Have a friend with terrible internet, capped and slow, about 1Mb/s. I cant seem to find any info on the size of maps to download, am i correct in saying you can download map content for offline use? If so, how big is eurpe to download, or ireland + UK + a bit around?

what you call map download is called "manual cache" in MSFS, allowing you to manually download a specific area which you drag on a map. I did not use that feature yet and cannot go into details as of now since I will probably not use it plus I am currently re-installing MSFS and downloading the 97gb as we speak....

2 hours ago, paule123 said:

Have a friend with terrible internet, capped and slow, about 1Mb/s. I cant seem to find any info on the size of maps to download, am i correct in saying you can download map content for offline use? If so, how big is eurpe to download, or ireland + UK + a bit around?

Hello Paule.  I can't say don't bother, but at 1 Mb/s it is going to be really painful and probably not worth it. 

MSFS isn't really the thing to buy if you have an internet speed like that, as even if you buy the disk version, the updates are massive - gigabytes and gigabytes of data.

It's the modern way I am sorry to say - poor internet speeds will exclude a lot of people from the new tech.  Mine is barely tolerable at 8 Mb/s.  My ISP keep saying they will roll-out fibre soon near me (76 Mb/s), but I have been hearing that for the last three years! 🙄

PS.  MS / Asobo say they have Petabytes of scenery data for the whole planet, so to try to cache the UK and Ireland will be many Terabytes.  It would take your friend almost forever.

Also, you don't have to say 'your friend' if it is really you, we won't shame you here.  A lot of us here are also 'Data Speed Challenged!'. 😄

Edited October 16, 20205 yr by bobcat999
PS

18 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

poor internet speeds will exclude a lot of people from the new tech. 

And it's about to get worse for a bunch of people. ATT is killing DSL. The idea is apparently to push people to fiber and, in the 72% of households they aren't bringing fiber to, 5g. Which is just awesome because even on the most expensive 5g plan, ATT will slow your internet down after 100 gigs, which FS will chew through in a single update, not even counting streaming scenery. Plus mobile data companies just love to play fee games with tethering, so using 5g on your desktop could cost even more.

 

Cheers for the responses.

 

Living in the countryside in Ireland my internet is a bit better than his, uncapped 7Mb ish, still feels like an information ghetto though, although my pc has a i5 3550 and no graphics card so no chance of flying anywhere. 

 

He has his own business with proper dsl in town so it is an option to take the pc in there and download a large area if that's possible, been reading about rolling cache, he'd even buy a 2tb ssd just for this if it's feasible, not sure if you have to actually fly around to cache it? I guess you don't really need everything, just flight corridors really?

How far away is his business from his house? Line of sight any possibility? If so, were I him I'd set up a cantenna (look 'em up, they're cool!) and tap in to my work DSL from home.

Here's some in-the-head math from a guy who isn't a math genius, so take it with a grain of salt but:

If you delete the oceans the Earth has around 57.5 million square miles worth of "scenery." I deleted the oceans because water in one part of the Pacific is going to look much like water in another part of the Pacific, so I'd assume that MSFS is compressing the ocean "data" significantly to save on resources.

So if they represent the world in 2 petabytes of data, that's 2000 terabytes. A little algebra gives you 1 terabyte per 28,700 square miles, so he would need that 2tb drive just to cache Ireland plus part of the UK. Caching Ireland plus all of the UK would require a bit more than 4tb.

Honestly, until storage gets a lot cheaper, caching anything bigger than something around the size of Ireland is going to be cost prohibitive, and even that isn't great because if he ever wants to fly outside of Ireland, he's gotta either buy a bigger drive again or drop to the non-photoreal scenery which isn't great.