It probably streams the content during play.
It definitely does, it pulls satellite data of the whole world
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
Interesting—D2R only had 1-3 seconds’ load time for me! Was it bad on consoles without SSDs?
Nowadays 2 seconds is an eternity considering M.2 drive speed and DDR4 bandwidth. Baldur’s Gate 1 for example, nothing is compressed and load times are in single digit milliseconds. Sure BG1 is loading like 1/8th the stuff but load times are 1/300th
There’s actually a program people use for D2R to unpack textures and it cuts load time significantly, but the install and the uncompressed files have a massive footprint
The hardware and bandwidth demands of the first game were why I stopped playing it. I had a machine that could run it (and an even better one now) and internet that could handle it, but it still just wasn’t a smooth experience. I don’t have a cap on my internet data but my speed isn’t particularly high, which meant the 80-150gb per week of data the game consumed was certainly felt.
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Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.
Your 32gb can do a lot and will still let you do a lot for a reasonable timeframe. No need to worry.
this situation reminds me of this interesting study: https://www.eoblab.com/_files/ugd/06b6e1_2e2b75f5053f40729dea921c758b8fec.pdf
lol i remember when you’d get called an idiot for installing 16 gb ram
Can’t have too much, but you can have not enough.
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
My server has around 156GB RAM.
Do I use most of it? Nah.
Why then?
Cuz it was free from work and I wanted to hit the amount from Weird Al’s “it’s all about the Pentiums”
I wanted to hit the amount from Weird Al’s “it’s all about the Pentiums”
I don’t remember anything about 156GB RAM in that song…
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don’t read spam
Ah, gotcha. Well I guess I’ll just settle for 128GB then.
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?
Casual FS2020 enjoyer here, what changes have you the most excited for 2024?
And .kkrieger is 96 kilobytes and uses around 200MB of RAM iirc.
The demo scene was always technically amazing
JavaScript developers hate this one weird trick!
Great. Now I’ll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.
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.
Technically correct, but if I’d have any input into hiring a person whose background involves making a flight simulator requiring 64GB RAM, that doesn’t emulate every mol in that plane for that cost (I’m exaggerating a bit), I’d ask many questions.
So… Sid Meier?
Sigh
It requires 16GB RAM, which is perfectly acceptable. But it can use more if available, for high res textures I assume. Which are streamed from Microsoft’s servers, explaining in part the difference between install size and max memory requirements.
My guess is the big video ram is high resolution textures, complex geometry, and a long draw distance. I honestly don’t know much about video games though.
The smaller install is totally the map streaming stuff. I’m unsure quite why it has to be so big, but again, I don’t know video games. I do recall you having to tell it where you want to start from and it’ll download some stuff there.
Pcs are clearly inferior, that’s like 32gb on a Mac. /s
Comparing a person computer to another personal computer
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”.
Well, I even remember discussions if 640k is really necessary or if 512 is ok.
flightgear better
Is there any reason to choose MSFS over Flightgear other than simply being unaware of the latter’s existence?
I don’t know that other one, but what hooked people on MSFS was the AI terrain made from satellite images letting you fly from anywhere to anywhere, and some capitals are handmade.
They also added missions based on the previous games to celebrate the series history.
Oh, it’s a game now? Back when I dabbled with it (early 2000s) it was a simulator as the name says. Flightgear is an open source simulator that, according to pilots, feels more realistic.
I think it’s always been a game too, even the first editions had missions alongside free flight.
I mean, yes, as I’m sure you know already. Flightgear is a fine product and lots of respect to the contributors, but the support around MSFS, the level of detail and whole host of other factors make MSFS the one to beat; even if the flight model of XPlane is probably a tad better.
malloc knows no limits.
Except
SIZE_MAXI suppose 🙄
