Hi Oliver,

First, thank you for all you do for us, it is greatly appreciated. On the discovery path item, is there any downside to using this as opposed to having addon xml's in the Documents P3D Addons folder? And is there any reason having discovery paths would increase or decrease loading times?

 

Thanks,

Gerald

Edited August 6, 20196 yr by gsand

1 hour ago, gsand said:

And is there any reason having discovery paths would increase or decrease loading times?

Hard to tell. Technically speaking, autodiscovery must be slower by nature, because more logic is required by the sim to do it than just reading a config file. But normally you shouldn't notice this, it is just a couple of disk access commands. So if there really is a performance penalty, there might be something wrong with the internal process of the sim that creates the file lookup tables/whatever. Maybe it jumps through extra hoops. One would also have to compare simulator versions, all this has changed slightly since 4.0.

The only method to really find out is having a large collection of addons somewhere and link it to the sim using the three(four) different ways. Start P3D at least three times for each method, and compare the loading times.

What four ways are these:

- Autodiscovery in \Documents\Prepar3D V4 Add-ons
- Autodiscovery on a separate Discovery Path added to \ProgramData\...\add-ons.cfg
- Static package definitions in \ProgramData\...\add-ons.cfg, added using the CLI
- For scenery: static definitions in scenery.cfg - For aircraft: static definitions in simobjects.cfg - etc. (works for every type of content)

It would also be interesting to find out if it makes a difference to add scenery areas as a single component of category "Scenery" or if you split them in two and add "Scenery" and "Texture" separately. 

Best regards

1 hour ago, gsand said:

On the discovery path item, is there any downside to using this as opposed to having addon xml's in the Documents P3D Addons folder?

Shouldn't make any difference. Unless your new discovery path is on a very slow disk. 

But if there really is some Gremlin hidden in P3Ds autodiscovery logic, every Discovery Path that you add will make things worse.

Best regards

Edited August 6, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

Thanks Oliver, very clear. Intriguing process with the load time starts. I'd like to try that sometime after I wind up a few things. Thanks again.