I am creating a bushtrip, and as such I have to do plenty of quitting and restarting for testflights. The startup time for msfs is killing me. I don’t know of any other game or app that has load times comparable (in the minutes). Is there anything I can do to reduce startup time?
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you can rename your community folder and create a new community folder and just put your exported Bush-trip into the new folder. When you are finished just delete the new folder and rename the original one back to “communtiy”
I know lots of addons will slow down any game. I didn’t say I had lots of addons.
How long does startup take for people on here? For me it takes minutes to get up and running on an M.2 SSD.
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I think the few minutes is basically what you get. No way around it. Hopefully Asobo will optimize this process in FS2024. Maybe some caching and smart detection of what has changes instead of a full scan of everythingm, every time.
If we had an option to refresh while the game is running that would be even better. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility to monitor for file changes and reload only what has changed / has been added.
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It should not take more than 2-3 minutes.
Use the -fastlaunch switch to bypass the initial splash screens, delete offline mesh files, remove unused world updates is all I can think of.
Here the sim starts up to the main menu in 126 seconds, empty community folder.
187 seconds with all my addons enabled.
Keep in mind these times are to the main menu, it will take another 90 seconds or so to load the flight, depending on location
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Any game may load into menu to 30 second, maximum. Anything more is too much. MSFS can be loaded into menu and after that load all other on background, but let us to work with that sim. Actually that is waiting simulator than flight simulator.
Prior to the update it took 2:30 with the community folder.
After the update it’s 2:30 with an empty community folder and 4:20 with it
This is my experience as well. I feel that Asobo could improve this. Most people will spend at least some time in the menus before starting a flight, so background loading could make this seem faster even though the sim might not be “playable” until this amount of time has passed.
Slow startup is very often the reason why I don’t bother to use the sim.
For a point of reference, I just measured loading times with a stopwatch and it takes me 1 minute 45 seconds to get to the home screen with a community folder of 13GB. To start a flight, from hitting the “Fly” button to sitting on the runway it takes less than 25 seconds. I have a PC with Win 11, 7900x3d, 32Gig DDR5-7200Mhz memory, RX 7900 XTX gpu and internet speed of 500 down/500 up. Most importantly, I have a 4 TB Gen 4x4 M.2 NVMe rated at 7.4GB read/6.8GB write. SU 14 did not impact load times, stutters or fps on my PC.
To maybe make you feel a bit better:
Five and half minutes to start screen, with only a few needed addons.
Desktop, i9-10900K, 64GB, GeForce RTX 2080Ti
System on WD BLACK SDBPNTY-1T00-1106 NVMe
MSFS on Samsung SSD 860 evo
That SSD is probably the biggest bottleneck.
Here’s the results of an experiment I conducted to measure startup times for SU13 & SU14 under various conditions:
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I just measured it with a stop watch. And I get 3m 28s with a Community folder of 138GB size…
Starting a flight with an complex addon (PMDG 737 on payware airport) takes 34 seconds.