The Manual Cache Should Be Redesigned From the Ground Up, Possibly Connecting Designing a Flight Plan With Manual Caching if Desired

Have you checked how much downstream FS actually uses, like in your router? I have 100 Mbps and it uses maaaybe 1.5 of that.

I guess I was more ambitious. My cache download turned out to be 45 Gb at HIGH detail. I started from the east north/south boundary of KJFK on Long Island and went west past Manhattan into New Jersey about as far as I’d come from JFK to Manhattan. And for that width, I went north just past the upper tip of Manhattan. Originally I aspired to go as far north as the new Tappan Zee bridge but for the length of time it took just to get above Manhattan and the uncertainty as to what the download size would be (and whether it would be worth it), I decided to give up and see what I got from the effort described above (took me about an hour of panning, selecting, mostly waiting for the Manual Cache interface to signal it recognized each selection).

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As for the original question, while much of the manual cache UI looks very rushed (like built quickly as a mockup and then fell off the priority list), I do like how it’s forcing me to think about what I really need. Otherwise people would just draw a big square over Manhattan and click “highest” and then complain their drive is full.

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Could someone help me understand why after having flown up the east coast through NYC , up the North shore of Long Island and on wards why my cache is not full ? I mean I have not even looked at it , yet. Maybe I need to educated myself a bit more,

I’d like to extend my suggestion further. If a Manual Cache is really worth doing, there ought to be a way to file a flight plan and have the flight plan calculate what sort of manual cache you’d need to see the scenery consistent with the type of resolution that you’ve opted for in your basic rig hardware and your graphics settings. And perhaps you could even tag various parts of your route with the type of resolution you want on each leg, on takeoff and landing, etc. Maybe you just want the cockpit view the whole flight or something and don’t plan to look around - but basically have the software do all the calculation of what you need given your altitude, speed, predicted or chosen weather conditions, etc. Maybe the software already does this for the rolling cache in real time as you’re flying? But there ought to be a way ahead of time to input the type of flight we’d like to do and have a more automated, interactive way of selecting the size of manual cache download that would be appropriate for the type of flying we want to do in an area. I’m sure this suggestion falls in the category of ideas are a dime a dozen but making them happen is something else.

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Your rolling cache should be full pretty quickly unless you’ve deactivated it in the Data settings

I have actually monitored it while flying and it is surprisely low. On average 2 Mbps. 20 Mbps at the very high end and only for an occasional short burst. It just seems to trickle in. Everything looks great, I don’t see a bunch of scenery popping in and it runs smooth. Probably why I personally am not seeing a benefit from caching.

I don’t think it really lets you think because it doesn’t tell you the size of a prospective download. If the design were like the Garmin mapping software for auto, marine, and handheld GPS devices, as soon as you drew your prospective download, you’d know its size and how long it would take. Garmin advises you of that and whether it will even fit on your device. Would be great if the Manual Cache software were as smart - it could even tell you similar to Garmin whether you need to make your cache bigger. As it is, the manual cache doesn’t give you much info to cogitate about - it’s literally a “no-brainer” - I wish it would get some smarts, e.g., The Manual Cache Should Be Redesigned From the Ground Up, Possibly Connecting Designing a Flight Plan With Manual Caching if Desired - #14 by bodyspike but it would only be worth being so smart if it really delivers on the FPS and detail of only the scenery that you care to see and would even have come into view, given your style of flying and your flight plan.

Well one of our questions seems to be answered in another thread. Someone with an Alpha Tester badge claims that during testing, they were 100 percent online. No manual caching. This is such a bad joke from a QA view if true.

hi guys,

talking about caching, when I play the game the high res textures are not loading. which ever is the graphic setting.

for example if I go to bora bora lagoon I can not see the water details
 only a flatish blue color like super low res.
If I try to manually load the cash, it will display properly the data and I can download the cash (files came up on 800kb for high res which seems lower than it should). any idea what is going on? I tried to delete and rebuild also the cash, nothing


it’s like if the game was always stuck at low res


ah and one morething, every time I start the game I get an 128mb update mesage that clear instantly after click start


I would really like a more detailed map view as well. Sometimes it is really hard to find a specific region, city or airport.

Please allow us to select the level of detail at any level. Having to zoom right in to get high detail selected is a pita when you want to download entire cities. Also please add up the total download size of the area selected and please add the data transfer rate when downloading.

Thanks

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To further add to my original post, once you download a very large cache and decide to view it with regard to what you’ve got, WATCH OUT.

The next day after the download, I launched MSFS and went to the General Options, Data Section, picked VIEW for the manual cache. Nothing happened for about 5 minutes. Then a PLEASE WAIT, Updating Cache flashed on the screen. Instead of individual named caches, there was only an ALL REGIONS box checked (“Oh, No!,” I thought. “My 45 Gb Manhattan region has been trashed!” The waiting for the Updating Cache continued for at least another 25 minutes. Then when it was done, the individual named cache regions were displayed (the All Regions was gone). I checked Manhattan and tried to view it. Thirty Minutes went by and NOTHING happened. I finally did Ctl+Esc to reveal my Taskbar in Windows and right-clicked to close the MSFS app via its Taskbar icon and haven’t bothered trying to look at the Manual Cache again.

What’s wrong here is when you pick VIEW manual cache, Microsoft should not be so presumptuous as to force you to wait through an update. At the very least one should get a pop-up to the effect that an update is available, do you want to update now? Or separate manual cache buttons for View and Update. Manual Cache is a torture machine almost as bad as the device that Franz Kafka conjured up for the Penal Colony.

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Since my previous post, I have subsequently deleted the Manhattan cache and flew around it doing some frames testing. I saw no difference in frames or smoothness between a cached city or one streamed in.

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That was essentially my experience, too. I didn’t delete my cache but I didn’t get significantly better fps or visuals, IMHO, with 45 Gb of the NYC area (~300 sq miles) in the manual cache as compared to experiments having no manual cache and always deleting my rolling cache before taking to the air (to compare the fps effects of different settings not being biased by accumulating rolling cache of a region). Someone in another thread said that the benefit of a manual cache supposedly is that it stores photogrammetric data (photorealistic presentation to 3 cm detail per pixel at closest distance at HIGH detail level, I think I read). But with my humungous cache, the George Washington Bridge still looked as artificial as it did without the cache. It’s a suspension bridge and has what appears to be a big dark blackish brown wall extending from the suspension span down to water level! The wall was there even with my HIGH detail cache.

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From my understanding, manual cache was meant to provide some offline scenery access to some of the streamed stuff, for situations where one didn’t have access to the internet, a really poor connection, etc. I’m not sure it’s even supposed to kick in while there are other sources for that data available to the program.

That said, I don’t think it’s working anyway currently, given the numbers of people I’ve seen reporting that there is little to no file accessing going on with the cache, whether online or off.

Hey,

yesterday i tried to create a big cache on my hard disk - about 250GB.
However, I noticed that I can only download low-quality data unless I zoom in and spend a lot of time reselecting each small area to download the HQ data-

I would like to be able to download high-quality textures for larger areas at once.

What do you think?

Cheers

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Thing is the sim won’t even render the highest quality above 1000 AGL.
So unless you fly really low I don’t think it’s necessary and even if you could get it to work at higher altitudes it would bring any system to it’s knees.
Edit: I could be wrong about exactly 1000ft but it’s pretty darn close to that ime.
Also apparently D A R N is a bad word now?

From my experience manual caching doesn’t work actually. I tried to cache a lot of different areas and it changes nothing. I still have the same low quality that offline offer.

Tried in different landscapes / area, even in a photogrametry city but I still have the same low quality than offline.

1 hour to cache a 2.0 Mo area
what a joke
hope they fix this soon because I would love to fly in higher quality area but my internet connection is too low (4 Mbps) so pre-caching is my only option
but it doesn’t work =/

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That’s literally how it should work. And it should save everything on that route, not just photogrammetry where it is available. Drawing the high detail areas very much zoomed in is just overly time consuming without any benefit. As shown in another thread, medium does look like very low detail already and low is outright pathetic, just some stalagmites/pyramid shaped things there with textures that look like 1995’s graphics which is totally useless and not even worth the effort at all.