I chose an airport in NZ as base for my career and flew from there at least once per session. When the servers were struggling on Sunday I thought I’ll fly out of there because my rolling cache is set to 100 GB and for sure it’s still saved somewhere. Nope apparently everything had to be redownloaded including the H225 I flew a couple of hours earlier. I could watch everything appearing very slowly. This was just after I started the game, I hadn’t flown in that session yet.
Is the rolling cache even used for that type of data? In the dev forums they said the ability to download user content will come soon, is it maybe tied to that? I just really don’t understand what’s going on but it seems like it’s even redownloading often used aircraft and scenery constantly although not every time.
The rolling cache only contains the Digital Eleveation Model, the Triangulated Irregular Network and Vector Data, think of this like the 3D Mesh of the terrain.
It does not store the actual textures however of the actual ground, this is always streamed in, reason for this is if you cached the actual textures a tiny area of the map would take up GBs of data. Photogrammetry cities are always streamed as-well I believe.
Aircraft sounds and common WASM functionality are cached locally but textures and the 3D model are always streamed in, the reason those are streamed is they are the biggest files usually, textures specifically can be massive, but they will add an option to download the entire aircraft in the future.
But then I don’t understand why they chose to do it like that. Why not give us some (adjustable) sort of cache that stores everything including textures and 3D models. Wouldn’t this also help their servers? In the career I’m often flying the same aircraft from the same airport in different game sessions.
I know of the upcoming download function for ‘my library’ but that most likely won’t include any standard airports or scenery and needs to be handled manually. Maybe there are technical limitations but if not this seems like a really big oversight.
But that discussion would probably fit better in the existing wishlist item to make cloud streaming optional
The idea behind it was allow a thin client type behaviour so that people’s hard drive space would not be filled up. I presume this was primarily an issue on the Xbox where the space is more limited than PC users, so perhaps they saw people uninstalling MSFS on Xbox to free up space.
However what they didn’t really consider is for a lot of users, they will happily have a sim which is 4TB in Size so everything can load without dependency on the internet. I think they didn’t really do proper research among the hardcore flight sim fans on PC on what they wanted and its why they are in this mess. Hopefully they can provide better caching in the future.
Using 100GB an hour on streaming for some people is not better than just downloading that 100GB forever.
There is another angle on this - presumably re-streaming all that data has a much higher energy cost and carbon footprint than streaming it once and caching it. If Microsoft are serious about sustainability as the Corporate Social Responsibility section of their website suggests, then maybe they should consider letting us cache more data and only re-stream it if it’s outdated.
Fun fact: transmitting 1GB creates 0.0042KG of CO2 according to this article. I haven’t checked to see how much data a typical hour in MSFS 2024 consumes, but I bet it’s a lot! I wonder how that compares to the carbon footprint of manufacturing and reading/writing 2TB NVME SSD, over my entire usage of the sim.
I accept we 100% need to stream data and can’t store the entire world locally - but it seems like there’s room to be more efficient.
I know they planted a lot of trees in MSFS 2024, but I don’t think virtual trees offset carbon like the real thing!
Or (and I hate to say this) they didn’t care about the small percentage of us who have very capable hardware, including large local drives. They focused on the Xbox because felt they couldn’t afford to alienate that user base.
