Microsoft Flight Simulator (MS FS 2020) [XBSX|S]

Please forgive me for accusing you of committing such a heinous crime......

 

Did it actually win game of the year?

 

I think its just a marketing term and nothing else these days regardless if it wins or not

 

If you didn't know, MSFS went on sale -20% on Steam today, at least here in the US. This apparently coincides with Sim Update 6, which I presume carries (among the mountainous pile of other fixes) all the cool performance upgrades which the Xbox Series got a month earlier. I caved and now I'm downloading 150GB of nonsense in the background as I type this

If you're a PiHole user, you might find a few more URLs you need to whitelist, or at least I did.

 

Then they really undersold themselves, if truth is not necessary
They should of called it Microsoft Flight Simulator: Game of the 21st century edition

 

They actually won multiple "Game of the Year" awards.

Microsoft Flight Simulator Awards & Nominations | Asobo Studio

Regards,
SB

 

Ouch. Yet another update that need to be applied in game than via store?

 

So I understand Brit's general point, however I still agree with orangelupa: why can't (for example) I let Steam download that bigass world update in the background while I'm doing something else? Instead I have to start of MSFS (which isn't fast to begin with) and then dork around with "selecting" the items to download, and then sit and wait for MSFS to get it all pulled down while I ... drink another highball of bourbon I guess?

I wish MS allowed for world updates in a different way, outside of having the game fully loaded front-and-center. C'mon Microsoft, I'm on a modern Windows OS. Let me use the built-in BITS client like you already do for Windows and Office and Visual Studio updates.

 

Ugh.

Just to drive this point home even more, Steam pulled down ~310Mbytes of update for MSFS today when i went to look. Took all of about ten seconds on the Fat Fiber, yisss...


So I launch MSFS, and before I can literally do anything with the game, here's a mandatory 2.6Gbyte download:


After this crap is done, only then will I be able to download the Australia world update. That's just some bullshit...

So I've got the update, now I get to wait for it to apply or install or whatever. Note task manager in the foreground -- zero percent of my 5950X, zero percent of either of my Samsung 980Pro NVMe drives, and some trickle of something through my fiberoptic gig internet pipe. It's been like this for about ten minutes. Why can't this just happen in the background?



Aaaand it finally progressed. Just to make sure nobody is confused, now I can get into the marketplace and download the Australia world update! Yup, another 2.5GBytes after the 2.9GBytes I've already downloaded between Steam's update and MSFS's mandatory update. Sweet!


Aaaaand now I can go ahead and update all the other package updates (dont let the size statements mislead you, the stated sizes are the installed sizes, not the "update" size) which I'm entitled to -- another 3.3GBytes. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not unhappy at all with the space consumption; big games are precisely why I have a two terabyte NVMe disk! My incredulity is forcing us to sit here and watch it rather than a background process applying it while we do something, anything else with our lives.

 

I'm guessing this is a bandwidth issue, or more precisely Valve may charge extra fees if users of your game download over a certain amount of data (excluding the base game install) in a given period of time. When the data is downloaded through the app rather than through Steam then it goes through whatever servers the app. developers choose rather than having to go through Steam's servers.

This is pretty common for games which have frequent large updates. Warframe does large downloads through their app (launcher) rather than through Steam. FFXIV also does all of its large updates through their app. I guess this is a situation where having a 3rd party launcher is actually "good" or at least not "bad". Then instead of having to have the game open to receive large updates, you instead only need to have their launcher open.

Microsoft and Sony also do this (or used to do this) for games on PlayStation and Xbox which is why some developers were very reluctant to offer frequent large updates of their games and thus users of some games from certain developers would have to suffer with some pretty bad bugs for weeks or months until all the fixes could be rolled into one update and for that updated to be tested so the developer could be sure they wouldn't need to have yet another update soon after that one. That was all a combination of each update having to be submitted for certification by Microsoft or Sony and then on top of that any additional fees for large downloads.

At least on the consoles, I think it's loosened up a little bit with some developers allowed to host content and thus update downloads on servers of their choice (FFXIV was one of the first to get a special exemption from Sony for this IIRC).

Regards,
SB

 

Sure, I can agree with that. So then why can't Microsoft permit these downloads over the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) in the same way Windows, Office and Visual Studio updates are processed?

#Lame

 

Haha! Thank you @BRiT for cleaning up my replies I was posting them as they were happening, which admittedly made for a bit of a messy posting style.