Manchester to Heathrow, how much data is downloaded?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

There is an option in MFS to download and store scenery for flights instead of streaming. But how much data would be stored for a flight from Manchester to London Heathrow for example?

This would involve flying south after take-off over Birmingham and then over the City of London before turning right, flying over Central London before landing at Heathrow.

The amount of data stored is unknown but given the route is bound to be considerable. The normal cruise level for a 737 would be 190. How wide is the visible corridor? All the way to the horizon? According to this calculator it's 169 miles. http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

Once a alpha tester is released from their NDA it would be helpful to know, thanks.

[Dominique_K 10,133]

The cache process is still a big unknown.

Lionel said in EP World «  we can pre-cache arbitrary region of the worlds /.../ You can select regions of the world that you want to precache and you can access them in the offline setting while having the same quality you would enjoy in an online setting ".

But some leakers reported that it didn't work that way at all in the alpha. There was no way to select a region or a route and download its sat imagery. The sim was just filling the cache until full and then flushing out what was stored at the beginning (FIFO).  Useless.

it is indeed a crucial issue  for the bandwidth challenged folks. In another post I took the examples of a London-Paris or a Miami area-Tampa area. 

I think that that 50 nm of downloaded orthos on each side would be enough and then non ortho ground beyond. That would roughly be a 20 000 square n-miles rectangle. Maybe a 100 nm width is even a little too much. How large would be the download then is a good question. 

Edited July 17, 2020 by Dominique_K

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

Dominique, if that really is the situation I find it incredible it hasn’t been fixed. Almost nothing about this has been posted in these glossy videos. But it’s fundamental for those who may choose to download the scenery overnight before flying it the next day. If that process doesn’t work then how can the product be declared ready for use?

Surely people need some indication of space required before they buy new SSDs. It will be interesting to see if any info on this is forthcoming in the few weeks remaining before release.

[GSalden 4,655]

If you take a look at TE Great Britain you will get an idea of how much space you will need at 1 m/p if you will recalculate it to your distance.

At 50 cm/p It would be 4x the size...

 

[Kopteeni 819]

Manual caching not available was still in the top alpha issues list in the last week update. Don't know if it'll make it to launch version.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

7 minutes ago, GSalden said:

If you take a look at TE Great Britain you will get an idea of how much space you will need at 1 m/p if you will recalculate it to your distance.

At 50 cm/p It would be 4x the size...

I don't have that scenery. Is the resolution in MFS the same as TE GB? 4x the size of what?

[Dominique_K 10,133]

18 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

Manual caching not available was still in the top alpha issues list in the last week update. Don't know if it'll make it to launch version.

VR, helicopters and seasons were clearly out of the scope from the beginning. No surprise. Selecting a region to cache was as clearly a feature for the release. We’ll know more when the beta will be on the table.

Edited July 17, 2020 by Dominique_K

[GSalden 4,655]

38 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I don't have that scenery. Is the resolution in MFS the same as TE GB? 4x the size of what?

They are around 40-45 Gb for each region ( North, Middle and South ) so about 120-135 Gb in total. For 1m/p, so 50 cm/p would be 4x that size...

Yes, MSFS is able to DL 2 m/p , 1 m/p and also 50 cm/p. If I am correct you can set the highest resolution. If your system or IN connection is not fast enough it reverts to a lower resolution.

Here I have a 250 mb/s IN connection do that should be more than enough.

Hopefully for you a Concorde will be released for MSFS...  ✈️

 

 

Edited July 17, 2020 by GSalden

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

How large are these regions? I have absolutely no idea. Can the user draw a rectangle around an area for that to be downloaded? We really need some info on how this works and expected file size.

Can you feed it a flight plan and it automatically calculates the area to be downloaded? So many unknowns.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

3 minutes ago, GSalden said:

They are around 40-45 Gb for each region ( North, Middle and South ) so about 120-135 Gb in total. For 1m/p, so 50 cm/p would be 4x that size...

So 500Gb minimum for Great Britain? Ouch!

[GSalden 4,655]

Just now, Ray Proudfoot said:

So 500Gb minimum for Great Britain? Ouch!

Here I use a 2 TB M2 for Windows + Fs and a seperate 500 Gb SSD 600 for additional scenery.

 

[Dominique_K 10,133]

As I remember FS20 is ZL19 which is a 30cm res., sharper than TE (ZL 16 or 17 ?). TE includes the mesh and various autogens which will not have be streamed by FS20 as they belong to the offline core. 

A precache of a polygon (rectangle) is a necessity for many in FS20.
 

Edited July 17, 2020 by Dominique_K

[ckyliu 1,749]

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

They are around 40-45 Gb for each region ( North, Middle and South ) so about 120-135 Gb in total. For 1m/p, so 50 cm/p would be 4x that size...

Yes, MSFS is able to DL 2 m/p , 1 m/p and also 50 cm/p. If I am correct you can set the highest resolution. If your system or IN connection is not fast enough it reverts to a lower resolution.

That all seems broadly correct but there are two things to consider:

• Firstly, whilst the platform supports 50 cm/px often imagery of that resolution is not available on Bing.
• Secondly, the above is talking about uncompressed data, so the figures are probably correct for what's kept in cache but the actual data streamed I expect to be significantly compressed to keep bandwidth requirements (and cost to MS) reasonable

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I don't have that scenery. Is the resolution in MFS the same as TE GB? 4x the size of what?

50m/px would be quadruple the size of 1m/px, the latter apparently what TE GB is apparently running at. You seem very panicky Ray, you have a fast system and connection with lots of storage, why all the concern (and why "really need some info", just don't purchase on day 0 and await some feedback)? Has everyone forgot there is a full offline mode that reverts to landclass type textures in-lieu of aerial photographs?

Edited July 17, 2020 by ckyliu

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

34 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Here I use a 2 TB M2 for Windows + Fs and a seperate 500 Gb SSD 600 for additional scenery.

I'm tempted to paraphrase that well-known line from Jaws..." you're going to need a bigger drive." if you plan on caching a lot of scenery. 😁

[honanhal 1,420]

It seems clear to me from everything we've seen and heard that the caching capability was more designed with someone in mind who wants to fly around in a relatively small space (e.g. the Los Angeles Basin, a Hawaiin island, etc.) rather than the kind of point-to-point flight you're talking about, Ray, for exactly the reason that the volume of scenery you'd need to cache to cover what's visible from flight levels is very large. that implies they see the ability to cache scenery as more of a "nice to have" than a real alternative for the way most of us here on Avsim tend to use our sims.

I could be wrong, but it seems that streaming is the way MS expects the overwhelming majority of users to experience MSFS. And to be clear, I think it's a very good thing by and large -- I vastly prefer that to having to set aside terabytes of hard drive space the way XP ortho enthusiasts have been doing for the last few years!

James