After all the effort of zoom in, select , scroll, select , scroll, select …
I then flew over the pre-cached area , with the task manager / performance window tracking file access…
The SIM kept accessing the Rolling Cache and didn’t even touch the Manual Cache, so what was the point of pre-caching ?
I dont know what to do, but I have created a Cache of a location, its taken 7 hours to download it and now its updating the manual cache, I am assuming its going to be like 150gb which is no issues I have had the PLEASE WAIT
Updating the Manual Cache screen for the last two hours
How many hours should I give this guys ?
I dont know Dizzy but maybe you need to delte the rolling cache and just create a large manual one ?
While I like exploring different locations on earth, I also like playing career mode. I have regular routes I fly while using FSEconomy. Some others might wanna fly around their homeports regularly. Whatever the reason, caching those areas to be less dependent on internet connection and server load is a good idea.
Agreed. That is why I want to permanently pre-cache some regular routes. An easy method to do so would be ideal. The current method is tedious, and I have yet to see the manual cache actually being utilized.
Ok this is crazy, I basically spent a couple of hours doing hi-res of a large area including 4 different cities etc, it took around 7 hours to download that scenery for the manual cache then the last 3 hours of updating the manual cache and its just finished, the final size of the cached scenery is 92.27mb
How is this possible, yet its showing me the area etc what I did completed ??
BTW I dont use a Rolling Cache!
We just created a new HOW-TO guide for creating manual cache regions here.
Feel free to comment below on the guide and let other folks know if they are curious about how to do this. Thanks.
Thank you Sartanius.
You have done a great job at putting the guide together .
I have yet to confirm that the manual cache is actually being accessed tho.
When I fly over a pre-cached area, file access snooping reveals that the Rolling Cache is still being used and not the Manual cache.
I need to understand under what circumstances it gets used.
Great step by step but I just don’t get how to get it make a difference. Set up the cache as instructed for my local area. Relaunched the sim and it showed the manual cache was selected. Loaded my local flight, took a long time to settle in at 30 fps, took off stuttering from the start and accessing the Internet full blast killing my CPU. So basically no diff setting up the manual cache unless there is some way of making sure it is used. Even tried selecting ‘offline’ but that had no effect.
Just don’t know what happened to this sim since the Alpha but it is really not performing well now nomatter what I do. Worked fine before release.
I’ve found the size of the cache displayed sometimes shows incorrectly. I had an area that was 2gb and today it now says it’s only 50MB or so after downloading a different cache area.
Can confirm that the manual cache does indeed work. Downloaded my local area then restarted the sim once it was past the checking for updates screen I disconnected the internet.
The local scenery was there in high resolution, no internet activity.
Helped my frame rates some but the CPU is still occasionally getting hammered.
Don’t yet know what happens when you fly out of the cached area.
This is definitely an incredible option to have and some truly powerful tech, but I agree I wish we didn’t have to zoom in so close to select the High cache.
It’s very time consuming and if you select a lot of land mass it will slow down your PC so it’s best to finely tune what area you want, hence the reason they probably make us zoom in. However, I just wish we could select High without the zoom.
Last night I did The Gold Coast of Australia and it looked Really Really Good. Better than it being streamed and it weighed in at 3.3 Gigs. I did almost the whole Northeast Coast of Australia and it took me about 20-30 minutes “painting” the area I wanted and about an hour to download and process the Manual Cache.
Then it loaded in faster than streaming it in and looked/ran better in Flight.
At only 3.3 gigs for that much flying area we can really get some nice manual caches on our drive and get away from a lot of streaming/stuttering. I saved nearly 200g of space to create and save more. Pretty fun stuff!
Truly some cool tech under the hood in this Sim!
Okay so I played with manual cache for a few days and there are some issues to keep in mind.
First, caching too many major cities, or one city with a large enough high quality area, will affect the FPS of the manual cache menu. Caching more and more of an area will continue dropping the FPS, eventually taking minutes to paint one rectangle. Eventually after downloading the cache, you will be left at 0.5 fps, and will require multiple clicks and 30 seconds to select anything. Only deleting previous cached regions will bring the FPS back to normal. It took 2 hours just to cache Downtown Toronto in high detail due to the time it takes to paint one rectangle.
Second, and I just discovered this, all the hours of painting I did were wasted. I saw few reports that manual caches were not being used, so I disconnected my internet and tested Toronto. Wow, nice scenery, except I realized some areas had blurry detail which makes no sense because it’s supposed to be high quality. I kept thinking and realized the rolling cache might be used instead.
So what I did was disable rolling cache, deleted the rolling cache and tried again. Terrible. It was like FSX, manual cache was not being used at all.
Maybe I cached too large of an area? This time I did a new manual cache of one square of each quality, disabled data and this time the scenery was beautiful.
This means if you cache too large of an area in high quality, or too many areas in high quality, it will break the menu and simply fail to load in-flight.
Keep your caches small and limited to make sure it loads properly and so that it doesn’t break the menu.
Will send the bug reports to Zendesk.
@spacesimmer this is the exact same thing that I am experiencing when creating regions under manual cache. The more regions you start to create, the more unresponsive things get. It gets to the point where I have to wait 10-20 minutes jut for the map to finally show up and when it does, its very difficult to click on any of the buttons in the menu due to the whole system being unresponsive. I made a few regions and I really do not understand the download size. It makes no sense, how are the file sizes so small when I defined most of the city as high resolution textures? When I go back to fly, it doesn’t seem like the sim is even using the manual cache at all. Things still appear as if they’re streaming in while I fly.
This feature is great but really needs to be further optimized, and there should be a better way than having to zoom all the way in just to be able to select high quality textures. Thanks for reporting this to Asobo.
In the meantime, I would like to know if you can use rolling cache alongside with manual cache? Which would make it somewhat smarter. Like if you were to have NYC manually cached as a region, and when you fly away from it, the sim will automatically switch over to the rolling cache. This seems like a better way of doing it.
Well done !
Excellent analysis of what’s going on.
So it looks like Manual caching doesn’t have much value in it’s current state.
Thanks for raising it with the Zendesk.
Yes rolling cache works well and coordinates smoothly with the manual cache. What you said is exactly how it performs and designed to do.
Also it seems there is yet another issue, it seems only photogrammetry data is being downloaded into the manual cache, and not areas with only Bing satellite data. This would explains the reports of unusually low file sizes. I’ll have to do more testing.
If you enable the performance tool in the task manager, you might see that the Manual cache is never accessed when flying over a pre-cached area.
That certainly happens in my case.
As has been said earlier, we need to fully understand how it works, because at the moment it looks to me like it offers no value.
So I just updated my windows installation to 2004 as suggested by another user and tried to re-cache all of the Tokyo area at medium detail. I left it run overnight and it consumed about 17GB of data… the file size that resulted was still 11.11MB. I haven’t had the chance to fly it yet (got work f
I also created a manual cache for Tokyo which consisted a mixture of low, medium and high textures. Mine came out to be about 500MB. Which makes no sense to me. I was thinking that it would be a few gigs at least. With the current state of how the manual cache works, I’ve turned it off for the time being as I see no added benefits visually whatsoever. Which leads me to believe like others, that the cache isn’t being used at all. Photogrammetry doesn’t seem to be working either as I still see those unrendered buildings and trees whether I have the cache on or off.
I have been caching London and surroundings in high textures. I turned off the internet and saw smeared textures. And high textures is not ultra!
Good idea, but not working yet 