I’m getting old, but at least I’m not a fool. A purchase is a purchase, not a temporary allotment.
And (because why not) I fucking despise going to the theater. Other people are annoying, can’t pause the film to take a piss, sticky/cum-soaked floors adhering fuck-knows-what to your shoes, noisy phones going off, $12 for a midday showing + a snack and drink is another $9. If you go to a fancy theater, you can order a microwaved burger and fries right from your seat for only $31. They cannot go away fast enough.
Games used to be $20, you got the full game, forever, sometimes with multi-player that you can host yourself, forever, sometimes with free DLC, forever. Now they want $80 and are trying to say that they have the right to take it back and still keep the money. Fuck em all. Except indie devs. But I’m watching you.
Anyway. That was cathartic. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Quick! Name one thing that has nothing to do with the other and make that your headline!
_
Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
This game feels like the perfect candidate for streaming from XCloud/GeForce Now since all those data doesn’t really need to be transferred all the time. And the game’s design can tolerate a bit input latency.
Rememeber how “no one will ever need more than 8gb of ram”? Up until fairly recently (a few years ago) you could not talk about anything having to do with ram online without someone coming along and being like “ACKTCHUALLY no one needs more than 8gb of ram for anything even gaming”.
Just to provide some context as someone who played the hell out of 2020 (on gamepass) and is looking forward to buying 2024 minute 1 and then figuring out how to keep a cat from fucking up a HOTAS sled for minutes 2-900:
The install is small because that is just the core game. Theoretically, that is all you need and it contains the meshes/logic for meshes and plane textures and so forth. You will then stream map data as you play and cache that. So the first time you take off at Pyongyang International it will take a bit of time to load but subsequent trips will be super fast.
That said… you will almost assuredly download the world packs. This is the much more hand crafted cities and airports so you can genuinely feel like you are flying over Paris or escaping from London Heathrow’s international terminal and so forth. Or just to fix some weirdness because of a building layout near a river. And those world packs get big.
Before I switched over to linux for full time gaming? My PC install of MSFS 2020 was probably 100-200 GB on its own just from all the updates?
That’s not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.
Microsoft is to memory as the conquistadors are to Central America.
Most games, most textures are compressed, which leads to something like Diablo 2’s remake having ridiculous load times considering it’s a simple reskin of a 20 year old game. That 30GB footprint probably gets unpacked to something twice the size, and if you’re caching literally every single thing for the sake of smoothness (flight sims rarely have loading screens when you enter another country’s airspace or a different biome), and a little bit of overhead for OS etc, gonna need heaps of RAM
