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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

tbf, the initial download screen is so bad I can't believe it was actually coded by a microsoft studio. It's a 120GB download, so I thought ok, I'll just play some other game in the meantime, right? Nope, they forgot to check if the application is in the foreground and check for button presses even when the download window is minimized, meaning that when I play something else pressing "A" on the controller presses the "help" link on the download screen, opening a new browser window and microsoft help page. So....nope, I can't play something else while Flight Simulator is downloading its data, because whoever coded it doesn't know basic principles of input capture on MS platforms.

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The downloader itself also just doesn't meet the level of quality I'd expect Microsoft would want before putting their name to something. Microsoft is meant to be all about cloud, and this seems to be a single threaded downloader, pulling one file at a time, then decompressing it. Once it's decompressed fully, it moves into the next file.

It's not a deal breaker for me - I just left it running for a couple of hours, but the process seems sufficiently fragile that many people had quite serious problems getting it to download.

I'm not a game dev, but it feels to me like there's a few areas where FS falls short of what I'd be expecting as Microsoft. I'd want it to be responsive and start quickly (at least presenting something on the screen), and I wouldn't want it to be using full GPU in the menus. Teething issues are to be expected, but the downloader is critical and it's the first experience people have. A shame they didn't use some more reliable file transfer tech (or even just thread it!) The general lack of multi core use on the sim is definitely quite disappointing though for a 2020 release that's doing lots of general calculations and other tasks that benefit from threading.

I am a gamedev and that's one of the reasons why this screen is so annoying :-) It's just basic stuff. Not to offend anybody(we were all there at some point) but it feels like it was coded by an intern or a team who had nothing to do with the main project. For whatever technical reason they had to have a download screen separate from the main game, so someone quickly added a single threaded downloader with basic input - still, I have no idea why it's using so much GPU just displaying some text.

Yeah, I can understand wanting the downloader to exist outside of the game (so they can update a broken game out-of-band) - that's all reasonable.

The issue is, as you say, a single-threaded "download-extract-next" flow... It's 2020 and that's what we'd expect from a 90s game launcher. Steam and other game launchers/downloaders can all saturate an arbitrarily fast network connection. Heck, even Windows Update (BITS?) can do this well. A shame Asobo wasn't able to leverage any of this.

The amount of GPU is indeed strange - I think there's more than meets the eye here. There seems to be a lot of HTML/JS type stuff in the UI here, and I wonder if they are doing some kind of GPU-based full-screen rendered surface, rather than just having a simple oldskool Windows Forms app that does the downloading without GPU acceleration.

As I said in my other comment just now - the GPU usage is completely broken. When in foreground, the downloader uses about 15% of my GPU, but in the background it takes over 60%. It's just written very very poorly.

> The general lack of multi core use on the sim is definitely quite disappointing though for a 2020 release that's doing lots of general calculations and other tasks that benefit from threading.

Ugh, yeah as a VR flight sim enthusiast this is just sad. Essentially every semi-realistic flight sim on the market is main-thread bound even on high-end on modern CPUs. I was really, really hoping that MSFS2020 would finally be the modern engine sim we've been waiting for so smooth VR flight could be enjoyed.

Ok, the download screen is even more broken than I thought. I'm using a GTX1080Ti, and when the download screen is in the foreground, it's using about 15% of my GPU(still stupid, for a static text screen, but whatever), but when the application is in the background.....it's using 60% of my GPU!!! So it's literally burning about 200W of GPU power just to download some files. And all because they probably forgot to enable a framerate limiter on that screen when in the background. Mind boggling.

Sheesh, I had the 15% usage issue as well when in the foreground of the downloader (and also wondered why it was using GPU to show a basic screen). I never popped it into the background to see that. I wonder if the lack of framerate cap could be to blame, ramping GPU to max...

Quite strange, as in the tech world we normally super optimise the initial onboarding user experience. Especially when many will try FS through Gamepass, it seems strange to not focus on the "onboarding ramp" to try and convert and retain users.

Yeah, it's bad, and it's the first thing you see as well. But it's not "negative review for the whole game" bad. I just muted it in Windows in the volume mixer (although I bet a lot of people don't know you can mute individual apps). I didn't notice your input problem but that sounds pretty annoying.

No, of course, I wouldn't go an review the entire game based on that one screen, but yeah, it's a pretty stupid thing to have right at the beginning as every single player will see it before trying the game.

Yeah for sure, even just having a download inside the game after downloading the "game" is pretty strange. When you uninstall it via Steam, those files don't go away automatically either, so now you mysteriously have 90GB less hard drive space. Gives me the feeling that things were pretty rushed up to release.

That's okay as long as they store that 90GB of data in the My Documents folder. The next OS Update will delete it all for you.

You can control the volume of individual applications from the volume center on Windows. Shouldn’t be necessary, but I assume that would probably work.

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