The MSFS update process - the digital equivalent of a Rube Goldberg Machine?

I believe you could also add in the list:

  1. Delete and rebuild the local scenery cache.
    .
    This will purge older remnants still left there.
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To be fair, OP Doesn’t need to do this, nor do mods decide what goes up as a wishlist (within reason ofcourse). There could be 2 conflicting wishlists, up to the Community teams/devs to decide which one to act on. Power of the voting system afterall.

I’m aware how the system works :wink:

I just mean that there are so much contradicting wishes, it’s impossible to incorporate everything.

With ‘we’ I meant the community as a whole. Not the mods.

Don’t take everything too serious.

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I believe you can purchase add-ons which are compatible, but this still doesn’t mean they are working either:

The marketplace desperatly needs quality control ASAP - #149 by CptLucky8

One of these is, to make things clear, was not even moving when throttling up
 :thinking: And it was at the top promotion spot in the list of releases. Meanwhile I’m still waiting



Even with a rating system



*twice in a month, the products which are promoted first at the top of the new Market Place releases, are deceiving in what they are supposed to be basically doing: flying.

1st one:
[BLOG] July 1st, 2021 Development Update

2nd one:
[BLOG] July 22nd, 2021 Development Update

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It would be great they not only mount folders, but zip AND .7z files too
 Huge savings of hard drive space, makes it easier to “mod manage” too.

And this brings huge saving in loading time too because instead of issuing thousands of IOCTL, you’re only issuing 1 and you get the full directory and the file bits in one go.

And since in general any VFS library is supporting .zip (and some times others like 7z) natively, it is often a matter of just “enabling” mounting .zip archives in the VFS. If not, it is really not too complex though and .zip fits perfectly the typical VFS approach.

PS: why 7z? I find it is in practice more efficient to compressing add-ons, most likely due to the efficiency on .DDS texture files.

PS: in addition, being able to mount .zip/.7z archives directly would also solve right away the problem with the game not coded to use longer than MAX_PATH length. See here for more details (and solutions):

FS2020 can't deal with pathnames beyond 260 chars, problem and solutions

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Step 4 is there so users can choose whether they want to install world updates etc. Think that is good for those with poor connections or little hard drive space, so they can choose whether or not to install such updates.

I’m sure they could bake in those to be mandatory, but not sure that would please people.

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Or they could include a checkbox list at the main content installer that asks users if they want to download and install the optional components like world update, new liveries, etc. Just like installers have been doing since Windows 3.0 and perhaps even before.

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and I shall add like most flight simulation add-ons are also doing when they are offering downloadable content in addition to their core binaries. At least it has been this way with RXP products for ages, for Orbx products, for PMDG products (liveries among other things) etc
 :slight_smile: I can’t help thinking that sometimes it just looks like the most renown experience in the field of simulation and add-ons, accumulated over decades of simmers feedback and customer relations, is of no value for this game, and I can see the same errors of the past repeating.

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Like steve jobs once said: “some decisions won’t please some people, there will be casualties along the way, but at least decisions are made” :love_you_gesture:

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I prefer this one:

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

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Yeah, nice!

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@wombatlemineur
Indeed, because in retrospect, one of the two companies succeeded with their phone
 :rofl:

But I’m derailing the topic here, sorry.

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It isn’t any different. They just don’t tell us that in the update posting because it insinuates that content they’re selling via an official channel could be bad.

Just look at how many of the 3rd party marketplace planes no longer work after SU5
 There have been poorly designed sceneries in the past that have crashed the sim. Zinertek texture pack caused CTD issues after the last World Update.

Very much agreed. I’ve had that happen as well. Had to delete the plane from the file system (content manager wouldn’t let me remove it) and then re-download via the content manager.

This isn’t stuff that an end user should ever have to deal with in 2021.

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Don’t forget:
Deleting and rebuilding rolling cache.
Deleting and rebuilding content.xml
Deleting scenery indices.

Well they did it this way to make the downloads smaller. The stuff they put there is just the fluff that isnt needed perse. I know the only scenery that I have installed it the us one because thats where I mostly fly for the time being, and getting the scenery can be slower then the update itself.

Then how about a single pre-update screen with checkboxes to allow the user to only update/install the parts they want?

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Thats the way it is now sort of. The part that the sim sends you during checking for updates, you have to have no way around that, but all the other stuff you have to download manually from inside the game once its updated is optional.

All of this really makes me think it’s actually better to purchase third party add-ons directly from the developers and not from the Marketplace.

At least by doing it that way, all of it goes to the Community folder and the update/troubleshooting process is a little more efficient.

What would be nice though is to have a single pre-update screen like @SuperSixBravo mentioned up above where you can select everything in one place and then click a button to have it all occur as one big batch.

Although there are practical reasons why it is what it is today, It certainly isn’t the most user friendly design. It is pretty easy to forget/miss something even for a “computer savvy” individual. Too many clicks, too many different places to have to go. I think it could most definitely be improved without sacrificing control over optional updates or stuff a user might want to obtain later.

That said, at this point I think I’d rather see development resources stick to fixing and improving the sim itself, than to spend cycles on the update process (apart from the obviously bugged parts of it).

And I think they could go a long way toward improving the current experience by simply adding additional back-end server resources so it doesn’t take 7 hours to download a 40gb update over a broadband connection.