Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK

My experience is now a few years old, but WASM binary we had ran less than 10% slower than C++ Clang compiled native binary from the same source. And that was for rendering code which is rather CPU intensive and benefits from optimisation.

WASM is surprisingly fast.

As far as I've seen, it's generally just the WASM modules that crash, and not a full sim crash to desktop (CTD). But considering the WASM modules are usually running all of the aircraft logic, systems, flight control computers, etc. then it tends to mean a complete flight loss since you can't... well... control the aircraft anymore. I'm not sure what kind of automatic restart logic exists for crashed WASM modules, if anything. It would be interesting to see if module crash recovery is possible.

Unless you want realistic scenery or an up to date g1000 implementation (I love X-Plane really but because of these two points I keep going back to MSFS - maybe there are some add-ons I haven’t tried?)

Yeah ... by now 2020 reached a beta quality, still plenty of bugs left to squash but most of them are minor. 2024 on the other side ... is just transitioning from tech demo to alpha quality. It needs a few more years to reach beta and then by 2035 or so it might actually become a reliable product.

DLSS also blurs the cockpit displays quite badly when there's anything moving on them (airspeed/altitude tape, etc.). It looks like temporal blur, which is interesting because the same blur doesn't happen with their TAA (*temporal* anti-aliasing) implementation.

That describes what I've seen. When I first compared 2020 and 2024 in as apples-to-apples a way as I could, it seemed like 2024's frame rate was about a third lower than 2020's. This was on a 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM.

I'm waiting for SU4 before I get back into it...

In a "memory safe" programming language you would get a panic for an attempted out-of-range access. For the user it doesn't make a difference, it's a "crash" all the same.

But you'd also have to have an entire VM to run the separate process in, otherwise it still has access to the user's whole account and desktop.

(unless UWP I suppose, which even Microsoft have kind of forgotten about)

Right. The sandbox can scramble its own state, but as long as the accessible APIs have a protected interface it can't mess up the overall game.

Which is exactly the point made by GP.

Does this still work?

gauges in JS? that's how all gauges with dynamic display works in MSFS 2020 and presumably 2024, so yes it still works.

Sure, but your add-ons will need access to some of the world, which right now requires giving them access to all of WASI, as far as I know. There’s no permissions model. That’s worse than the JVM.

(It seems like they want to implement one… someday. It’s vague: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/...)

Like this?

"More than 20 programming tools vendors offer some 26 programming languages — including C++, Perl, Python, Java, COBOL, RPG and Haskell — on .NET."

From https://news.microsoft.com/source/2001/10/22/massive-industr...

"The Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) is a retargetable compiler suite and toolchain written by Andrew Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs, since 2005 maintained by David Given.[1] It has frontends for the following programming languages: C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC."

"Maximum portability is achieved by using an intermediate language using bytecode, called EM. Each language front-end produces EM object files, which are then processed through several generic optimisers before being translated by a back-end into native machine code. "

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Compiler_Kit

"When IBM i was first released as OS/400, it was split into two layers, the hardware-dependent System Licensed Internal Code (SLIC)[15][1] and the hardware-independent Extended Control Program Facility (XPF).[16][8][33][34] These are divided by a hardware abstraction layer called the Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI). Later versions of the operating system gained additional layers, including an AIX compatibility layer named Portable Application Solutions Environment (originally known as the Private Address Space Environment),[5][35] and the Advanced 36 Machine environment which ran System/36 SSP applications in emulation.[1]"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#Technology_Independent_M...

Other examples can be retrieved from annals of history.

Yes, I discussed WASI in my comment. It has maybe 1% of the feature set of the JRE/.NET core libraries, and I think that’s a generous estimate.

It is there for C++ on the CLR, or IBM i, or TenDRA, or ...

Most recently in my memory it's been minecraft. There was a wave of mods that were stealing things like discord access tokens, I don't have clear memory on all of the cases that I've been through, just that I always try and verify all mods I can now. I think I remember one for Lethal Company and looking online I'm seeing some referenced for Dota 2, Sims 4 and Slay the Spire.

Just learned Nexus mods is also pretty good about handling anything that's virus like, most of my modding experience has been external to that though.

While I agree that it's not the best situation, (and I'm wholly against nvidia in this case.) And yeah this isn't about the mod-game api boundary, this is more about the mod-os boundary since that is harder to control against. WASM from my research so far doesn't allow any of that by default and it has to be passed through by the runtime. In this case it would be passed through to the retargeting compiler. This can give additional benefits like allowing mods on consoles in a more secure way and allowing for targeting the game to future cpu architectures without requiring all mods to recompile their code (not that I think the latter is a reason microsoft cares about.) But the idea of recompiling code when launching a game is already kind of standard on the gpu side of things.

Microsoft absolutely care about other operating systems, Flight Sim runs on Xbox (which is not quite Windows), and they've started releasing games on Playstation recently as well.

No native support for fat binary dlls on Windows unlike Mac is kind of lame.

Absent fixing the vGPU problem (since Nvidia is unlikely to change their stance on this), what would be the best solution? WASM seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

> Kerbal Space Program, Rimworld, Minecraft all have gigantic modding communities, just to name a few.

I see what you mean, but there's a reason why I said modding support. From these, only Rimworld really counts - KSP's modding is unofficial and without support from the developers, Minecraft modding is also unofficial (you still don't have code or an API, you have to decompile! you do have datapacks but those can't do shit compared to proper modding)

Point is, all of these have unofficial modding communities because they are written in managed languages which are easy to reverse. But they don't give you a modding API to target, they don't give you documentation and they don't give you a clean/stable API. Look at how much Minecraft mods break with every minor update, it's nowhere near "official support".

> In many cases, the existence of standardized modding APIs instead of everybody just poking around in the game's source is actually an upside, as it makes interoperability much easier.

You're right but that's mostly just a consequence of the time which has passed. We no longer load just one mod. But the old model does work perfectly here - even if the modding is just "here's the DLL, replace it", the community can easily build a modloader on it which does support multiple plugins.

> At some point, we'll probably have to deal with this and I don't mind starting the technical side now, but I don't subscribe to the idea that mods are riddled with malware.

Semi-agree, it is a risk and one which can definitely be a huge issue, but I'd say this is much more of a social issue than a technical one. All these "lock things down to ensure security" initiatives throw the baby out with the bathwater, they don't really allow for anything substantial or creative to be made. And that's a huge loss, a way bigger one than malware spreading for a few days before getting inevitably found out and removed.

this convo is funny considering I'm working on a blocky game similar to Minecraft and one of the big design principles I have on my mind is drastically lowering the bar of entry for creating stuff. Even if you can theoretically modify many things, most users won't go and whip out a development environment on a whim, they'll just give up.... there's a few things which can make it drastically easier for users to become tinkerers, one of them is a compiler included with the game. If something is in the files, people can play around with it without friction, even better if some samples are included. IMO the benefits way outweigh the costs.