K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?
Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play? Or only stream what you actually need when you play while you play?
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.
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.
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.
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 stay in the same location, the streaming will stop! Because, everything will be cached…
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.
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…
Getting strong Gone with the blastwave vibes