Hey guys, I made a post on Microsoft Flight Simulator forums about this but I will also post here. I spent the last couple of days not flying so I could get a proper offline mode where I could fly around in VFR with detailed photoreal scenery. The manual cache feature is the key to flying with stored Bing data, except the whole process didn’t go smoothly at all.

My top priority was to store Toronto-area scenery so that I could avoid stutters and have the ability to fly offline. However, along the way I discovered the following major issues that many others have reported:

1. Continuously drawing a larger and larger high quality area will progressively drop the FPS. A popular issue that many have reported, if you draw a larger enough area for over an hour, eventually it will drop to 0.5 FPS. After downloading the area, that low FPS will remain in the menu and loading the manual cache menu can take hours. Every click will take a minute to process, making it impossible to create a new cache.

2. Only areas that contain Bing photogrammetry data will be stored in the manual cache. Downloading any area that only contains Bing satellite imagery will be discarded and not stored in the cache. This means if you draw any areas that are not in a photogrammetry city, your cache is useless and you will end up with a small filesize. Remember, the only cities with photogrammetric data are major cities in North America, Australia and Europe, making manual caching a waste of time anywhere in the entire continents of South America, Asia and Africa. Also a waste of time caching anywhere that only has satellite data, which pretty much every little town out there.

For example, here I manually cached a medium quality area that is supposed to cover the Toronto and the outer cities bordering it, but instead it only caches downtown Toronto. For those who are familiar, it stops the cache right at Eglinton Avenue, right where photogrammetry data ends:

20200820192713_11920×1080 627 KB

20200820192825_11920×1080 861 KB

 

To test if manual cache was working or not, I needed to isolate the scenery to only the manual cache. This means data streaming has to be disabled, rolling cache has to be deleted and then disabled, and then compare the differences in quality and base game data.

Here is Toronto and various buildings streamed at 25mbps:

toronto stream1920×1080 433 KB

 

stream11920×1080 507 KB

stream21920×1080 581 KB

stream31920×1080 436 KB

In high quality:

toronto high1920×1080 460 KB

 

high11920×1080 509 KB

high21920×1080 464 KB

high31920×1080 366 KB

Medium:

Toronto med1920×1080 414 KB

 

med11920×1080 316 KB

med21920×1080 367 KB

med31920×1080 296 KB

Low:

toronto low1920×1080 302 KB

 

low 11920×1080 282 KB

low 21920×1080 290 KB

low 31920×1080 248 KB

Manhattan in low quality:

Manhattan low1920×1080 396 KB

 

As you can see, low is basically useless, I would consider medium quality the bare minimum.

Essentially the feature is broken as caching too much data will break the menu, and only a couple hundred cities can be cached. Forget about caching vast terrain scenery or little towns here and there, they will be discarded and you will get a low file size. Of course, I will be sending these bug reports to the Zendesk.

Great post

1 hour ago, spacesimmer said:

Hey guys,

Hi...really, really informative...you saved me from downloading med quality.

The issue with downloading high quality (at least for me) is that I have to zoom in really close before the high quality selector become active...leaving me with about 8 square blocks to select at a time....it takes forever to complete a whole city with that selection size.

Have you figured out a way to select a large areas (lets say Miami) at the high detailed level?

 

Yes! This is a huge problem/bug !

It´s really weird that almost nobody have replied to this thread.

After I lost a lot of time selecting what I wanted to cache to play offline, I was surprised, with only a single file with just 1 mb!

Basically, all the Bing photometry does not work offline (manual cache or not) , and this is supposedly one of the main features of this sim.

Please Microsoft, fix it! 

Thank you.

 

Finally I found a forum post regarding this issue, leaving me to see that I’m not the only one experiencing this dreadful bug.

After only trying to cache Manhattan, the game menu went to 1fps (if at all), try navigating back to the main menu like that...!

regarding not being able to select greater areas especially the high-resolution ones, is pretty much Microsoft/Asobo intention, so you aren’t able to download huge data packs with a single click and hogging bandwidth thus later on rendering the streaming useless. They don't want to sell the game in it’s entirety, they want to make you dependent. Right now this is of no concern (beside the hefty bandwidth needed and bugs) but for future products they pretty much just disable all the streaming capabilities of this game to sell a new one.

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by Ju1ius

Wow, low quality is basically useless! I'm assuming you downloaded the city to the manual cache and the flew over while in "offline" mode? What I'm curious about is how the manual cache interacts with streaming - for example, if I download a city in medium, will the closer photogrammetry buildings load in the missing vectors and textures (a delta of data), thus making my streaming more efficient? Or am I forcing FS to only give me medium quality assets even if online?

Speaking of vectors, photogrammetry seems downright stupid when it comes to polygon reduction in the lower qualities. It should keep the edge points, thus keeping rectangular buildings rectangular, and throw away the more nuanced detailed points (air conditioning units, balconies, etc) instead. This forest of spikes is just terrible looking. It only takes 8 points to represent a simple rectangle, which would look way better. As for textures, low quality also looks terrible rubbish. I'd rather FS apply autogen textures color-matched to the low quality photogrammetry textures as a placeholder until the high quality textures can be loaded. I don't understand why FS went with an either / or approach to autogen / photogrammetry when the two could have been combined to produce much better results.

Sounds like a typical Microsoft schema - like Windows - once you buy in, you’re in for life. Over the years I’ve attempted to move to Linux several times, just because I hated being held hostage by MS. Each time I’ve had to back out because the software I needed and wanted was only available for Windows.