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ETA on terrain patch?


Nercon

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After release, that future separated maps installation will also be available to download (not only in dvd format)?

I hope so because to receive something from outside Europe in my country is a flood of taxes, fees, months on custom fee services, etc etc etc and with my internet I can download even 100GB in a row without any issues.

 

Thanks Ssnake for doing a so great work!

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The download option is likely, but undecided yet. It really depends on how large the sum of all converted maps will become. At this point I'm hard pressed to make a final statement. In any case the price of a separate map installer on a DVD set will be low, under $20.-, which would typically fly under the radar of customs where they often have a value threshold for an import (in Germany it's somewhere around 40 EUR).

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I understand and know that exist associated costs to have a large amount of files in a server to be available to be download like bandwidth limits, electricity and maintenance costs, etc.

Here because our "lovely" laws, we not have a minimum and always spend months on custom services. For a 20€ order I need to pay around +60€ (totaling over than 80) for handling+shipment+vat+fees+customs, so as you can understand is very unfair and frustrating paying like almost 4x more to fill the belly of burocrats.

 

So if it is a pain to have the free download, I think a fee of 15€ its a very fair price for a very large amount of download access and I don't mind to pay that 15€ fee to have access to that data for download way and I fully understand. But Please, don't do dvd only!

Thank You!!!

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I hope a download version will be available if not it will be a no go for me. My country now have new customs laws and then after all the extra $$$ and extreme paper work the customs/mail office steals lot of stuff so I hope for a pay download version. If not bye-bye new maps for me :|

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ohhhh yes, I even forgot that thing, the stolen side. Its true, in my physic orders 2x I was stolen from them and need to re-order again. And many others situations I received damaged things because their dirty and no care hands searching the interior to try to find if exist there illegal things (or something that is nice to steal).

 

The traditional physical distribution is dead since long time in many digital entertainment sectors, see the modern consoles, steam, ..... for example x-plane11 is around 60GB to download and no issues to do it.

So Ssnake, please, in modern times of fast internet, take all this into consideration and gave us an option for also download and with a tiny paid fee.

Edited by stavka
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The coming update for 4.019 (new terrain engine) will be free.

It was always intended to be part of the initial 4.0 delivery, but we had to pull it and go back to the drawing board as our initial UI concept for handling the (much larger) map data turned out to be impractical.

 

What's being discussed right now is how we're making the map data themselves available. This depends a bit on how much there will be, in the end. If the amount of data are too large for making a download impractical - mind you, I don't expect this to happen - we may be forced to offer it as a DVD set, and producing and shipping those DVDs costs money. You COULD convert all the legacy maps by your own for free. But it would take a few days of computing time (like, all CPU cores at full blast for an entire weekend, plus possibly running out of disk space). So, that's not really what we recommend either. So, depending on the practicality a DVD set at the cost of material, shipping & handling (and nothing else) might turn out to be the solution. HOWEVER, I have to repeat that, I expect us to offer the map installer as a separate download, for free.

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Some people here don't mind to pay for a download, please think to add that option also! A storage for big data being available to download, even TB, is more cheaper than DVDs+Handling+Shipping, not to mention the risk of post service stolen, vat (here is 23% without minimum limit), custom fees, etc

Exist multiple large storage solutions: google cloud, amazon s3, microsoft azure, dropbox, ....... only to mention a few

 

My internet speed that is very common here is +120Mb/s, from my ISP, the newer solutions are around 200Mb/s, so big downloads its not a big deal. If people have internet issues they have the DVD solution, but for others that have very good internet, paying more to vat, taxes, etc and with multiple risks associated is a bit frustrating.

 

Some time ago I got a peninsula Iberia scenery for xplane flight sim, it was +300GB, in modern times no one will send it on DVDs, if you use the dual layer DVD 8.5GB it will be 35 DVD that's completely non sense to send them.

Today if the size is small is almost cheap or even cheap to send it through internet, if the size is huge, is more cheaper through internet than a tradicional DVD, not to mention that many times is impractical like the example above for very large amount of data.

 

If the total maps are huge, I'm fully open to spend a small fee to help pay the cost of an online storage to have that data available through a download ;P

 

Thank You!!!

 

Edited by stavka
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I'm with stavka ^_^ maybe two options DVD or Blu-Ray (with shipping cost) + download (with some kind of server cost for download) 

 

Of course 100% free is better ;) but if that is finally a no go... I will pay my download.

 

Thanks for the details Ssnake!

 

 

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What kind of map sizes are we talking about here? Because 50 to 100 gigs of download shouldn't be a problem for us living in western Europe if you are not bogged down by your connection speed. In US I understand that people often have a limited amount of data they are able to download in a month. Sure downloading tens of gigs of data is frustrating but it's not something that can't be done. It wasn't that many years ago when I had to leave my PC on for the night in order to download a few hunderd MBs worth of data.

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1 hour ago, Rosmarus said:

What kind of map sizes are we talking about here? Because 50 to 100 gigs of download shouldn't be a problem for us living in western Europe if you are not bogged down by your connection speed. In US I understand that people often have a limited amount of data they are able to download in a month. Sure downloading tens of gigs of data is frustrating but it's not something that can't be done. It wasn't that many years ago when I had to leave my PC on for the night in order to download a few hunderd MBs worth of data.

One of the first things I did on the internet was to download (with a 1200 baud modem) the shareware version of Wolfenstein3D (728kb(!)). it took me forever (on a Compuserve connection, 12 DeutschMark per hour). When it was finally finished the zip file was corrupted ...

 

Jens

Edited by jens198
typo
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2 minutes ago, jens198 said:

One of the first things I did on the internet was to download (with a 1200 baud modem) the shareware version of Wolfenstein3D (728kb(!)). it took me forever (on a Compuserve connection, 12 DeutschMark per hour). When it was finally finished the zip file was corrupted ...

 

Jens

I remember hoping no one would pick up the phone between the hours of 1am and 6am so I can finish downloading a Steel Panthers patch.

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4 hours ago, Rosmarus said:

What kind of map sizes are we talking about here? Because 50 to 100 gigs of download shouldn't be a problem for us living in western Europe if you are not bogged down by your connection speed.

 

A surprisingly large fraction of European citizens are still in rural low bandwidth areas with 128kBit or less. The assumption that "everybody" in Western Europe is on DSL or cable connections is demonstrably false. Sure, people could visit the next big city and go to an internet cafe, D/L the maps, and burn them to DVD there. I'm not saying that there are no solutions. Some people also like collectible items.

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On 8/22/2017 at 5:35 PM, Ssnake said:

The coming update for 4.019 (new terrain engine) will be free.

It was always intended to be part of the initial 4.0 delivery, but we had to pull it and go back to the drawing board as our initial UI concept for handling the (much larger) map data turned out to be impractical.

 

Whoops, I was confused myself. I removed my post to prevent further confusion. :$

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Last numbers I saw from 2015 and it was 75% of US and 76% of EU had broadband at greater than 200kB speeds.  I see this all the time that urbanites and tech people online think everyone must have fast internet connections.  There still large swaths of the US and Europe that don't even have reliable mobile phone coverage.

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OK - so from what you say I can understand that services like: Netflix and HBO will not succeed, because of the bad bandwidth in Europe. Nor will people back up their files online.

And what a pity that steam will die and games like the ARMA series can't be downloaded :):) 

http://www.speedtest.net/global-index

This link shows another side of the story. I do realize that it present a country average and that many countries have black spots, my own inclusive (DNK).

 

So I kind of get it (not the same as understand it), that esim just don't think that offering a download option is a good idea. But what about a flash disk?

As mentioned before many modern laptops doesn't have a DVD drive - so maybe it would be better to offer the terrains on a large Flash drive.

 

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13 minutes ago, EAGLE1DK said:

So I kind of get it (not the same as understand it), that esim just don't think that offering a download option is a good idea. But what about a flash disk?

As mentioned before many modern laptops doesn't have a DVD drive - so maybe it would be better to offer the terrains on a large Flash drive.

 

 

Given a blank DVD costs almost nothing (if bought in bulk) compared to a USB flash drive ...

 

People are probably willing to pay something for the content (be that time, bandwidth, etc.), they are probably less keen to be paying a larger cost just for the media to provide the content (USB + copying + postage is likely to be higher than DVD + copying + postage).

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Guys, this discussion is almost completely suspended from reality. Like I wrote in practically every relevant post, the most likely outcome is that there will be a download option, and a DVD option to choose from. Should, for whatever reason, one of these options turn out to be impractical/unfeasible we will think of alternatives. Until then there's no point to fret about points that in all likelihood will never materialize in the first place.

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