What we really need is faster loading of the game, and for that, they need to get rid of the 3D hangar. It’s pretty but it’s utterly useless, and it’s the reason why the lobby weighs 1 Gb and takes 3mn45 sec to load when it really should take 45 sec.
Because it’s loaded even if we never go to the hangar.
The 3D hangar is useless at the moment, but it needn’t be. It should be where you keep your ‘fleet’ - i.e. a number of combinations of aircraft, livery and tail-number, which you can select from and then choose ‘Create flight with this aircraft’ to be taken to the flight planning screen without having to scroll through hundreds of liveries or change your tail number because you’re now flying with a US airline livery rather than a European one.
And also probably more important as the number of aircraft increases (i.e. when helicopters appear), so that you can keep a small selection of only the aircraft you want to use easily selectable.
The problem is, loading a single aircraft already takes time, you don’t want to load several ones.
The hangar should be a screenshot and that’s it. No need for fancy 3D if it takes so much time, hard disk and memory to start the game.
The hangar is a prime example of a good idea that turned out to be badly implemeted.
I have to say load times are not really a big issue for me - I’ve been playing a fully stocked Cities: Skylines for years - with all the community mods and buildings it can take 20 minutes to load. I’m more concerned with the ‘clear, immediate indication of the game loading’ problem.
The 3D hanger just bugs me as it serves no purpose at present.
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20 minutes !!! That is insane.
I wouldn’t mind the loading times if the game never crashed, but when you fly with others and your game crashes, it’s rather annoying to have to take 7 mn to be able to join back.
LOL yeah wheres my press any key to start button!
To op: before you start the game, open the windows task manager, then you can see exactly whats going on.
C:S is a beast when you’ve been collecting buildings and other mods for a while and you have a heavily populated map. It’s why my rig has had no problems coping with MSFS memory or graphics wise - my bottleneck for MSFS is my poor internet connection.
I’ve only had two MSFS crashes (bought standard edition late August) - one is a complete mystery and was a couple of patches back. The second I know was down to the internet bottleneck; I think some CTDs are caused by pipelining all the terrain and other data it needs and the rate it can deliver. Maybe why those flying airliners seem to have more (non aircraft specific) issues - they are moving faster, so the pipelining needs to deliver quicker.
40 seconds, with Mods – and on a mid range gaming Laptop.
Sound like you have MSFS installed in a slow mechanical HD ???
I’m quite happy with a black screen and not having to see some other weird gaming console screen. “Japan update has landed” is pathetic enough.
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The trouble with the 1st 30 seconds that MSFS is loading, is that there is no indication that it is actually loading at all. At least with a loading screen, you have a confirmation that it is actually loading, and you did click your mouse correctly on the MSFS icon !!!
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Pretty clever
The clever one is [Nicolas Martin] who wrote script
I completely agree. Both FSX and P3D have a small splash screen to indicate the loading process has started - that is a very different thing than an unnecessary pause later on as we had with the former “press any key” prompt.
As it is now, when you click on the icon to launch the game, and nothing appears to be happening at all. The desktop remains unchanged for up to 30 seconds.
Some programs (like web browsers) typically open immediately when launched. Those that take a long time to load almost always have a splash screen to indicate to the user that the loading process has started. Visual Studio and Photoshop are two examples that come to mind.
Well, the fact that MSFS does not have one built in is GOOD.
You can use whatever splash screen you like !!!
or just download the one above – its FREE !!!
Wait, what ? It takes you 40s to load the lobby ? I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone with such a fast load, even on SSD.
Yes, I don’t know about a full-on splash screen. I like the msfs addons linker approach with a popup dialog.
There is also a similar pause sometimes when closing the program to desktop. You click yes to close and it just sits there with no indication that it’s closing.
OOOPs, I meant it takes about 40 seconds till MSFS shows anything happening on the screen …
Yeah, I get it as a professional software engineer and know how to verify something is happening. But in an application of this size it’s not out of the question to fire off an asynchronous thread responsible for showing a visual indication that something is happening. I would never develop an application that just loads indefinitely in the background. This is a standard that all applications implement…thus the concept of a splash screen.
Yeah I get it, Im just saying he could open the task manager and watch the progress of the load from there. If hes got steam he could launch it from there as well, the button will change, and he’ll know its loading.
My system while not a super computer is running a 4 gHz I7 with 4 cores. The first indication that anything is happening after clicking the icon to start is 38 seconds later. After that there are between 5 and 8 splash screens depending if you count a black box or two. Couldn’t at least one of the screens be moved to the very beginning so, like the O.P., we have a hint that we actually clicked start?