First of all a confession: My installation is huge. 650GB. Lot of stuff.

But, I have special scenery.cfg files AND addon.xml files where I just load the things for a region.
Nevertheless, the loading takes ages. Not so much from the startup screen to the actual flight, that is as expected. But from starting P3D to the screen where you actually start the flight.

What makes this take so long? It's not dependent on how much stuff I load. It seems to be dependent on how much stuff there IS. It's up to four or five minutes now, from a SSD. With a bafre installation of P3D it always was like 30 seconds or so.

What happens here in the background?

From my tests and what I have read it can be dependent on simobjects loading.  I have 4GB of Alpha India Group AI aircraft models.  When I have them active to load it takes about 4 minutes for P3Dv5 to get to the setup screen.  With them disabled I load up in about 20-30 seconds.

1 minute ago, Clutch Cargo said:

From my tests and what I have read it can be dependent on simobjects loading.  I have 4GB of Alpha India Group AI aircraft models.  When I have them active to load it takes about 4 minutes for P3Dv5 to get to the setup screen.  With them disabled I load up in about 20-30 seconds.

Likewise. 

I am seeing 2x the load times for V5 vs V4, but still less than a minute per phase (program start to Scenario screen, Scenario screen to loaded aircraft). When things settle down I will skip the Scenario screen, so load time may be over a minute. 

At least for now - we'll see what happens when I finish loading up my Orbx world!

Edit: I am running off dual NVMe devices. App on one, textures on the other.

Edited May 12, 20206 yr by Howellerman

Ok, AIG off, I have about 2 minutes. That seems reasonable.

In addition to AI models, scenery added using the add-on.xml method also takes longer to scan on startup, especially if the "discovery path" method is used. This is the case with Orbx: the entire Orbx scenery library is scanned on startup every time, even if no new products have been added.

From click to scenarios screen I have 1 minute - after I select flight it's two minutes to at the gate. I use UTL and AI Ship. If I disable them, my initial time goes to 15-20 seconds. 

 

Vic

42 minutes ago, tymk said:

In addition to AI models, scenery added using the add-on.xml method also takes longer to scan on startup, especially if the "discovery path" method is used. This is the case with Orbx: the entire Orbx scenery library is scanned on startup every time, even if no new products have been added.

Can I stop this?

You may find an entry in c:\ProgramData\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5\add-ons.cfg that looks like that:

[DiscoveryPath.0]
PATH=X:\Add-ons\Teren\Orbx\p3dv5
TITLE=Orbx Main Library
ACTIVE=true
REQUIRED=false

Try setting ACTIVE=false and see if it improves your loading times. The downside is that you'll need to re-enable it whenever you install another Orbx product.

Thanks, I can live with this, I suppose.

See if it's worth the hassle, the improvement depends on the number and type of scenery products installed. For me, AI is the worst offender, but I can't live without it, especially the AI shipping... 😉

I timed it yesterday. From klicking the icon to the ramp (no settings screen as I set airport etc. using SimStarter) 11 (eleven) min. This includes all ORBX sceneries (but not all of them active at a time) installed via add-on.xml, FLAi planes for PSXSeecontraffic and some (not yet too many) other airports. No AI ships yet.

I think that's insane. And it's running from a SSD. I never observed comparable loading times in 4.5 where ORBX was installed into the sim.

Kind regards, Michael

45 minutes ago, tymk said:

You may find an entry in c:\ProgramData\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5\add-ons.cfg that looks like that:

[DiscoveryPath.0]
PATH=X:\Add-ons\Teren\Orbx\p3dv5
TITLE=Orbx Main Library
ACTIVE=true
REQUIRED=false

Try setting ACTIVE=false and see if it improves your loading times. The downside is that you'll need to re-enable it whenever you install another Orbx product.

Well, this didn't help, really, made things much worse...

Whoops 😉 It helped a little in my install, but not enough to warrant keeping the auto-discovery disabled in day-to-day use. Looks like we're stuck with long loading times until LM optimize the discovery/loading sequence for SimObjects...

Edited May 12, 20206 yr by tymk
Typo/clarification

I should add the highest increase in loading time by a wide margin came with the 200 or so ORBX add-on.xml entries.

Kind regards, Michael