Nowadays every program, app or game would be using a standard installation path like C:/Program Files (x86) or anything similiar to this by default. Standardized, super easy to find and nothing unusual.
However, Asobo installs the game by default in a place that couldn’t have been better hidden. I really wonder what led the developers to set the following file paths to be standard to install a 100 GiB game in these pretty well, complicated hidden folders:
AppData/Roaming/Local/… and so on (Steam version?)
Those paths aren’t even being displayed in Windows Explorer by default. So someone with zero tech knowledge would be pretty lost, as you may noticed thanks to the lots of “Where is my game installed???” posts here on the forum. Much worse, if you have the Microsoft Store version installed, you can’t even right-click on “Open file path” to find the game because it doesn’t even appear … I’m sure not everyone was paying attention to the path while they installed the game.
Can anyone explain what is the advantage of choosing this paths, so that Asobo decided to pick those instead of C:\Programs? If there is no advantage, this is my feedback to change the default path! Less frustrating for not-experienced windows users.
Yeah, I’m a little ■■■■■■ at not being able to look around even in such a large installation. However, being a software person from the 60s up, if I were to put out a huge work like this so see how it “flies” (pun intended), I certainly would not want the users messing around and the complaining during the first few weeks; I’d want to know what my software was screwing up on - not what they had messed with and then complained about.
I say give them some time before we raise a stink. This is a great work, and it’s full of bugs. That’s OK by me; I’ve been there.
Anyhow, for some fun I suggest you take some simple plane like the 172 with a G1000 and fail the G1000 by turning off all electrical. You’re down to the modern equivalent of needle, ball and airspeed. I’ve been doing this, and I am in awe of the flight model: Try some stalls, both landing and departure, and try a forward slip into landing. It behaves very nearly like the real thing.
I’m willing to wait for the glorious day when “Checking for updates” actually finds some.
I Was baffled and dismayed by this decision as well. Very likely has something to do with XBox (Windows App) integration along with Store integration on the OS. I don’t think it will ever change.
The only thing they can do at this point is create symlinks in the installation folder that bridge to the documents folder for configuration files and folders for users to play with. It’s a bit of a hot mess on the OS side of things.
Moving towards things like .NET Standard and UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications, it’s not uncommon for things to go in some flavor of %appdata% location. In fact I think that may be the standard or accepted best practice. I’ve only just recently started to dabble in it myself so I don’t have all the answers, but I can say it’s related to the next generation of cross-platform software development. It’s not an Asobo-specific thing; you’ll see more of this in the future.
I gather that to change your PC, you would have to de-install the program and install it again in the new PC. I found the executable is 0 byte, lol, maybe is a copy protection scheme