My gut feeling? Probably something nafarious.
My proof? Decades of feeling like people were up to shady shit. Being told I have no proof, and to shut up, and then they later prove it was shady shit.
But hey, that 2003 Iraqi invasion TOTALLY saved the world from a nuclear blast, right? It couldn’t have just been a series of government lies. The government wouldn’t start a war, and kill young 18 year old men without a clear and proven threat, and have a solid plan in place to end that threat.
I’m 41 years old. I was two weeks away from turning 18 when 9/11 happened. By 2002 I smelled something fishy. I told my friends not to sign up to serve. I told them something was up. I was called a coward, and that George Bush was the president of the USA. He wouldn’t lie to the nation about something so serious.
And now, 20+ years later, I’d just like to tell you how we still find the time to get together a few times a year, share some beers, and laugh about how wrong they were. How foolish they felt when Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how during the Obama years it was leaked that the Bush administration even knew it was bullshit at the time they said it.
I’d LIKE to tell you we do that…but they’re all dead. Some killed in action, others came back with PTSD and killed themself. The end result is the same. I grew up from kindergarten through high school with boys that became men, and always were my brothers. Now I have half a dozen anniversary dates that I visit gravestones.
Ok, granted I got off track and forgot what the topic was. This game isn’t that serious. But I still smell something up. It’s probably running a crypto mine rig on your CPU in the background or some data harvesting farm, or something.
Again, no proof, but I smell bullshit.
Well then you shouldn’t have gotten rid of the big bacon classic! That would be like McDonalds getting rid of the BIG MAC, and replacing it with the double quarter pounder with cheese…except no condiments or toppings besides 8oz of BIG MAC sauce, and calling it the “MAC ATTACK”.
AND WTF HAPPENED TO YOUR SPICY CHICKEN??? ITS LIKE HALF THE SIZE NOW! LIKE AN OVER GROWN CHICKEN NUGGET!
I haven’t had Wendy’s in at least a decade. You are telling me that they destroyed the spicy chicken sandwich. Maybe the best fast food sandwich of all time? This is a shock to me that I might not recover from.
Well, I can’t conceive anything other than streaming 4K satellite terrain data that could take up that much data and be nefarious. This is download activity, not upload, so I don’t see it being like a botnet or something.
But how much data does it take to send terrain information? Why not just send the picture of the terrain every moment (stream it) rather than whatever they’re doing?
That would require Microsoft to do something like running a 1:1 local render of everything the player is doing in their sim, for everyone playing the game, at all times. And then they’d have to stream that video feed to the player and somehow make sure the elsewhere-rendered terrain is synced up perfectly with the player’s local game. Doesn’t really seem reasonable.
Data vs compute
It’s easy to send all the data in an x mile radius of the players position. Or to identify the players position, speed, camera angle, etc. render it all, compress it, and then send the computer, rendered, video fees.
Because it requires computing power from the GPU to translate the terrain into an image of the terrain. They’re using your local GPU for that since GPUs are expensive, and also it minimizes latency between control input and view update. If you turn the camera you want that new view immediately, not 200ms later.
I think he’s 's onto it that people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator are actually flying real life drones and bombing civilians without knowing, just like in Ender’s Game.
Time will tell
Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?
Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.
So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.
