• mbtrhcs@feddit.org
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          1 month ago

          because the earth is big and you don’t have a hard drive big enough to store it locally?

                • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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                  1 month ago

                  Imagine you would save all YouTube videos on your hard drive. You don’t have enough space for that (and time to download anyway). So the next best thing is to just stream those videos and parts you actually watch.

                  And this is kind of how this game works; it will only deliver those parts and download in the background (which is called streaming) what you currently visit and need. Because you don’t have enough space on your drive.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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          1 month ago

          Live information from the earth like weather and other data. If its raining in your city, then it will be raining in the game at this place too. Plus the game does not have all other data anyway, because entire earth is too big for your drive.

          • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            It’s not weather, it’s terrain and textures. It’s a high resolution stream of where you are flying over so you don’t need to keep the earth on your PC. The base install is supposed to be only ~30GB data, that’s not enough to see your house.

            • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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              1 month ago

              It’s dumb. I’d much rather have a 500GB install. They might as well just make the game a streaming service. It also ensures an early death for the game and no functionality without an internet connection.

              • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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                1 month ago

                I don’t think requiring online functionality is the death knell of a game in the year 2024. Personally, I’m excited. Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install and I hated MSFS2020 taking up a quarter of my game drive.

                • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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                  1 month ago

                  I 100% disagree. Any game that requires connection to a remote server for single player functionality is dead to me. And any suggestion otherwise I take personal offense to.

                  This makes your local game dependent on someone else’s server. That someone else, at any time, can shut down that server with zero consequences. They can change the terms of the deal, with zero consequences. Their servers may unintentionally go down or experience other technical issues, depriving you of the product you paid for, with zero consequences. Also you simply cannot use it away from an internet connection.

                  You are at the mercy of the provider, who has absolutely no legal obligations to you.

                  Their servers were so damn slow to download on initial install

                  And you can’t see why that would be a massive problem while trying to livestream your game from their server?

                  • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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                    1 month ago

                    Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.

                  • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.ca
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                    1 month ago

                    The CDN to download the initial files were slow, the in game streaming was fine.

                    Yes, ownership sucks these days, but I don’t know how they’d technically pull this off as well without using a remote server. As a philosophy, if we’re purchasing games the only real choice is GoG, anything else ends up with us locked into some server-based licensing system.

                  • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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                    1 month ago

                    No one said anything about a digital representation. I can draw Earth in MS Paint and it’s like 1mb.

                    If your point is that it has a high resolution digital image of the Earth, just say that.

                    But my point still stands. I’d still rather have a 500GB local install instead of all the problems that come with game streaming.