Technology

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?

malloc knows no limits.

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

lol i remember when you'd get called an idiot for installing 16 gb ram

Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning

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.

Microsoft is to memory as the conquistadors are to Central America.

I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much

Great. Now I'll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.

Quick! Name one thing that has nothing to do with the other and make that your headline!

_

Pcs are clearly inferior, that's like 32gb on a Mac. /s

Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.

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".

flightgear better

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.

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).

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.

And .kkrieger is 96 kilobytes and uses around 200MB of RAM iirc.

Is there any reason to choose MSFS over Flightgear other than simply being unaware of the latter's existence?