I have about 40 GB in the Community folder
Loading time : 22 minutes
Intel I7 9700K@5 GHz
32 GB DDR4
SSD…
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I did notice that some of the folders that unpacked into my community folder had multiple folders within them not consistent with common structure. I took those out or just pulled out the parts that seemed in the right place and noticed my loading times got a little bit better. I have some huge mods though. Someone created Dublin which is split up into 8 separate folders each with many GB’s of info. I’m continuing to test and going to try out that Peeyem mod manager next.
I had the Dublin, had to remove it as it increased mine by like 10 alone.
I hope once the sdk is complete they make it so things can be packaged rather than just loose files.
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I have many community sceneries installed, mainly cities. My loading time today was about 30 min.
But I think it doesn’t depend on the scenery size. Mostl of them have only between 200 and 500 MB, some have 1 GB. The large one I removed. But this changed nothing. It seems to be the number of sceneries that impacts the loading time, not only the size.
My payware sceneries have a size of 52 GB and they had no inpact of the loading time. Freeware are about 30 GB.
Believe it or not, it has a lot to do with the type of scenery - Payware/Freeware. Optimized and Not Optimized. Obviously, most veteran developers adhere to optimization techniques. What I love is that by way of the “Peeyem” tool I have better control over the freeware community. This helps to better manage or mitigate CTD due to incompatibilities after MSFS updates. But as I digress, let me return to the topic. By separating the free and payware scenery I see a huge plus in load times. Max load time for me with Aircraft liveries and payware is 5 mins. (over 30 payware installed)
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I actually just noticed this too.
It seems for me, it’s not the total number or size of addons, it seems more about the number of files in the addon. So, adding in a few scenery mods (like mountains or additional photogrammetry cities) will have more impact than 20 modest airports in terms of startup time.
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Very strange to hear about it from people with SSD, my community folder is 92Gb (118 folders with sceneries, landmarks, liveries and fixes for planes), just done some tests and here are results:
-first run (with all addons) after windows starts 2 min from run msfs shortcut to blue loading line + 4 min 46 sec loading line to main menu (6:46 total from desktop to msfs main menu)…
-second run 2 min 30 sec from desktop to msfs main menu
-first run without community folder 3 min 17 sec
-second run 1 min 38 sec
i7 3930k, 32gb ram, HDD
Also I’m using MSFS Addons Linker to deactivate those addons which I do not plan to use at the moment, very comfortable tool
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Yes, addons linker is an essential tool. Very easy to use and allows me to group my addons into categories.
Yep, practically this is most usefully thing that you can group addons in different folders
I have found that the load time is dependent on the complexity of the area you choose to start the flight in, rather than the size of your community folder.
For examnple, I have 1 x approx 1gb mod installed in the community folder for my hometown (Norwich)
If I start the flight at Norwich airport then total loading time from boot up to on the airfield is 4 mins 15 seconds.
With the same mod installed, if I start the flight somewhere with not much scenary (North ronaldsay island) then total time is 3 min and 4 seconds.
With the same mod installed, if I start the flight in central Tokyo, loading time is 5 mins 25 seconds
So my conclusion is it’s not the number or size of mods in the community folder that impact loading times, only the number of mods / complexity of the scenary in the area where you will start the flight.
If this is the case then mod enable / disable software isnt so useful, as if you want to have short loading times just fly somewhere with basic scenary!
Would be great to get your comments things work the same for you or also if you don’t see this happening on your system.
Philip.
I believe we’re talking about the load time to launch the game, not the flight. At this point, it doesn’t yet know where you’re going to fly. It is most definitely attributed to the Community folder. If I remove everything from my folder, the game loads up very quickly, and if I put the mods back in, it takes several minutes.
If you are too greedy in mods,the time of download is longtime
A word of caution here: A lot (not all) of these freeware sceneries kicking around are straight Google Maps rips. They contains hundreds of thousands of objects and entities, none of them optimized in any way, and often done by 12 year old Timmy with minimal skills and experience that decided to do a scenery pack of his home town after watching a YouTube tutorial. That’s how you get all these scenery packs without a complete SDK yet.
Now that said, there are some quality freeware scenery packs that have been hand made. Some are ported from work people did in other sims, some from scratch. But a large number of them are just straight Google rips and will basically cause extended load times and bring your PC to a crawl when entering those areas, potentially even crash MSFS completely.
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Just thank for your post! I go make attention at me download
Yep and to be honest most of them are pretty poor anyway only looking good at altitudes that make them practically redundant. Just look at the texture folder for most of these Google fast and furious scenery “creations” and its loads of very messy files.
There is next to know optimisation either, people ripping them from Google dont open them in Blender and tidy them up, removing any unnecessary polys or damaged buildings. In fact many of these sceneries are replacing perfectly good Autogen houses and trees that are optimised and look nice, albeit not 100% accurate with melted blobs. I think these quick effortless sceneries are in many cases just not worth bothering with.
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The problem is the use of add-ons using google maps imagery it’s most likely copyright anyway.
Only use the imagery people make themselves that is also optimised not the sims fault if people are loading in tons of gb’s of google imagery and I doubt they will ever do anything to make it load quicker whilst using google imagery.
Not sure there will ever be a way to load that data in without an impact in performance in flight or increasing loading times before hand especially 60gb’s worth.
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The use of Google scenery is nor here nor there. The main problem is the sim loading every single asset in the community folder, whether it is going to be used for a particular flight or not. Using Google scenery will just make the slow loading issue appear sooner as opposed to slowly accumulating a large quantity quality scenery over time. Eventually we’re all going to have a “slow loading” problem. There should be a separate folder for scenery that loads dynamically, like the rest of the world.
On one side, I understand why the Community folder exists and works the way it does. On the flip side, I see it as a lazy solution.
As far my solution, I avoid loading up my community folder with garbage.
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To be honest there should be a way to have 60GB of data in the community folder and not have an impact that too severely in flight. In XP I have 3 editions of GB from Orbx totalling over 353 GBytes and the sim copes absolutely fine with it, it just takes 3-4 minutes to load.
Its a question of the developers making sure FS is properly configured to deal with large numbers of addons on the community folder., loading what is geographically appropriate if possible and ignoring what isnt.
I think I have a nice solution for the time being. Instead of copying your mods to and from the community-folder, you can rename the file layout.json to another name, for instance bak-layout.json.
If you do so MSFS will not load that mod. I made myself a little visual basic program, where i can choose which mods i like to use and it renames the layout.json back and forward automatically. I can even save my choosen setup into a file and load this. (for instance VFR-Holland, loads all the VFR scenes and Airfields of the Netherlands; LFMN-LFKJ loads only the scenery of Nice and Corsica and the LFKJ-mod)
This happens in a split of a second, because the Community-folder stays intact, only renaming is taken place.
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Thta’s a nice solution. Another one might be to create a permanent store area for the mods and then create symlinks inside the real community folder, which point at the permanent store. The symlinks can then presumably be easily moved in and out of the true community folder without having to move any physical files from one location to another.
I don’t have many mods, so its not an issue for me but that’s another solution I would also look into.