Hi all.
How do you handle this?
I mean do you use freeware airports and scene updates for cities and such things?
My community folder is about 60 GB and i had to wait ca. 30 minutes until the main menu. And i am using a SDD.
There need to be a better system, otherwise there is no chance in using the whole mods. I mean i could easily use more mods from around the world, but then i can wait an hour or so…
So, do you use all the mods out there? Or only airports for example?
I had the same issue. I took out most.
It seems the big scenery mods are the ones that increase it the most, the ones that replace whole cities with new textures ect.
Now I only have liveries and the landmarks adddons that just add buildings, features ect. Airports are generally small unless completely redone texture wise.
Mine is about 24gigs and loads in about 2 min.
Yeah, now i left only the airports in the folder, now round about 10 GB…load in about 2 min.
What a pitty, there where so beautiful scenerys…Prag…Wien…Paris. But it is not working in the moment.
Hey Devs, we need a new system here. Could it be that every time you start the sim, the community folder is putting in the contend manager? I mean there must be a solution in the future, or nearly no one will download contend from 3rd party developers (often these contend is also in the communty folder).
They need some kind of cache system for addons it long loads once and then caches it and only requires to reload changed or new files.
Right now it is straight loading everything. Hopefully they can optimize this. This may be where they are going with addons now showing in the content manager. Might just be taking it a step at a time.
Wow…I’m going to need to back all the way out. My community folder is 110GB composing of 7975 folders and a combined total of 275516 fles. It takes 14 mins to load to Asobo’s initial screen and another 15+ mins to the start screen.
I think it will be a challenge. The Community folder is parsed alphabetically, many of the add ons tie into existing base functionality so if an add on is cached it will still have to be examined, probably through a flag, at start up for changes or deletion then the cache modified accordingly. It adds complexity which the system probably should avoid at this point in time.
I’m a computer programmer and former scenery designer and there is somewhat simple solution for the designers here. Yes, there is a significant amount of data in each large scenery area added but Flight Sim doesn’t need to be concerned about going through all that at startup. All they really need to know is 1. Are there changes to this folder since the last time the sim was started and 2. For any of those changes what was the general area in the world that the new folder encompasses. That goes into an internal INDEX file that matches locations (lat/long) with the folder names. When a user chooses a starting point for their flight, picks a challenge, creates a flight plan, etc. there should be a general idea of what scenery areas might be utilized and the rest of the Community folder can then be ignored if the areas are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
That said, the sim is open world meaning that during flights we can choose out of the blue to go far away from where we set off and could get into another area covered by a different customer folder so there would need to be periodic checks against that index to see if something else needed to be loaded up. Yes, that would pause things a bit but I’ll bet all of us would prefer that to an hour load time at the beginning for areas we’ll never go to. If you have to pause just tell us why. Great time for a bathroom break.
I see this same load everything mentality in the manual cache system. It’s pretty obvious there that as you add new areas to a new cached area that the entire world is reconsidered and redrawn prior to it processing your next mouse or keystroke.
I completely get this approach during testing. You just need a small data amount to see if those things work but we users are going to keep adding to them since they are features of a PRODUCT WE BOUGHT. The onus can never be on the user to go through extraordinary lengths to be able to reasonably use the product. I was told in the FAQ’s to remove community folders prior to loading of places I didn’t intend to fly. How about Asobo take care of that for us.
I discovered yesterday the vast array of freeware airports, scenery areas, points of interest, liveries, etc that have been made already even without a fully functional SDK and it blew my mind. I spent hours finding places I wanted to explore only to discover that the sim was then basically unusable. I’ll bet I could create that indexing system in a day of coding. The basics are really fairly simple compared to 3D graphic manipulation. It’s just large data administration, concepts that are used daily in IT.
Sardaukar888 [Freeware] Peeyem, a simple package manager for Microsoft Flight Simulator [v0.2.0]
I use this freeware program that allows you to either enable or disable any mod located in the community folder.
Consequently, the sim and any subsequent flights are loaded with only the pre enabled mods rather than everything.
I hope this helps
Just want to add my $.02. I have 100+ mods to totaling around 60Gb. I run on a newer laptop (10875h/2080S max-q/32Gb/1 Tb NVMe). I never have to wait more than 2 mins from icon click to main flight selection menu.
So what’s different? I do have an NVMe drive. It can’t be just that?
One thing I do frequently, whenever I add or change my Community folder I delete my Content.xml file in the LocalCache directory. It’s definitely slower (like 3 min), but after that the sim loads very fast.
Maybe something for you all to try??
how do you handle it ???
Well your answer is in your question. You have a large community folder so the sim is having to read more on launch dont put stuff in you wont user often and clear it out problem solved.
In the long run we need a solution like @Azphilosopher proposed, but at the moment the best thing is having 2 folders, and draging to the community folder only what you are gonna use for that flight. Or use a package manager.
Do we have the same problem with Marketplace Items ?
I wondered too about the packaged marketplace items. I purchased the London city add on by Orbx and assumed that data would only get looked at and loaded up if I flew around the south of England but now I’m not so sure. Whatever system they end up with for the Community folder should also be implemented with all the rest of their scenery data. Know it’s there but only load it all up if you’re within say 100 miles of the area covered. In fact I’d be fascinated if somewhere on the screen you could have an optional status message box that told you that a new area was being loaded up as you flew near it. You could then be not surprised by the stutters that happen as you approach some highly detailed city or point of interest and it would satisfy the “nerd factor” inherent in many of us.
Thank you. That sounds like a great interim solution. Do you have an actual link to that program?
[Freeware] Peeyem, a simple package manager for Microsoft Flight Simulator [v0.2.0]:
Here’s the link for you.
I have been using for several days and find it a very easy way to manage content on a flight by flight basis. Just a few clicks within the program, prior to loading the sim, reduces loading time.
I did see some significant performance gains when I removed a liveries pack with 150 odd liveries and 1.5gb. It would make sense as the sim would need to load all the liveries models into the menu each time whereas scenery is dependent on location.
Do you have any big scenery mods that replace cities/regions? This are the ones that seem to impact loading times. Landmarks, liveries and airports do not really impact it much.
If you do have those big scenery mods installed might check if they are in proper folder format as it is likely that they aren’t being loaded properly or another mod is overriding it.
Long loading times with big scenery mods is pretty consistent so something is not loading. I have an nvme drive and just putting in the London and Sydney freeware mods pushed mine to 20 min.
Hi! Not sure if you meant to ask me, but I have a few, like the Istanbul one (2.7G), Yosemite (1.8G), etc. I don’t have any problems loading scenery, I can login very quickly.
Geez, I haven’t added scenery… How do people have like 60GB?!
Hmm. Maybe it depends on how the scenery is created/packaged.
Now that I think about it I had Istanbul prior to the other 2 and don’t recall an impact.
Probably that as the payware don’t seem to increase load times by much.
Some city enhancements are 5 to 10 gigs by themselves