I’ve encountered a consistent issue related to World Updates, City Updates, the rolling cache, and overall performance in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
I downloaded several World Updates and City Updates to reduce streaming load and to speed up the loading of photogrammetry areas. However, when these updates are installed locally, the rolling cache function almost completely stops working. It shows no activity or bandwidth usage in Developer Mode, and photogrammetry areas load in poor quality despite having high available internet bandwidth. In addition to this, overall simulator performance becomes inconsistent, with noticeable stuttering when these updates are installed.
When I uninstall the World Updates and City Updates and allow the photogrammetry areas and cities to stream instead, the situation reverses: the rolling cache works normally, the photogrammetry areas appear in excellent high quality, and the simulator runs very smoothly with perfect performance.
What I don’t understand is why streaming—which requires a constant high-bandwidth connection—produces perfect quality and smooth performance, while downloading the same regions locally results in degraded quality, a non-functional rolling cache, and reduced simulator performance.
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I have no technical knowledge of how these are designed to work together, but I’ve long wondered if MS/Asobo made a mistake by allowing users the ability to download content locally.
2024 seems like it was designed as a streaming model from the start. The very loud and vociferous calls from the community to enable downloading eventually led them to relent, but I question if it will ever work properly. I also wonder if it would have served MS/Asobo better just to devote resources into optimizing the streaming model and just absorb the arrows calling for a fully downloadable platform.
I know this is likely of no help to you, but I think we’ll be debating this until the next platform comes out, assuming it does one day.
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PG is never downloaded, it’s always streamed (unless actively cached). WUs/CU downloads only include things like POIs, Airports, etc. AFAIK.
Strange that you are seeing these effects though.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Rolling Cache only supplies data for areas that have been previously loaded during a flight.
I can download scenery, but until I fly over it the RC stores no data for that area.
I would think that downloading an area would allow it to be loaded into memory from an internal physical drive during a flight (allowing potentially higher read bandwidth for users with low-bandwidth internet connections) but I wouldn’t expect to see any RC activity the first time I fly there.
I still have major questions about the Rolling Cache - what it is, what it does, how it interacts with streamed data, why I don’t see very high RC transfer rates (and correspondingly low network traffic) when I repeat a flight over the same area 10 times…
ETA: In my mind, the Rolling Cache should work like this:
A marriage of streamed data and local data: All scenery in a bubble around my current location is pre-cached before I start the flight, and continually updates based on available cache and current LOD settings, adding and discarding streamed data as I move the bubble.
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