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RaptyrOne

Rolling Cache and Manual Cache Questions

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I'm not clear on the differences between these two. I set up Rolling Cache to 90GB. It creates a 90GB "file" on the SSD.

I presume that the sim will populate this 90GB file with scenery data as I fly around in the Sim. This will in turn help reduce the bandwidth load when flying around in that same area in the future. I presume also than that this feature won't be of much use to those that might always choose to fly in a different area. Those that fly regularly from a 'home' airport or those flying regular routes for a virtual airline might see most benefit. Maybe it will allow for a better experience if your internet connection goes down, provided you stay in a cached area.

But then what is the Manual Cache for? I set this to 90GB too but I did so thinking at the time that it was the same thing. I realise now that it is a separate cache and it also took a 90GB block off my SSD. I want to delete this cache (simply because it is not a default option so I presume not essential) but there is no option to do so in the Options Menu. My next thought then is to simply delete the 90GB .ccc file sitting in the Manual Cache Folder. As it will likely be too big for Recycle Bin and I don't want to copy such a huge file to back it up, can this be deleted without crashing the Sim? It won't even let me reduce it's size.

It would have been nice if a basic manual had been published to explain these intricacies - how these caches work, how best to set them up to take max advantage of them, what happens if a 3rd party add on is installed to a pre-cached area, or if Asobo themselves update scenery files that affect a pre-cached area? Does the Sim recognise the new data and auto-delete the "outdated" cache data?

 

 

 


GregH

Intel Core i7 14700K / Palit RTX4070Ti Super OC / Corsair 32GB DDR5 6000 MHz / MSI Z790 M/board / Corsair NVMe 9500 read, 8500 write / Corsair PSU1200W / CH Products Yoke, Pedals & Quad; Airbus Side Stick, Airbus Quadrant / TrackIR, 32” 4K 144hz 1ms Monitor

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I set Rolling Cache to 100 Gig and Manual Cache to 100 Gig and still today I flew an area I've flown around at least 6 times in the last few days and I used over a gig of downloaded data.

I think they're a bit broken at present and not working as designed.

 

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You will know what is in your Manual Cache since you have to actually outline and label what you want manually cached, if you have only allocated space for the Manual Cache, which is the first step required before you can actually use the cache, then go ahead and delete the Manual Cache ccc thing without worry, afterwards you could re-define a new Manual Cache if you want.

The Rolling Cache is a First-In First-Out cache that fills to its pre-determined limit before actually making room for newer flying areas.  It does not need to be managed except for deciding its initial size.  If you are constantly flying to new areas all over the world, and who isn't, the Rolling Cache will have little value.  Once you have some very favorite spots, the Manual Cache will be much more useful.

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So let's say you home base in Seattle area, and so your rolling cache is filled with a lot of Seattle stuff.  Then you spend some time in the alps and after a couple of days you return to seattle.  The seattle stuff may have rolled out of your cache so then it will need to download again.

If you have a good internet connection and no datacaps, then no problem.  But if you do have limited bandwidth or data caps, then you might want areas that never roll out.  That's where building a separate manual cache comes to play.

Sure, you can set up a huge rolling cache, but that's a lot of disk space to allocate just because you don't want to download the same area over and over again.  Better to se up a small manual cache for the areas you wish to keep, then a manageable rolling cache that will cover say one night of simming.  

 

Edited by wthomas33065

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3 hours ago, Will Fly For Cheese said:

I set Rolling Cache to 100 Gig and Manual Cache to 100 Gig and still today I flew an area I've flown around at least 6 times in the last few days and I used over a gig of downloaded data.

I think they're a bit broken at present and not working as designed.

 

It's entirely possible it's working as designed.  Areas of Low LOD, Medum LOD, and High LOD (Level of detail) are loaded as you fly over them.  This is bases on your Terrain Level of Detail and Object Level of detail sliders.  It's entirely possible that when you entered into an area, a large Low LOD file got downloaded from the internet.  But because you stayed at a relatively high altitiude, the Medium and High LOD files of that area never got loaded.   Now you fly over again at a lower altitude.  Now this forces your computer to load more detailed mesh and texture maps and thus it has to refetch those items.    So those get cached.   Later, you play with your drone and start peeking into windows in the city.  Now you have to load the highest LOD for that area.  So again, it goes to the internet and caches it.  

How much is fetched and how far away from your aircraft it's fetched from is controlled by the sliders.  

If you actually work with the manual cache, you'll see what I mean.  As you "zoom" in, you'll notice at certain altitudes, only LOW detail is available.   Then as you zoom in more (lower altitude) you can start choosing medium levels.  Then as you go further in still, the high detail shows up.  That's exactly what is happening in the Sim.  Just because you fly over an area at 5000 ft, doesn't mean you are caching all the high detail tiles of the area.  You actually have to be close enough and low enough to force the load.

It's also possible that had you NOT had rolling cache or manual cache enabled, you would have ended up downloading a great deal more than 1Gig.

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2 minutes ago, wthomas33065 said:

It's entirely possible it's working as designed.  Areas of Low LOD, Medum LOD, and High LOD (Level of detail) are loaded as you fly over them.  This is bases on your Terrain Level of Detail and Object Level of detail sliders.  It's entirely possible that when you entered into an area, a large Low LOD file got downloaded from the internet.  But because you stayed at a relatively high altitiude, the Medium and High LOD files of that area never got loaded.   Now you fly over again at a lower altitude.  Now this forces your computer to load more detailed mesh and texture maps and thus it has to refetch those items.    So those get cached.   Later, you play with your drone and start peeking into windows in the city.  Now you have to load the highest LOD for that area.  So again, it goes to the internet and caches it.  

How much is fetched and how far away from your aircraft it's fetched from is controlled by the sliders.  

If you actually work with the manual cache, you'll see what I mean.  As you "zoom" in, you'll notice at certain altitudes, only LOW detail is available.   Then as you zoom in more (lower altitude) you can start choosing medium levels.  Then as you go further in still, the high detail shows up.  That's exactly what is happening in the Sim.  Just because you fly over an area at 5000 ft, doesn't mean you are caching all the high detail tiles of the area.  You actually have to be close enough and low enough to force the load.

It's also possible that had you NOT had rolling cache or manual cache enabled, you would have ended up downloading a great deal more than 1Gig.

A great post - with much to digest.

Many Thanks.

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2 minutes ago, Will Fly For Cheese said:

A great post - with much to digest.

Many Thanks.

This brings up so many memories of MS-COF and MSX and FSGenesis mesh....

Same concepts, just now Azure has given us all access to a huge common HDD instead of having to download and install individual mesh

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you can not shrink manual cache maximum size 😞

Edited by Gomoto
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Just now, Gomoto said:

you can not shrink manual cache maximum size 😞

Yeah.  The game won't allow you to shrink the Manual Cache size.  Is the only way to shrink the Manual Cache by deleting the .ccc file?


i5-12400, RTX 3060 Ti, 32 GB RAM

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Is the manual cache file created in the maximum size or is the maximum just a border variabel? In any case I do not understand why lowering the maximum size does not work at the moment even after deleting the manual cached regions.

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12 minutes ago, Gomoto said:

Is the manual cache file created in the maximum size or is the maximum just a border variabel? In any case I do not understand why lowering the maximum size does not work at the moment even after deleting the manual cached regions.

The ccc file is actually the size of the cache you create.  I have two .ccc files one 50GB and one 10GB in size.  These kind of operate in the same way as a swapfile, but it appears that you can't "shrink" them through the UI.  

So when you define the cache initially, it creates a filespace on the HDD and reserves it.  Much like tablespace is used in a SQL DB.  Whether or not the DB is empty or not, from an OS perspective that DB file is the same size regardless of whether or not the data is being used or full of "null" values.

The UI should provide you with a method to shrink the manual cache file, or if that's not possible to delete the entire file and start fresh without having to delve into the file system.

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I reinstalled to get rid of the manual cache file and to move my installation to the faster of my two NVME drives.

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The manual cache is great to preload a big photogrammetry city like Boston. I'm doing this now, and it's going to take a couple of hours because there's so much data (gigabytes worth). The HUGE problem with manual cache is that the manager is rubbish. The more you cache, the slower and more unresponsive this tool becomes. I had to delete gigabytes worth of previously cached regions just to use the tool. This is obviously a bug, and it makes having a big manual cache useless. Ideally I should be able to cache a terabyte of my favorite cities on my drive if I want, but I'm lucky to get 5 GB before the "paint" tool becomes unusable. This means I basically can only have one big city in the cache at a time. BTW, my cache is on a NVMe drive.

I do have a question about this - do the rolling cache and manual cache share the same data? In other words, will the rolling cache load data from the manual cache, so that if I delete a city from the manual cache, it'll still be in the rolling cache? Many RAM caches work this way, but obviously this is not the efficient way of managing drive space.

Edited by Keto Ketchup
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