so...did i understand it correctly, that everytime i hit the play button, and the sim plays on a loop, it is being recalculated over and over?
or is the advantage of bake that it isnt calculated in real time, rather, it is precalucated, thus it is easier on the cpu?
This is my understand of it. So, I might be wrong. When you play thru it calculates and creates a cache. Every time you make a change blender will recalculate from frame 1. so if you have cache till frame 50 and the play head is on frame 15 and you make a change it will play the cache until 50 stop then start recalculating once it loops back to 1. This takes up a lot of RAM and CPU power. By baking the simulation you lock in the simulation so that it can't be changed, but takes less RAM and CPU to display. When you bake you are creating actual files if I remember correctly.
yeah i also kinda understood it like "recalc if change, no recalc if no change", and the bake locks in, and doesnt display each frame, which saves cpu and ram
Cache and baked data are always stored in a folder at the same location as your blend file.
