With every update, the MSFS team always recommends emptying the Community folder when you encounter stability problems. Marketplace addons can also cause issues, as well. Or, you may have a problem where two add-ons conflict and you want to investigate by turning one on and turning another one off.
For these cases, it would be a good idea to integrate an ON/OFF option for items in both your Community and Official folders in the General Options. So people experiencing problems could easily turn off one, several, or all add-ons for testing. (Preferably, this could be done without restarting the sim.)
MODERATOR EDIT: Xbox users cannot use add-on linkers, so their only option right now is to uninstall add-ons, making this feature even more necessary for them.
Thanks for your reply, i never had heard from that tool before, so thanks.
Seems to be a great tool, but imo in general ingame options seems to be the easier approach.
And when updating the sim the addons can be deactived as standard…
Maybe it would be great to have both options, so you can use the “Addon Linker” if you like and if not you can cut off the Addon’s from within the menu. Should work seamlessly together…
SU5 made it painfully clear: FS2020 is like a house of cards, with a zillion interdependencies between the base sim and all the different add-ons that are available.
Asobo recommends to clear the community folder before installing an update, and for good reason. But what about all the add-ons purchased on Marketplace? I can only uninstall them, if I want to make sure none interferes with a new build of the sim. But I have 50 or 60 add-on airports by now, all bought on the marketplace. To uninstall them all is time consuming, and reinstalling them later even more so.
SU5 (inho) causes so many problems for so many, because almost nobody uses a clean install of FS2020 without any add-ons. It would be perfect if I could - in the Marketplace - deactivate all add-ons, one by one or all at the same time, do the sim update and than reactivate my add-ons one by one. Like this, I could spot faulty add-ons right away and leave them deactivated until a patch becomes available.
In summary: the idea is to include something like the freeware add-on linker directly into Marketplace!
If you use MSFS Addons Linker from flightsim.to you can do just that. Plus, it will no longer be necessary to empty your community for every Sim and World update for the game.
@OracularTripod7,
My apologies. I didn’t know that. An “In-Sim” method of doing what AddOns Linker does would still be awesome, for both PC and XBOX users.
It probably won’t be as efficient as the external addon linker.
With the addon linker, you disable the addons you don’t want, then launch the sim.
If it were in the sim, you would need to launch the sim, disable the addon(s), shut the sim down, then launch the sim again. Enabling them would be a similar process.
You can already do this, and it will work just as in FSX. Even without the add-on linker.
Head to your “content.xml” which is located (at least in my case) at “AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator”. Open it with the notepad and use serach option to find the add-on you need and then change “active=true” to “active=false” and it will disable the add-on from loading even without uninstalling it.
I wanted to ask Asobo if it is possible to add an option on the content menu to disable downloads. Many users are experiencing poor performance and one work around is to delete photogrammetry in areas users are not flighting. But when a user wants to again flight in a certain area they would have to re-download the content. I might be more efficient if we have a disable button option. Also it would eradicate issues with third party addons that conflict with handmade Asobo airports. We could just disable the Asobo airport. I know there is a lot of development going on but this would be a great feature in my opinion. Thank you!
We need a way to quickly disable mods, rather than uninstalling and reinstalling them. This will assist in sim troubleshooting.
But it can also help reduce loading times.
If you know you are going for a bush flight, with your favourite bush basher, in a particular area in the world, why would I want to load my complex airliners, big international airports, or things on the other side of the planet?
If you are going for an airline flight, it would make sense to load only that aircraft, and only the cities and areas you are flying with, or could potentially fly with.
PC users can currently use an addon linker to assist, but this does not work for marketplace items, nor is it an option for XBox users.
Ideally, this option would be accessible BEFORE the bulk of the sim loads to the main menu.
I came here to propose the same thing. It makes sense, especially to find issues with third-party addons.
Very often, folks blame the sim for crashes and issues when, in fact, these are caused by addons. Being able to disable all of them and then re-enable them one at a time until we find the culprit would be immensely useful.
I know there are external tools that to that but this should be something native of the sim.
This was never an issue until Asobo abandoned the use of the content.xml file in SU10. When it was used, it was just a matter of changing the true / false on any add-on that were being loaded.
One could also edit the content.xml from inside add-on linker… but again, since MSFS does not use the content.xml per say, there is no way to do this.
One can try to move items via the experimental content gui… but this is a terrible “table” that has little functionality.
So Yes vote on this… cause you can’t turn really things OFF/ON for items in the the Official folder… (well, you can if you delete from the content manger inside the sim… (but before doing that move the scenery out, or bury it by one folder level and the sim won’ t see/or load it)… then use the linker to turn it off or on…
Pain in the butt… just put the content.xml file back in use, and forget the silly content menu.
