I fully agree with almost all of your observations @secretfarmerGal
However, my point is that in FS2020 Asobo did not “fully accept” the reality that they have de-facto written a “streaming game”. As a consequence in FS2020 we did face a number of issues which have been considered “learn to live with it” … like:
- You need to delete the RollingCache prior to an upgrade
- … at least I was sticking to this recommendation to avoid a hanging sim
- The RollingCache may induce stutter
- … which is why I at some point decided to completely disable the RollingCache
- Degrading cache performance with larger size
- … means the more I cache the more it stutters
I had the feeling that the RollingCache in FS2020 was not a serious effort as the game worked perfectly without it.
In FS2024 Asobo finally embraced the true nature of their game, and that is a heavy dependency on gigantic datasets which need to be downloaded progressively (streamed, on demand) … where local caching provides a dramatic benefit and basically becomes mandatory.
I guess we all can see that Asobo still has a lot of updates to ship before they actually reach the point where the streaming nature will no longer we considered as a “negative” but rather a “positive” step. But ,as I wrote, IMHO this step was unavoidable … and necessary.
I would love to have a “high performance adaptive and customizable mega scale” RollingCache with say 2 + 4 TB of capacity on two of my dedicated caching drives. Compared to a backend dataset of a few Petabytes my local 6 TB cache would still just capture a tiny tiny portion of all the data.
In FS2020 the RollingCache felt like a quick hack … in FS2024 it will have to become a sophisticated piece of engineering. And I am confident that with all this pressure they will find a way to get there.
But then, I am just a goose … and maybe it is all just a dream.