As it stands today, if you install a new community mod by adding it to the community folder, you have to reboot the sim. This is a pretty time-consuming process.
Would it be possible to add an option for users to directly reload community mods without having to restart the simulator? FSX kinda did the same thing with scenery, when you added one to the library it cleared the scenery cache and rebuilt it on command. And it was always possible to force FSX to rebuild the cache anyways even if you didn’t add anything new.
As it is now becoming clear that large collections of addons in the community folder can really slow down the sim startup, various techniques are being used out here to restrict the number of thes addons active at startup.
It would be useful to be able to add/remove or activate/deactivate scenery addons from within the running sim (as is done in P3D, for instance) without having to shut the sim down, make changes, and restart.
I’m glad I found your suggestion and have a similar:
Why even have to manually toggle scenery add-ons on/off, if Asobo could implement a dynamic containerized loading system. The idea is completely stolen from Star Citizen’s Container system, and I think it could be a great addition here as well.
The gist of it is that MSFS only loads your plane when starting the sim. Everything else is streamed in and out of memory as you fly around. No need to load an entire countries 3rd party add-ons, if you’re only flying in the South of the country, right.
What does it require then? Simply, coordinates of the center of the scenery object and the max distance from that center to the farthest point of the object. With this info MSFS could asynchronously load the scenery into memory at eg…100 nm radius of your camera.
This could help partly on the Scenery Gateway System as well, as there would be a possibility to always download and load scenery as you fly around.
The idea for this also comes from spending too much time before starting MSFS to load/unload add-ons from the Community folder, not to talk about the long load times.
It seems like MSFS already does some dynamic loading of the scenery on-the-fly (pun!), so why not extend this better to 3rd party scenery?
There should be a way to reload the community folder as an option in the simulator. Just the community mods. For now, whenever a mod is added it´s necessary to leave the software and start it again. This option could improve the simulator loading time and even performance as the community folder could be left just with the essential files and the user would select the wanted mods before flying to a specific area.
I agree.
Technically this should be possible since installing and deleting addons from the marketplace is possible from within the menu without restarting the sim.
Not a high priority I guess, but I had the case a few times that I loaded the sim just to realize I had the wrong preset set in the AddonsLinker, requiring a full restart.
Yeah +1. Doesn’t always have to be fine for official I have found like it does for cf, but still a refresh would be nice.
The problem is that the sim indexes every file (not every mod, every file) during initial startup which is what takes forever. Even a quick refresh to check if anything has been moved or added - and then to only process anything changed - would be welcome.
I mean it’s not the end of the world but can be a pain sometimes.
Could Asobo add an update forcing the game to re-scan the community folder when you enter the hangar.
This would make life a lot easier for third party developers, as they’d be able to quickly check their add-ons on the fly before release and users could add and remove new Aircraft, or updated Aircraft, without restarting the game, even if it could only add/remove Aircraft, it would reduce long waits due to extreme loading times.
This would drastically increase load times, when exiting a flight. So this would be something that would have to be accomplished through developer tools, otherwise I don’t see why everyone should suffer even longer load-times in MSFS?
It said when you enter the hangar so nothing would get reloaded until you go there which you don’t need to do to load a flight. I would actually take it a step further and ask that we have a rescan of the community folder on user request from the normal flight window because even having to go back through the hangar each time is still a pain. This could be in dev mode only. It’s a royal PITA trying to establish community folder related issues or updates so something like this is sorely needed.
A button that a user could press, to opt-in to a rescan would be better than some feature that runs all the time, for everyone whether they want it or not.
You can force a rescan of the community folder in-sim… but you’re not going to like it.
ESC to exit the flight, then go to Main Menu|Profile|Content Manager. Delete one of the Official content. (I use a repaint type I never use). Then outside the sim, use Windows Explorer to add or delete to your Community folder. Go back to the Main Menu|World Map, and start a flight… The folders are rescanned.
(Remember to add back the deleted Official Content you deleted… it will have to re-download and take several minutes).
It would actually be easier to exit the sim, add or subtract from Community, and restart the sim!
I agree that this is bad. A button in the MSFS toolbar to rescan/refresh the scenery would be better. Also the Content Manager needs to be able to delete/add/inactivate Community packages.
Sorry if I was unclear, what I was referring to is the screen where you choose your Aircraft for your flight, as it’s where you keep your Aircraft I referred to it as a Hangar.
My question is if MSFS can quickly scan the community folder, for new/updated Aircraft or scenery when you click the window to enter that list of Aircraft, however as rhumbaflappy said, a button would be even better as you would only scan if you have added, or updated, item(s) to your community folder.
