The Manual Cache is a nice idea, but really, really hard to work with. In particular, the need to zoom right into the map to be able to select the higher levels of detail to cache make it incredibly difficult and slow and defeats the purpose. I tried caching greater Cape Town as an experiment and just selecting a small part of the area took over half an hour, and the download a further 15 minutes.
A suggestion is to allow you to zoom to the entire area level you wish to cache, and then allowing you to select the detail level you wish to cache the area at. It would really help to also indicate the size of the download for each detail level to help make an informed choice. A flexible lasso border option to get the perimiter just right would be fantastic.
Another issue that makes it harder to select areas to cache at higher detail levels are the map is static while the paint selection goes off screen. This results in constant panning and scanning and selecting. At least if the map scrolled with the cursor as the paint selection moved off screen we could select a square or rectangle really easily in high res and it would mitigate a lot of the pain.
If I want to select a large area to pre-cache, it’s a royal pain the the rear to have to zoom in so far and select small areas at a time.
For example I’m trying to pre-cahce all of southern Japan at medium detail (low detail was only 800KB), it’s going to take hours just to re-select the areas I had at low detail, even before downloading them. We need to be able to select different quality levels while zoomed much further out, and perhaps have more tools such as being able to draw an area and pan while selecting.
Honestly, I can live with it after doing XP11 Ortho. I want the ability to edit individual regions, so that I can change level of detail in a region easier post-flight, or if the total download ends up being much lower than expected.
The ability to cache key points along a predesignated flight plan automatically - with the option to cache areas in either Low/Medium/High at the click of a button.
Rather than having to do it manually, it would be more beneficial when creating a route to just click a button which caches low altitude areas at a higher quality and high altitude areas at lower quality prior to flight.
I can’t agree more. I don’t care how much data is required. I know High Quality takes up a LOT of space (I did just a few miles of my 3D quality home town, and it was ~4GB). But without the ability to select a large area, the manual cache is just useless. If I want to cache half a state at high quality, just let me select it, tell me how much space it’s going to take, and let me download it.
Just started my first manual cache with the Greater Berlin Area…
It took hours to select the region, please change to first select area and then resolution thus it would be easier to zoom out and pick a bigger area much faster.
Is Microsoft out of server bandwith?
My Gbit Line gets some bits within 1 second and pauses for 2 minutes before another few bits arrive thus taking hours to finish this download which normally would take less than a minute for me.
PLZ consider changing this tool because the way it is atm it is totally useless - thx
It would be nice if you could select a range and then decide between low, medium, high.
So that you don’t have to zoom in on everything.
It would save you hours of work.
I wish we can cache a large area in high quality without having to zoom in very close. I wish we can manually select cache quality instead of it depending on your zoom level. That way we can select a large area in high quality faster.
You’ll have to zoom it very close to select high quality cache. Say I want to cache a big city in high quality, I will have to stay zoommed in. When you want to cover a fairly large area, zooming in while brushing takes a really long time.
The basic interface and the way in which areas are selected and at what detail should be totally redone for the Manual Cache.
I don’t know if the person(s) who designed the manual cache interface ever used a Garmin GPS device and Garmin software and maps but the folks designing the Manual Cache should have to go take a look at how Garmin does it.
One should be able to select map regions from a Bird’s Eye View, even when one wants high detail. Select a region at some zoom resolution, click the level of detail desired, have the Manual Cache interface calculate your download size. Right now it appears there is no way at any point before or during the download to know how big your prospective download will be and if it fits in the cache size that you’ve allotted. Maybe if you knew how big the download was going to be, you’d not do it or be happy with a different level of detail. Instead one has to zoom in very close and laboriously walk up and down the map to select regions and the software spends forever fixing the addition to your download. Then you download completely in the dark as to what it’s going to cost you in Gb.
Rather than have just itsy-bitsy little blocks, regions should be nested within each other. I think Garmin uses U.S. counties, then states, then regions of the U.S., then countries. But maybe you want all of a county so you don’t have to go little block by little block. When you find a neighboring county that you don’t want all of, then you could go block by block selecting only the smaller regions that you wanted- or maybe you drop down to the level of townships or what not in the U.S.
Then comes the download. The PLEASE WAIT screen (how appropriate!) flashes up a number like 02:32. I thought, “O Boy! Just two minutes and 32 seconds!” It’s either meaningless or the first digit is in hours (I have 100 Mbps actual everyday download speed, cf. to advertised 200 Mbps) but the server(s) must be pegged with other requests or I’m eventually going to overflow my 100 Gb manual cache.
Try pausing the manual download. Once paused, the manual cache interface becomes extremely unresponsive to resuming the download. It takes just the right timing of clicks, almost like dancing, now we step, a-1-and-a-2-and-a-3-and-a-4, etc., before the software responds by resuming the download.
If the download is so slow, taking hours, why does my i9-9900K have to be cooking, CPU, GPU, and target SSD for the download the whole TWO plus hours? My CPU’s are 79 to 85 deg C, my GPU is 82 deg C (it’s normal temp when running the SIM full blast), and the SSD has gone as high as 63 deg C (and it’s in the path of the air intake!). Why does the computer have to be running full blast during the download unless the GPU has to process the download data but why not let the computer do that later so you can go away during a long, slow download and not worry you’re going to fry your machine while you’re not watching it???
There are quite a few threads on how bad the manual cache is. It’s so bad, it makes me think the Microsoft Flight Simulator had to be rushed out the door to build enthusiasm to sell Xbox Series X and VR headsets for the holiday season or something like that before the software was really finished and fully ready to go.
If you want to do your own demo, just try selecting and downloading Manhattan and the areas immediately bordering on Long Island and New Jersey in high detail and see how it goes. Try pausing and resuming the download (or even try quitting the sim once it’s paused - I couldn’t do it (don’t have a good REAL SLOW dance step cadence). IMHO, it really reflects badly on Microsoft and Asobo.
Search the forum for lots of other posts complaining about the same sort of outcome. Not too many are calling for completely redoing the Manual Cache interface (and software behind it) from the ground up - but I am. That is why I started a new topic - to call for the complete reworking, not just tweaking, the manual cache interface and guts to make it actually useable in a comfortable, not a tortuous way.
Edit_Update - 2020-09-05: Based on another poster’s suggestion in this thread, I’ve at least temporarily changed the title of the thread and am asking the moderators if they want the suggestion of optionally allowing a flight to be connected with (better working) manual caching, if desired by a user. That suggestion has garnered a number of upvotes. I’ll let the moderators decide what to do with that add-on suggestion for redesigning the manual cache.
Manhattan from Battery Park to Mid-town is 1.8GB. Mid-Town to Harlem is about 1.4GB. In HQ, there’s no way to capture the entire “scenic part” of the island in one map segment. It took about a half hour to just get those two areas mapped and cached.
I’m one of the ones demanding a fix. I have a 100GB set aside area for manual caches. So far I have a little over 18GB in caches of varying quality size and areas, mostly Eastern Seaboard and parts of the Carrib. The interface is now down to 1-2FPS when launched. It’s a useless slideshow. Everything is latent. Clicking buttons, trying to right-click and paint an area, all of it. Frustrating. Why is your CPU and GPU pegged? Because my suspicion is they’re streaming the raw map data and making ALL the rendering burden local to the machine. Yes, the overhead map view itself when you launch the Manual Cache is being rendered in real time while streaming the data over your BB connection. Aren’t you glad you paid for this privilege?
No one commented on this in Bets/Alpha testing? Bueller?
On my system I cached all of Manhattan also catching the shoreline of the other side of the rivers. It ended up being 8.5 GB. It didn’t take that long but the small squares was kind of a pain. My point for responding is that even with the area cached, I see no performance difference from when I was streaming it. Zero.
System Specs:
asrock z390 phantom gaming mobo
I7-9700k @ 4.9 GHz
32 GB Ram
Geforce RTX 2070 running 1440p Acer monitor
FS is on dedicated 500gb M.2
Internet download speed average 450 Mbps
That’s my suspicion, too. I have nothing against that. I doubt the money we paid to buy a FS 2020 license would cover the “lifetime” cost of all the data processing if it were done on servers. I just think that the interface ought to be more intelligent to let us do it at a pace that is not going to cook our computers. If we’re cooking at “100% download processing,” they ought to let us dial back the download and processing rate to a level that we feel comfortable with for the health of our computers.
The other thing that would be nice, just as with video games, is that it would be nice to be able to offload and save manual caches to another drive. Obviously as the years go by, the data will get stale and new downloads and new processing will be needed (if it’s actually worthwhile to have locally cached data). The only thing against swapping it in or out of the active manual cache that I can see is that Microsoft might worry that someone might hack a way to use the data with X-Plane or something else!
I agree. It’s a disgrace. I can’t stop shaking my head at how bad, just bad, quite a lot of things have been designed in this “sim”. Overhauling all this cr4p will take months.
I’m one of the poor sods with a very bad internet connection so I have to download every single region I’d like to fly in beforehand. I have now downloaded 5 of these ranging from 1 to 3 MiB (whatever that means), so nothing too crazy I reckon, and since the last addition the manual cache interface is unusable. It lags massively; I’m getting 4 fps and can hardly click on anything because it just won’t react. Cheers for that.
Pls remember Asobo members have nothing to do with planes not to mention with Garmin stuff. Until one year ago they even ignored planes existed IRL therefore please be gentle with them, they are still learning.
I understand your concern - but it’s not the Garmin G1000 plane instrument panels. Garmin is (or was) big on selling GPS devices for recreational use and selling relatively high-resolution maps for the devices. I am referring to various Garmin software interfaces for selecting map regions, for example, to download onto a handheld device with limited memory space. The Manual Cache programmers might benefit from studying how Garmin built a pretty useable human interface for selecting and “caching” map regions to their handheld devices. I don’t know whether it was Microsoft or Asobo who made the choices in designing the current Manual Cache. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t have to live with it for “the rest of time.” It really needs to be thoroughly redone. I don’t know if you’ve actually tried to manually cache a substantial region. It’s pretty painful and also stressful to one’s computer. And then many folks have posted that once you get a cache, it actually doesn’t do you much good, to top it all off as icing on the cake.