Manual caching PSA: Current issues and Observations

[spacesimmer]

Greetings all. I spent the last couple of days not flying so I could get a proper offline mode where I could fly around in VFR with detailed photoreal scenery. The manual cache feature is the key to flying with stored Bing data, except the whole process didn’t go smoothly at all.

My top priority was to store Toronto-area scenery so that I could avoid stutters and have the ability to fly offline. However, along the way I discovered the following major issues that many others have reported:

1. Continuously drawing a larger and larger high quality area will progressively drop the FPS. A popular issue that many have reported, if you draw a larger enough area for over an hour, eventually it will drop to 0.5 FPS. After downloading the area, that low FPS will remain in the menu and loading the manual cache menu can take hours. Every click will take a minute to process, making it impossible to create a new cache.

2. Only areas that contain Bing photogrammetry data will be stored in the manual cache. Downloading any area that only contains Bing satellite imagery will be discarded and not stored in the cache. This means if you draw any areas that are not in a photogrammetry city, your cache is useless and you will end up with a small filesize. Remember, the only cities with photogrammetric data are major cities in North America, Australia and Europe, making manual caching a waste of time anywhere in the entire continents of South America, Asia and Africa. Also a waste of time caching anywhere that only has satellite data, which pretty much every little town out there.

For example, here I manually cached a medium quality area that is supposed to cover the Toronto and the outer cities bordering it, but instead it only caches downtown Toronto. For those who are familiar, it stops the cache right at Eglinton Avenue, right where photogrammetry data ends:

To test if manual cache was working or not, I needed to isolate the scenery to only the manual cache. This means data streaming has to be disabled, rolling cache has to be deleted and then disabled, and then compare the differences in quality and base game data.

Here is Toronto and various buildings streamed at 25mbps:

In high quality:

Medium:

Low:

Manhattan in low quality:

Pretty much low is useless, I would consider medium quality the bare minimum.

Essentially the feature is broken as caching too much data will break the menu, and only a couple hundred cities can be cached. Forget about caching vast terrain scenery or little towns here and there, they will be discarded and you will get a low file size. Of course, I will be sending these bug reports to the Zendesk.

[BitRotBrew]

• Is your performance better in game when you enter the manually cached cities vs no cache and streaming enabled?

• What is the file size of a city like Toronto in High Quality?

• If I want to manually cache a city, how would I find out which areas of the city are photogrammetry vs which aren’t so I can save as much space as possible?

• If I accidentally select an area in manual cache mode that I want High Quality that isn’t, while having it overlap with an area that is, will that mess up the cache causing it to not work?

• Does have multiple manual caches of photogrammetry cities in High Quality reduce the FPS in the manual cache mode causing it to become unusable?

[WeamDreaver]

Thank you for the research!
Very interesting find about manual cache only for photogrammetry.

[R74NN]

I can confirm the poor performance, while you select some regions - it doesn’t have to be a large area at all. The tool (manual cache) is currently practically unusable, both, from performance and actual tooling (UI) point of view.

Thanks for the research, now I know why my entire city was only 900KB in the cache. So no point for me to use it for my country (Czech Republic).

[TheBigBobo86]

Incidentally it does actually consume data while caching. I tried manually caching tokyo at medium quality overnight, got a tiny file size (11.11MB), but the data consumed by the sim went up by roughly 17GB.

[WTFAWASTE1234]

I also noticed a big issue with trying to zoom in or out while you are selecting…seemed to lock up the sim. had to use TM to end & restart the sim.

[TCarlisle2012]

I get the stalagmites as in your picture on any graphics setting

[spacesimmer]

@BitRotBrew

• Is your performance better in game when you enter the manually cached cities vs no cache and streaming enabled?

• What is the file size of a city like Toronto in High Quality?

• If I want to manually cache a city, how would I find out which areas of the city are photogrammetry vs which aren’t so I can save as much space as possible?

• If I accidentally select an area in manual cache mode that I want High Quality that isn’t, while having it overlap with an area that is, will that mess up the cache causing it to not work?

• Does have multiple manual caches of photogrammetry cities in High Quality reduce the FPS in the manual cache mode causing it to become unusable?

1. FPS in-flight remains the same, but there are noticeable less stutters when flying around a cached photogrammetry city. When caching an area with good photogrammetry coverage, the reduced stutters are definitely worth it.

2. Toronto actually has very little photogrammetry coverage. At high quality it was somewhere around 2.5GB. Looking at the coverage in New York, NY, it is covers far more land by at least 3-5x. Probably the filesize is that much larger too.

3. Unfortunately I’m don’t know of an easy way to find the photogrammetry area of a city, but all the 3D cities are accessible on the Windows 10 Maps app. You can use the 3D cities feature, search your city and move the 3D map around to find where the 3D data begins and ends on the map around the city.

4. Did a small test on this and the scenery looks normal, it will display the high quality cache first. On the cache menu it seems a bit glitchy the way areas overlap each other, so I would try to keep the cache areas separate if possible.

5. Yes, the more high quality cache you cover, the more it progressively drops the FPS of the menu.

@TCarlisle2012

I get the stalagmites as in your picture on any graphics setting

If your internet connection is normal and fast enough (minimum 5 mbps), I would try playing around with graphics and data settings cause that would look pretty terrible. Also try updating your graphics drivers, and Win 10 updates. Failing that, I would reinstall the game.

[BitRotBrew]

Thank you for the answers.

[CasualClick]

I think the slowdown is more about the fact that GPU and CPU are being hit hard to render the map area PERIOD. As in when you click on VIEW- Manual Cache and the screen changes to the overhead satellite view, at that point it’s MS actually using your GPU and CPU to RENDER the area, even if you’re not building a cache or designating an area. It starts out as a featureless blob, and I have to wait while the current map view renders.

My FPS drops to 1-2 now when opening/running the utility. For the record, I did map NYC Manhattan - from just around Lady Liberty and Governor’s Island up to Midtown (1 HQ map 1.37 GB) and then from Midtown to just past Harlem (2nd HQ MAP 1.77GB).

With the cache on (minimum spec rig), I’m getting high 20s low 30s over the downtown area, at 1,000 AGL on Low. I turned up LOD and boosted building quality to Medium, so I’ll run my test flight again from LGA over the city and see what’s what.

Honestly, it seems to work better for me, but clearly this negative cumulative effect on caching as your maps increase/grow is a problem. I’m filing the Zendesk report tonight, see what comes of it.

[TrainableLake79]

Nice work, and a lot of it. Thanks for your efforts.

[JoanneSpanner]

It never occurred to me that this feature only applies to some cities. They didn’t tell us that in the promo vids, did they?

[Mikeyjames1967]

Yep, it is useless.

I spent a few hours yesterday doing the entire eastern third of Australia in Low, and then Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Cairns in High.

I’m using an 8-core Intel CPU, RTX 2080, 64GB RAM, NVMe SSD, on a stable 100Mbit connection. The time it takes is unbelievable. I thought it must have been caching each section as I did it so wasn’t too concerned.

I then get to the end, and it starts ‘downloading’ after an hour, with the progress sitting at 5%, I went to bed.

I get up this morning and see it has finished, with a total size of 109 MB.

Three hours to paint the areas due to the wait time for each section, and then an hour plus however long it took while I slept, for 109 MB.

I thought it must be a mistake, so decided to restart the sim. The menus were pretty much unresponsive and it took me a few minutes to exit the program.

I then restart, and as soon as I go to the manual cache section the system becomes unresponsive with a message “updating cache”. After another 10 minutes waiting for the update I’m still left with 109MB. The system remains pretty much unusable while in the manual cache section.

Seems like an epic waste of time on a useless feature.

[R74NN]

All in all, the “frontend” of the sim - tools like manual cache, planning and basically any other area of the UI/UX is a disaster. Everything is slow, stutters and is hardly usable. This should be never released in this state. 120 EUR for this mess feels ridiculous at the moment.

[JoanneSpanner]

Yes, it spent the best part of 30 minutes downloading 1.3mb last night, what a joke.

[Tackleberry4602]

I did the whole South East England. It took 2 to 3 hours to download. In the menu it shows that 5.7Mib however looking at what throughput the pc had during this time showed 7Gb. So I am wondering if they have made a mistake in the ui. Mib instead of Gb. On my connection 1Gb can download in about 1 min. With the servers being loaded with people playing it I wouldn’t be supprise if there was network slowdown to limit the data per user. My experience of the ui is the more you select to cache the slower the ui gets. Possible memory leak.?

[R74NN]

It’s not a memory leak. It just doesn’t work, because no one apparently tested it, or they thought “we will fix it later”.

[DizzyBasket7278]

The rule is that it only caches photogrammetry areas. Once I understood that, it all makes sense.

[JoanneSpanner]

But that doesn’t explain what’s going on here.
You select areas, the game responds slowly, and it takes ages to download… on areas where there is no PG scenery, and apparently single digits mb worth of data? wtf?

[DizzyBasket7278]

Yes it seems to get in a knot when it tries to precache a “non photogrammetry” area. Precaching non photo areas is of no value.