I had added a number of addons from the Marketplace straight after Installation and I noticed that the loading time to get to the in-game menu from the ‘Press Any Key screen’ was an awful 2 minutes and 43 seconds on my Samsung 870 Pro SSD (God help anyone with spinning iron hard disks). Out of curiosity I decided to disable all third-party addons to see if they were the cause of this lengthy wait time.
Once in the Marketplace I noticed a Content Manager button. I clicked on that and there were all the installed packages. I filtered down to the Orbx stuff and selected the tick box and noticed that the only ‘Management’ options was to Delete the package. Really? I was expecting something sensible like also having a Disable option. Clicking Delete does exactly what you’d expect but hope wouldn’t actually happen. It deletes all the downloaded files from the FS 2020 package directory. That means to reinstall you have to download all the files again.
This is such terrible design I’m quite reluctant to believe it. All that you should do is Disable the package but leave the downloaded files alone surely? I decided to see what would happen if I did things manually instead of using this so-called Content Manager system. So, in Windows File Explorer I moved the Orbx folders out of the directory. Sure enough, FS 2020 saw the files weren’t there, showed it as Owned but not installed and was available to download. I moved the Orbx folders back into the FS 2020 package director and, as expected, Content Manager saw it was Installed once again, no need to redownload anything!
Why in hell doesn’t the Content Manager offer the same procedure which I did manually in order to avoid wasted time redownloading everything? I’m sure those on metered connections or slow Internet connections would rather the files were not deleted but simply moved to a Disabled folder location or something similar.
Awful, awful content management system design plain and simple.
EDIT:
I just loaded FSX Steam version to recall how that handled Scenery content. Sure enough the Scenery Library offered both a Tick box to Enable or Disable that scenery package, as well as a Delete Area button for more drastic removal. Why has all the good quality-of-life design and architecture decisions for in-game content management been so completely forgotten from past years of Microsoft Flight Simulator versions? Remember lessons of design from the past because reinventing the wheel is bad, especially if you end up with a triangular wheel this time around.
