Comment by daly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daly | Hacker News Reader

Oh but you're going to miss that pretty screensaver... You know, the one that says (<sarcasm> "Do you like what you see?" </sarcasm>) ... NO, I LIKED THE WORK I WAS DOING

I bought a new computer. I bought the Flight Simulator 2020. The flight simulator wouldn't work. MS Support said to update Windows, which I did. FS2020 worked... for a week. Then MS Support said to update Windows to 2004. The whole update took about 6 hours, time I would like to have spent flying.

Of the 3 weeks I had FS2020, a FULL DAY was spent on the phone with MS Support, with the ONLY change being a new, updated Windows. 24 hours of "support" spread over 3 weeks. 3 work days I could have flown.

FS202 is an amazing program. But it won't run if (a) the remote license check fails (b) the operating system isn't up to date, (c) the wifi is down, or (d) FS updates aren't applied.

Would you keep a great car if (a) it wouldn't start if the owner's manual wasn't up to date? or (b) it wouldn't start because your lease isn't up to date? or (c) the onboard computers weren't the latest update? or (d) the wifi was down? I'd get rid of the car, no matter how good it was.

I got rid of FS2020. I now have a sweet Linux install.

If you value your time, your work, or your money... Don't use Windows.

I got massively down voted in another forum for critiquing FS2020 for being "self-important", for want of a better word.

For example, take the FS2020 downloader. Instead of using the game-store downloader, with its highly optimised CDN and streaming package format, they wrote their own downloader.

Okay, fine. Let's accept for a moment that perhaps Steam, or XBox, or whatever couldn't handle the enormous size of their game, despite being roughly the same size as COD5 or Doom Eternal and that the FS2020 team needed the game to load faster to "deliver a good experience".

So the FS2020 team clearly spent effort to write "something better". That something better was atrociously bad. So bad that the game immediately earned the nickname "download simulator", because that was the experience most users had of the game for the first 24-49 hours or so.

It took 5 hours to download on gigabit fibre internet. It should have taken 30 minutes!

The FS2020 downloader makes every mistake possible to make in a downloader. It's synchronous. It downloads tiny files. It doesn't use a local CDN. It decompresses files after downloading them in a single thread, without downloading anything during this time. It downloads the base game and then the patch separately, instead of the pre-patched version. It doesn't recover from interruptions properly.

I could go on and on.

Someone in the development team of this AAA game decided that they know better than the people that operate the Xbox content distribution network.

It's arrogance born of ignorance.

The "self-importance" problem is truly endemic today, to the point that it embodies some kind of natural law. It is easier to extract value from users if you subjugate them.

For instance I find it absurd that to use a VR headset - effectively no more than a gaming peripheral, along the lines of a TrackIR but fancier - I need to buy in to several software "markets", create several accounts, submit to installing invasive spyware on my machine, and endure regular multi-gigabyte forced updates that don't improve the experience at all. It's completely out of proportion.

FS2020 was a 3d worldview tech demo that got smashed up with the FSX14 flight code. The 50 pounds of mush got shoved into a 40 pound sausage casing and then shoved out the door.

To think Microsoft had any real planning on this product is wishful thinking.

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