I had never really put any effort into exploring this feature prior to this weekend. Sometime Friday afternoon, I decided to see what the impact would be of manual caching the 50 square miles or so (give or take - I focused mainly on areas that I explore low and slow) around my home airport, KBWI - Baltimore Washington Int'l. The 1st thing I noticed is that I have not seen the low bandwidth popup arriving to Baltimore since doing so while I have had them on my last two arrivals into Chicago (default KORD, too) and Boston (FT). 

The real advantage is the detail level. If I approach KBWI from the north, I have to fly over the area where I boat on the Upper Chesapeake. There are lots of rivers, islands, and small towns all over both shorelines. After manual caching the area at high detail, I see all of the places that I go in very high detail with no lag at all. I can clearly make out my boat slip at the marina, and there is one particular spot by an island that I like to anchor by on the weekends. It looks 100% picture perfect accurate. Prior to caching, I would see a decent semblance of it but it lacked detail. The cached version of it is as they say, dead nuts accurate.

It took over an hour and a half to download that area but in my opinion, it was well worth the time and drive space. The only question in my mind is, if the Bing data gets updated will my cached data get marked "stale" and get replaced with the the updated data. or do I just need to re-download the entire area again if it does get updated?  

Have you tried this? Any tips or tricks? Too bad we can't highlight large areas of the map at the high detail level. You have to zoom in really close on the map to get to high detail, so "painting" large areas on the map is cumbersome.

How do you do this again?  So you're basically saving this area in photogrammetry to your PC?

15 minutes ago, MDFlier said:

It looks 100% picture perfect accurate. Prior to caching, I would see a decent semblance of it but it lacked detail. The cached version of it is as they say, dead nuts accurate.

This is very interesting. 

I've experimented before with manual cache. However i sim in too many different areas. 

Go to Options -> General Options -> Data -> Manual Cache. (This only works from the main menu. If you go to options while a flight is active, the manual cache options are greyed out)

Select a folder to save the cached data to, and set a maximum overall cache size. I used 128Gb just because I had 1.3Tb free on that drive and wasn't sure how much I really needed. The area I cached came out to be 22.22Gb. Once you do that, you select "Cache New Region" and give it a name. Then, you can just right click and drag areas on the map to select them. If you are zoomed out, you can cache low resolution data, if you zoom in a little more, you can cache med resolution, and if you zoom way in, you can cache high level. You can cache low res of a large area, then zoom in and re-highlight the same area under medium res, and then zoom in again and cache it at high res. The 3 can overlap is what I am trying to say. 

It appears to be PG, unless that part is still being downloaded. I'm not really sure, but it looks good and I have no stutters in the area now. The documentation is... well... That's why I asked. .

 

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by MDFlier

How does this work if you're using the MSFS2020 Map Replacement instead of the native Bing data?

I couldn't see any difference whatsoever when I tested manual caching with highest detail, but my connection is very good since I tuned in my router to avoid Bufferbloat and get a stable ping <5 ms.

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by Ixoye

My thoughts are that you shouldn't expect to see a difference provided that your connection to the servers is blazing fast all the time. If your connection speed at the time of the flight is slow, I think having the high res data already on your system would have to be an advantage. I'm sure I've flown past things before they could get fully loaded when I am below 10000' and above 200kts in a tubeliner. 

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by MDFlier

As far as I remember from the rolling cache discussions, this manual cache would equally potentially lead to issues as soon as something relevant is changed inside the cached region, no? There are many reports about CTDs due to rolling cache not being deleted after a big update, I am pretty sure this would then also apply for manual chache(s). 

I did play around with it in the beginning of MSFS, but due to above risks, I stopped using chache (manual AND rolling) completely, so I have no need to check if my cache needs to be updated when installing a scenery addon or whatever. 

What iNet connection speed do you have, @MDFlier? Because I never observed really late loading of the highest most details in my sim, except some things that can not be changed anyway (to my knowledge), like late loading of certain objects like cars on car parkings, taxiway signs and of course some terrain morphing of cliffs etc. 

I even once specifically tried to get rid of the terrain morphing in the Alps using a manual cache with the highest most resolution in Switzerland to no avail, the terrain morphing was still present...

Doesn't cache only affect the photogrammetry areas?

I did experiment with this initially, but gave up as firstly it was too cumbersome to use if you want a decent size area grabbed at max res, and secondly no-one seems to know how it actually works (does it always get used? will it be invalidaterd after any MS updates? Could it be used in preference to any updates? etc).

Potentially very usefull, but appalling that a feature like this gets issued without proper documentation. I have TB of spare drive space I'd be happy to use for this if I thought I wouldn't have to refresh it everytime MS does something weird with their servers.

If anybody DOES have access to any genuine documentation on this I'd love to hear about it.

From 0 to around 10 he explains how to set a manual cache (in detail). At around 10 he says using the default location for manual cache will help prevent glitches that remove the cache you have created. At 11 minutes he discusses what manual cache does for you.

 

22 minutes ago, Fielder said:

From 0 to around 10 he explains how to set a manual cache (in detail). At around 10 he says using the default location for manual cache will help prevent glitches that remove the cache you have created. At 11 minutes he discusses what manual cache does for you.

 

 Hmmm.... so if this fellow is correct, most of us (me for instance) have absolutely no need to bother with any of the caching features. Good to know!

Edited April 25, 20224 yr by odourboy

I'm pretty certain that photogrammetry data is already downloaded whenever you install one of the world updates. I think the idea of manual cache is to download satellite / aerial images only ahead of time if you have slow or intermittent internet.

One way to test is to set up a manual cache, exit the sim and re-load with your internet disabled...

Tiles are not cached is my understanding.

Also I  reset caches with each update if they are enabled to avoid CTDs. 

ns

 

I tried out my idea above and used slew mode to move around my city. It doesn't look like much of anything get cached - just got some FSX style textures on the ground.

The the sim did a CTD, so I give up.