The current Microsoft Flight Sim is gigantic. My install folder is upwards of 300 GB and I’m missing a few terrain updates
Why does the terrain take more (much more) bandwidth than a video stream?
And what the heck do you mean they’re “streaming the terrain” surely it would be a one and done date transfer, much smaller than a live video packet stream, that amount of bandwidth is insane, you could do multiple 4k streams.
Canadian_Cabinet@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
It is detailed terrain for an entire planet, and figures are at around 10Mbps for just terrain without buildings.
Assuming you’re flying at 800kmh in something like an airbus A380, you’re flying 13.3km each minute, uncovering a large part of a new circle/sphere of terrain with a radius of 13km (half of it overlaps with old already-downloaded terrain). That’s half of 555km squared of terrain. That’s a lot of terrain. If you want that terrain to be fairly accurate, you’ll want to see at least meter accuracy near the plane (if you’re near the ground you’ll want to see one datapoint of terrain per meter or more), with lower levels of detail as you get further away. Add onto that things like the placement of trees, bushes, rocks, and all the texture data of the terrain (probably an index into existing possibly procedural textures), and you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be transferred.
10Mbps seems pretty fair for all of that.
Also terrain data is updated regularly, and you might not want to keep around old terrain in the first place. There are reasons like players only flying some routes once and never again, and if you save all of mozambique for someone who actually only flies around in the US that’s bad too.
Sylvartas@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Because it is more data I guess ? Also probably has to use lossless compression, if it can be compressed at all. Whereas video compression algorithms are usually pretty damn lossy
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
because 1) the figure in the headline is only the most extreme figure they found. 2) the image generated by your GPU is only one perspective of the entire 3D environment. There is much more data in entire 3d model especially in dense areas. And 3) cloud streaming videos are also heavily compressed.