As a software developer, the lobby seems unnecessarily heavy to me for what it does. When the game crashes, it’s a double punition since it takes so long to load.
In comparison, DCS World lobby takes 40 seconds to load.
So why does the MSFS lobby take 3mn45 and nearly 1Gb (in RAM as well as on disk) to load?
The globe can’t take that much, a simple SQLite database is enough to store the data. Also Google Earth does the same and much much more and doesn’t take more than a few dozen Mb.
I suspect there is also a web browser engine in the lobby.
Well, I tend to think all of this shouldn’t weigh more than a couple dozen Mb at worst, plus a few Mb of music and screenshots, a long shot from the 900+ Mb it currently weighs.
I will speculate that the garage which allows to see the plane in 3D and hop in it (but not turn it on) is a good part of the culprit. I suspect that for that feature alone, one has to pull many of the libraries used for the actual game even if they aren’t used for the most part. This might also explain why going back to the lobby takes so much time, when it should really be near instantaneous.
So would people be ready to dump the 3D lobby and replace it with a screenshot, in exchange for reduced load times ?
Another question, that only Asobo developers can answer, is why does the game crash to desktop, and not to lobby ?