kinda… graphics all end up as polygons eventually but 3d tile rendering has a lot of different considerations and limitations you don’t have with rendering a normal 3d asset rendering. check out things like CesiumJS that is an equivalent kind of technology
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Decq@lemmy.world 7 months agoYes, just like msfs does. They still use polygons and shaders… Polygons that make up the terrain and more and shaders that sample png tiles as textures… And much more
LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world 7 months ago
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Other games store those png tiles locally. Which, sure, increases the installed size of the game. Storage is cheap though, might as well use it right? Like, even if this article is off by an order of magnitude, 8Gb/h is still a ton of data to stream just to play a video game. If other games also do that, that’s news to me. But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking. Storing all your texture tiles in the cloud and making your clients download and redownload them seems the opposite of efficient, or at least that they optimized for the wrong thing.
Decq@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed, but it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game… I don’t get why this is so hard to grasp.
Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it? No you don’t, you let the program figure out which parts you actually need and stream it to you. Same exact thing, fot the exact same reason.
Games try to be as efficient possible with their network code for real-time updates, so latency is minimalized. This is not at all important if you prefetch stuff minutes before you actually need it.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?
Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?
Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.
No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.
You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.
Decq@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play? Or only stream what you actually need when you play while you play?
You do that by, hear me out, playing! And the game figures out where exactly you want to play and what you need. Besides, it probably will be an option to preload anyway but I don’t know enough about MSFS. And in the case of preloading, you would hit the exact same data cap.
Yes and you only don’t fly everywhere in game that you would have to download in these preloaded chunks/regions you’re so happy with. If you just intend to the same location, the streaming will stop! Because, everything will be cached…
So you cancel your ISP subscription ever time you finished downloading a game, movie, whatever? No you keep paying so you might as well use it. And if you a data cap, I’m sorry for you. That’s a real bummer. But, I don’t know why i have to keep repeating this point, the amount of data is at worst the same! (if you have enough storage to keep it all in cache) If you don’t want to use more data don’t fly to regions you haven’t downloaded yet… But this is the exact same as with preloading…
AlotOfReading@lemmy.world 7 months ago
A highly compressed, global base map at 1m resolution is somewhere on the order of 10TB. MSFS is probably using higher resolution commercial imagery, and that’s just the basemap textures, most of which you’ll never see.