So we all know how we need to start MSFS a couple of weeks before the flight due to the time it takes to get to the menu. I kinda get why they like to load all of the custom stuff first so we can see the planes in the fancy hangar and whatever.
BUT… That kind of stuff is useless to me!
So I propose the idea of a quick launcher to increase load times!
I’m not a developer so I am not sure if this kind of thing can be done. But what If they gave us a quick launch icon that would launch a lite window with a few options in there like;
Aircraft (drop list)
Dep Airport ICAO
Arrival ICAO
Optional ‘Paste a route’
And LAUNCH!
Basically to then only load the things you are asking for, and skip right over the menu and load straight into the flight.
I’m not sure whether this is the correct place for this, but a lot of comment has been made following world upgrades as to how the sim has been slowed down.
Now, I think that it is proven that the more addons you have in your community folder, the slower the load process. If that is the case, then surely adding World Update packages every time you fly is another great way to slow down the sim.
Typically, when you fly, you fly a particular region, and often a particular airport.
It seems to me that if there were a tool to select just which addons you need BEFORE you load flight sim would speed up the load process.
The file structure that Asobo/Microsoft have come up with isn’t conducive to 3rd party addons managing this, but there are actually several out there that can handle this for 3rd party addons, and I think it would be of benefit to all if we had the option of only loading the packages we want before we load the sim.
This could also be said of a number of features of the sim, that many people wouldn’t use, or would only use for particular flights. I’m thinking of the planes and liveries that are rather superfluous when all you want is to make a bush trip (a 747 or 787 is overkill in this situation) for instance, just as a Cessna 152 isn’t really of much use if you are going to fly from New York to London Heathrow. And if that is your flight, your packages requirements are rather minimal. You may want to load some scenery for the East Coast of the US, Ireland, and Southern England, but the rest of the US and Europe are a little redundant (and if you want to fly outside of the planned route, it won’t really matter -you will get standard scenery, just not with enhancements), as are World Updates for Japan, and in the future, etc.
This appears to me to be a possible partial solution to the “long load time” complaints, by eliminating many of the causes of long load times.
Just my 2c
I know that you can manage 3rd party addons with this and other tools. I’m using MSFS Addon Collector, by Shay Katzir, partly because I like its graphical presentation, and party because it has a user guide, which the other one doesn’t. How do you “isolate” Asobo/Microsoft packages using Addons Linker? There appears not to be anywhere in this tool that will point to anything other than the Community folder, and your source folder, and for this to work with official packages:
You’d have to know that the construction of the official package is the same as for 3rd party addons,
You’d have to move the official packages to somewhere other than your source location,
You’d have to be able to use symbolic links to point to the actual package locations, and
You’d have to point the “official” packages towards the community folder, or be able to select between multiple (community and official package) folders for placing the required packages at run time.
It would certainly be a clean solution if it were possible, but you’d also had problems with the sim when it wanted to update packages, which wouldn’t be where the sim expected them to be, and anyway, I don’t know about you, but I’d feel uncomfortable removing packages manually from the sim.
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This tool (along with several others) is great for managing addons that you have downloaded, but I wonder if it will allow you to manage Asobo PACKAGES. These are currently stored in a static location - separate from the Community folder, and for this tool to work, Asobo packages would have to be stored elsewhere as well (so that a symbolic link could be set up for each required package each time you wanted to change the number of loaded packages.)
Then comes the problem of updates to packages. The questions here are:
Can a link be used to identify the actual location of a particular (moved) package?
Will a link be used to download the update to the correct place
And most importantly, what will the download process do when it notices that most of the packages that you should have aren’t present?
I think that 1 and 2 could be answered quite readily by experimentation, but that currently #3 is the real stumbling block to this approach.
Imagine this scenario.
You’ve moved all your downloaded Asobo packages to some location other than the default one.
You’ve set up links for all of your packages.
You launch MSFS
The update checker goes to your packages directory, notes that most of the addons that you should have are missing, and does - what?
Well, it can’t “find” the missing updates - it isn’t programmed to go searching, it “knows” that there is only one storage location for Asobo packages, and most of them clearly aren’t where they should be.
So the logic will be coded such that it will start downloading all the “missing” packages once again, thus not only replenishing your store of packages and defeating the object of the exercise, but also slowing you down because of the time it’s going to take to download many gigabytes of data.
So no, I don’t believe that this, or any other third party addon manager can handle this situation, and it needs an Asobo fix for us to be able to go down this road. Sorry, but this is still an necessary upgrade to the sim.
An SSD is part of the answer, but not all of it. Unless you have an absolutely high speed, super dooper PC with all the latest bells and whistles, and a truckload of RAM, loading addons can STILL slow you down.
As I’ve already replied to this thread, the ONLY ways currently to minimize load time are either to use minimal or no addons, or the use an addon manager that limits the number of addons the sim needs to load at run time, by NOT loading those addons that you really don’t want for the next flight. And if there was a way to prevent unwanted packages from loading as well, that would be a bonus, but I don’t believe that current addon managers can do that, for reasons that I have enumerated elsewhere.
See [RELEASE] Patch Notes (1.16.2.0) Now Available! for information about this.