Hi
I have meanwhile aquired and installed quite a few add ons. Addtionally there are plenty of aircraft liveries inside the community folder. Unfortunately this leads to very slow loading times.
In the meanwhile it takes about 5 to 10min to load.
I wonder if we can expedite this
So it’s an easy fix… Take them out. Use only what you need for the flight. Nothing Asobo can fix. Same with every game ever made. More mod’s slower it is.
No. Looking at DCS, XP or AFS2, load times don’t get longer the more addons you add. This very particular to P3D and MSFS.
The difference is very obvious, the other sims only load what is needed at the time of the launch. After this, it loads only scenery which is needed. MSFS loads all on startup. It takes even longer if the IVAO MTL is included.
Some optimization would be great
Plz stop to comparing, this is NOT dcs or xplane.
There is a addon which let’s you quickly link (enable/ disable) mods. Only load the mods you need for your sesssion.
This is the only solution for now.
I don’t see an issue comparing it to other flight simulators. If not compare to other flight simulators what are we to compare it to? GTA 5?
Extra add ons don’t don’t increase load times in other sims. That may be true. But it does in MSFS. Doesn’t matter that it doesn’t in those other sims. It does here. That’s the state of MSFS at this point in time. Not saying that’s not a problem or that I agree with it. I’m just saying that it is what it is. More add-ons = longer load times.
You can easily test it yourself by timing load times with all your add-ons in the Community folder and with the Community folder empty and comparing your results.
It is the way it is, either use the workarounds as suggested or don’t, best bet is to use your “Vote” (ridiculous system IMO) to the Wishlist thread to raise awareness to Asobo of the issue (if one doesn’t exist then start one)
I’ve noticed some add-ons greatly increase the loading times. The Arches, Bryce Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Devils Rock (I believe) Zion National Park are big culprits. I only add them if I am flying in the area and am purposefully visiting those landmarks.
It happens in P3D and X-plane as well. After a certain threshold you had to deactivate certain scenery addons or wait for 5 minutes plus for it to load. It’s a side effect of having to load the entire planet and localized enhancements.
It would be nice if they can figure a way around, perhaps with partners they can agree to stream the assets instead, but I imagine it would be a lot of hassle for all parties.
It does happen tp P3D because it takes the same approach as FSX or MSFS. Load everything at the beginning. For XP I don’t agree. I have way over 1000 add-ons installed. The load times of the sim, until you reach then main menu is between 30sec and 1min. Then you select the airport and there, specially if I have O4XP textures it takes about 5min to load. XP does not load all scenery, the whole world. It loads only a limited amount of areas surroundign your starting position. It loads as you fly. The bad habit of this, on old disk, you are sometimes paused in mid air with stutters.
For me, flying out of LSZG generally XP does not need to load a lot additionally because being a small country. After 2-5min I am all set.
Its not my intention to compare!
I try to give feedback to Asobo in order to get an optimized approach on the topic.
Maybe its possible to implement some logic on not loading all at start and start loading scenery after reaching the main screen.
Activating scenery/liveries before launching the sim, I don see it as sustainable
Yes it would be nice if addons in the Community Folder didn’t affect the load times - but they do and as already said an addons manager is the answer at present. And yes, I’ve noticed too that some of the “better” addons have huge files and so make matters even worse.
But a nice feature would be if the sim itself didn’t automatically install everything but as the flight progesses it looks to see if there are any relevant addons and load them, much like the current rolling scenery that is downloaded as you go. Would need some standardisation of 3rd party stuff however and maybe MS/Asobo feel that it is something they would prefer to do themselves?
I don’t particularly care what “other sims” do - I’ve got MSFS so I’ll make the best of that. I still think, however, that it is far, far superior to anything else I personally have seen. I may be fortunate in that I don’t appear to be experiencing many of the problems others have, but maybe my expectations are somewhat less than others? Computers aren’t infallible.
I don’t know if you have ever used Orbx True Earth, but I experience a massive loading time increase with those addons in particular.
But don’t take my word for it.
I got TE GB. There is no chnage in load times if you have TE FL, TE NL, TE WA, … It is completely irrelevant how many photo scenery you have. It takes the time for the particular region, but the end. I got 1.5 TB of add ons for XP
MSFS loads longer the more add ons you add +++
Hard to imagine how long it will load once i got my 1.5 TB add-ons. 45 min ??
From my experience, mods with a large number of files take the longest to load. So Google sceneries fit into that mostly. Liveries are the fastest and custom airports are in the middle.
They could probably find ways to optimise the checks that it runs. Maybe only verify them when they are actually needed. So a mod that affects the G1000 only gets checked when you launch a flight with an aircraft that has a G1000. Or only verify airport sceneries if you have it configured as departure or arrival, or you happen to be flying close enough to it that scenery around it gets streamed in.
I do agree that the loading logic can be further optimized. The sim loading everything at initial boot and only initial boot is pretty inefficient.
Thankfully I run my sim on a 2TB SSD so loading times are okay, but nonetheless it could be drastically improved.
It would also be good to have some visual notification if there was a mod that was supposed to be loaded had failed, maybe even the reason. Maybe this is shown in the SDK console? If so, maybe leave it at that.
One thing I noticed today which was interesting, is that after uninstalling either a certain amount of mods or certain mods in particular, my load times were SUBSTANTIALLY increased. Earlier today I decided to test out some things to get my load times quicker, since they were extremely slow. I had about 52 gb of mods in my community folder, and with that I timed that my game took about 13 minutes to load(which was ridiculous). My goal was to get that down to at most 5 minutes to load and just be happy with that. I started by just getting rid of all my liveries and then started to get rid of the bigger mods that I figured I wouldn’t use much, and got my community folder down to 32 gb. To my shock, this cut my loading time down to only 2 minutes and 20 seconds. So I went from 13 minutes to load 52gb of mods, to about 2 and a half minutes to load 32gb of mods. The thing I don’t know is what caused this massive save in time, as it doesn’t seem proportional to how much I deleted at all. So I’m left to guess that a certain mod or mods that I deleted were the culprit.
Get this, load only what you’re going to fly. You really don’t need to load molecular level scenery of Melbourne, Australia, and the Mega Livery pack of 600+ paint jobs if you’re going to shoot TnG’s in a 172 at LAX.
I’ve got 200GB of addons - if I tried to start up using them all I’d die of old age first! Use an addon manager.
I’ve done a couple of basic checks and indeed despite file sizes not being substantially different some take (much) longer than others. Must be something on how the addon is constructed?