Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.

The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.

A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.

I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.

MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.

I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.

That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.

So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.

GTA 5 require 120GB of disk size, not 500GB. And this include everything, game engine, assets, and the whole area. https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/203428177/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PC-system-requirements

Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.

This shows they’re not trying very hard to optimize the simulator, but instead throw hardware and bandwidth at it, and expect users do the same.

Open world games like GTA allow flying over dense areas without using 180Mbps of bandwidth.