This question may be answered somewhere in the forums already; but, I can’t find it.
“Will we always have to empty the community folder prior to every update?”
Because it seems we have too, I have not downloaded any of the awesome freeware that exists yet. Please advise
The reason that this is advised is because the SDK that is used to make freeware/payware is still a work in progress. If these developers do not keep up with those SDK changes, it may cause MSFS to hang or crash.
Approved 3rd Party Developers will soon get a pre-release of an upcoming patch so that they will be able to test it prior to going live.
Then you have nothing to worry about and nothing to do. This only applies to you if you have stuff in your community folder.
I have done both. Moved everything out of the folder before update and left things in there. Both have worked for me. However the first thing I do if I notice some strange behaviour in the sim is to remove all addons in the community folder and try again. The simple way I use is to create a backup folder on the disk outside the MSFS2020 install location, I then select everyting in the community folder, right click and cut and paste it into the backup location.
There are so many different content from amateur, free or partners that could be put in the Community folder that I can easily understand Microsoft/Asobo taking this minimum precaution and ask to clean our Community folder before any upgrades. It makes sense.
It really depends on what you put in there. I try to keep my Community folder as small as possible. Avoiding letting there stuff that I don’t really use or are not of enough quality (personaly wise). Since 2 or 3 MSFS updates, I didn’t clean my Community prior updates, I tried to update these addons and mod as fast as possible (flightsim.to monitoring your download is quite efficient).
The official advice is to empty your community folder if you have a problem, the inference being to leave it intact for the download.
Having said that, it only takes a few seconds to rename the community folder and create a new, empty one, then reverse the process once you are sure you have a working sim update.
One thing to bear in mind though is that some problems may not be immediately obvious. Keep your eye on the forums to see if any add-ons have been flagged, and if an update becomes available.
Yep that’s what I do also works when content manager hangs.
Can you also simple cut and past ORBX or GAYA add ons to a different temp folder while the update is in progress ?
I mean orbx uses a orbx central for installing/deleting addons. I don’t want to destroy anything.
What I’ve taken to doing is creating a folder called ‘DISABLED’, and then move addons into this before an update.
Because you are merely moving the folders, and they remain on the same disk, this takes seconds, no matter how much actual data there is.
The sim will attempt to load a mod called ‘DISABLED’, but it doesn’t do anything because the folder structure is incorrect. I suspect it probably throws up errors, but it never seems to cause me problems, and is much quicker than actually move the individual folders out, then moving them back again afterwards.
Just because your add-ons and liveries have never caused problems doesn’t mean that no add-ons or liveries cause problems. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence in these forums to support that some do. Advising against the official MS/Asobo recommendations based on personal experience is not something I would recommend.
One tip would be to move things back in to your Community folder one ‘thing’ at a time and test. That way, if something does cause a problem, you’ll know which add-on was the culprit.
True, but here’s a valuable little tip if you have many of those:
Install half of them at first. If all is well, install half of the remaining ones, otherwise remove half of the installed ones. Rinse and repeat until you find the culprit(s).
Statistically, this will drastically reduce the amount of those slow, slow FS restarts.
Unless some Mods interact badly with others, then it gets far more complex. !!
Another think to consider – only install the Mods you need for a particular flight.
ie IF you are flying in California, why install Airport Mods for airports on the East Coast.
Also, why install EVERY item you have bought in your Steam / Ms Store Library, if you are not using them. ?
Maybe your sim runs better if it does not look like this —
I don’t have ownership of my community folder, I can add and delete but not copy elsewhere (bizarrely) - is there a tip to change this?
Maybe you don’t have access to where you are trying to copy to ??
Maybe can make additional folders in the same folder as Community, ie c1 c2 c3 and copy to those ??
This is something I will never do. Imagine as this Community folder gets bigger and bigger, you better have a lot of time on your hands to load EACH file and TEST each file. No way!
Oops…
Redeye
I couldn’t agree more. I would imagine payware developers for a start would find the idea that their product could be broken every two weeks incredibly frustrating so its highly unlikely in my opinion that Asobo would be making changes that would do that and risk upsetting their partners.
Nor do I think that the SDK is so unstable that scenery mods that are made using nothing but tools within it like I do are likely to cause any issues either. As long as the build passes all the tests and doesnt throw up any red warnings, scenery it produces is good to go in my experience and I use it for hours every single day producing multiple builds.
What could cause issues, just maybe, is these google scenery rush jobs that people are churning out. I think if people have those, it may be wise to rename or move the community folder content. But otherwise, its just not necessary.
Actually I dont think Asobo say you need to do this either. They say you need to empty the folder if there are sim stability issues either before or after an update, as far as I can tell.
I have never removed the files from the community folder since release and not had any problems.
Does it not say you only need to remove them if you have any issue with the sim after download.
I have emptied it before and forgotten to do it about equal times, and no issues yet (knock wood). But now I use one of the addon organizers so I can put them somewhere else and reference them. At this point it may not be a problem for some of us, but in a year or two when we may have over a hundred DLCs to select, I’d think it may be a consideration.
