I think the issue is that alot of people don’t use the manual cache so only a small niche amount of users have run into the issue and it hasn’t made the splash asobo needs to tackle it short term. I personally have submitted zendesk requests on this matter and suggest you all do the same. The answer they provided wasn’t great, but it lets them know that people are interested in this feature.
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This is a great idea, definitely something I would love to see added, im in disbelief that the manual cache is still the way it is after all of this time.
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At this point, I would be happy if they just fixed the panning bug, so it would be the same as it was to begin with.
They made “server side changes to optimize manual cache delivery”, but why bother when it’s nigh impossible to tell what areas are actually being selected?
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Having the same issue. Strange, but earlier versions did not do this. Spent hours with this ‘feature’ convinced that it makes a performance improvement but who knows? Maybe I’m just wasting my time and disk space tediously mapping scenery only to get the occasional WARNING:CANNOT ALLOCATE crash. (one trick seems to work is renaming the New Region to where you want cached before wasting your time mapping it). Anyone know if there are any benchmarks that shows manual cache is worth the hours of my life I’ll never get back?
Agreed, I really feel like this is a 10-minute fix on their end that isn’t getting their attention due to the lack of users using it simply because it’s broken.
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this is really a must have no one has unlimited bandwidth
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I can’t even begin to be bothered to actually go through and actually use the manual cache system in its current state. My hair would fall out and I would die of old age before I could even download the US… I am allocating my entire external hard drive to a rolling cache and that seems to work ok for now. But I would love to change that, Asobo must think otherwise lol.
The interface for MC only allows you to pick small tiles (zoomed in) for high quality graphics. Using the mouse to paint an area (small tiles at a time), it will take 1/2 hour or so just to paint a medium size city for high level graphics.
Why does Asobo not allow us to pick larger areas at a time (like with med and low quality tile coverage) for high quality data?
Can anyone confirm manual cache even works? I’ve seen so many threads/posts in the past (granted a couple of months back or longer) that it doesn’t even work.
would love to know!
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@OvertheEDJe Out of interest have you tried the selection option zoomed in to select rectangular areas of your own choosing at high level settings, rather than clicking on individual tiles?
(There is more information in this guide: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-to-create-and-manage-manual-cache-regions/136740)
@moxiejeff The jury is still out for me on whether or not manual cache actually provides any benefit.
I tried to cache London’s photogrammetry on medium setting a few days ago and the first attempt led to an error “Your bandwidth is too low to stream photogrammetry”. When I clicked “ignore”, which returned me to the main menu iirc, and then went back to the data>manual cache settings screen, I was able to click on the London area I had previously selected and click “resume download”. This second time it did complete the download.
However, I am not certain if having downloaded that now cached area, it does actually make any discernable difference in flying around the London area. I do notice that the size of the data download for the area is only 150 MB
Since I had to open the cache screen to grab this screenshot I decided to try and also select a high level area as well, as a separate download, to see how that goes:
It seems to be a larger download but is progressing along without incident
It completed the entire download without any problems (which it hasn’t done for me for quite a while- previously I would get a ctd). As can be seen it is a much larger download size (1.18 GiB) for a much smaller area:
I then launched a flight over the downloaded area and switched to the external drone camera and flew around the area downloaded. I was getting this sort of quality:
There was marginal refreshing as I flew around, however the level of detail within a close field of view within the downloaded area was consistently the same quality, so it was clearly using the downloaded cache data.
When I moved outside of the downloaded area with the drone camera I was seeing this:
This area slowly populated to a higher resolution as scenery was downloaded to finally render this view:
So my conclusion is that yes manual cache is actually working for me, but probably only offers greatest benefit by downloading at highest level of detail.
If I were to download the entire London region (at a high level of detail) that the first screenshot at medium settings was showing, then it would be a very large download. I don’t know if it would successfully download and I won’t be trying it as I don’t need such a large area at that level.
However, I thought you might be interested in my findings.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing your findings.
For me, I am not able to select the high level unless I am zoomed in pretty far; at that point, only the little tiles are available for me to select / paint with the mouse. This takes forever for a medium size city.
Are you suggesting to 1) select a large area under medium settings and download, then 2) go back into the MC screen and then you will be allowed to select that same area with the high detail option being available?
If the intention is to cache at high level then there is no need to also create a cache at medium settings.
You will notice that when making a selection at high settings then there is also automatically added around the high level tiles a slightly larger area that will also be cached at medium level and also a slightly larger again region that is at low level.
I agree, it is necessary to zoom in quite close to achieve the small squares necessary for downloading a high level of detail cache.
I agree that for quite large cities, of a few miles square, then downloading the entire area at the highest level of detail will take quite a while to select. It will also be quite a large download for an entire city selected at that level of detail. However, I would suggest that unless planning to fly over entire city areas at a few hundred, rather than thousands, feet it may not be necessary to download an entire city at such a level of detail.
In the example above, for London city, I only chose the area right before the threshold on the approach to runway 09 at EGLC (London City Airport). I guess we each decide how much detail we want, and at what level of detail, for various photogrammetry areas around the world.
I see your point, if flying high then med / low setting will be enough for that scenario with the highest details reserved for landing areas around the airport.
However for me, the above med / low quality scenario does not work as I am trying to get the city / surrounding area (between 2 airports) at the highest detail because this is where I will spend a lot of low level flying irl for my ppl training.
Hopefully it won’t take much for Asobo to make it such that a user can paint a larger area for the highest detailed scenery so that we don’t spend 30+ minutes clicking the little tiles just to cover 1 or 2 cities.
The capability is there, the interface is just limited and cumbersome for someone looking to paint a large area.
Streaming at high quality looks awesome and will have to do for now. But I would prefer to cache the area (at high quality) that I spend 95% of my time in the sim flying / practicing maneuvers.
Thanks again for your response and insight.
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Just for information… When zoomed in to the highest level I don’t have to click each tile individually. I can still select a large number of these tiles using the mouse button to create a rectangle that selects multiple tiles at once. I hope I haven’t misunderstood and you were already aware of that option. Albeit such rectangles are still small compared to the over all size of the city, but not so small that it would take me more than 5 minutes to cover an entire city.
Ok, help me with this…(as I might not fully understand)
I can only seem to select a small tile (at once), then hold the shift key to drag my mouse across other tiles (one by one) to select for high detail.
Are you saying that I can select multiple small tiles (drawing a box around 100 small tiles at once, 10 x 10) with the mouse (at high level)? I have not been able to do that…but will try again today.
If so, then I agree it should not take more than 5 minutes to do a city.
I know that I can. I hope you can also!
One caveat, the bottom right of your rectangle needs to be visible and not stuck behind any of the overlays to the right hand side of the screen. I find that in that scenario no tiles get drawn.
How are you even reliably selecting areas to begin with? The UI for doing that has been broken for almost a year now. After selecting an area, it moves around vertically and doesn’t stay fixed to the map.
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The manual cache entry scrolling bug is still there. It’s absolutely maddening. At the end of a long entry one doesn’t really know if the area you think you defined is really what is stored. As you zoom out the area pans up and down from where you think it should be. I just entered some high res areas along the Thames in London trying to mimic the bends of the river where the most intense parts of the city are located. Zooming in to get to the high res entry you can only do a fairly small area of the river. Once you put that in you left click and pan. If you go up or down, suddenly the area you already defined pans as well and moves away from the river. If you zoom out you find you were not centered at all where you thought you were.
Asobo needs to give 3rd party developers the structure of the manual cache file and let others design an entry interface that is easy to use and reliable. My patience on this has worn out.
Very interesting. As always, THANK YOU for your detailed investigation in this. I may try it… I think one of my questions on this would be, in theory, would it help the FPS for a specific cached scenery? i.e. JFK or San Francisco (which are notoriously terrible with FPS and multiplayer on) or does this really have nothing to do with the performance?
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That I don’t know 
I am trying to think of reasons why it should. I guess one thing I could say is ‘try it and see if it improves performance for you’…
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