Magic, I say! 

@khague3 what discord server is that? Nothing shows up when clicking your link?

It would be nice if liveries could be DOWNLOADED as individual packages rather than the entire 10GB. Not everyone has fiber to the home. Any news on this possibility? 

"MSFS Livery Mega Pack" is the name of the Discord, sorry wasn't sure if the link would work...This is the full post below --

Want to use an installer to choose specific liveries from the pack to put in your game? Well, now you can thanks to a tool developed by @reap!!!

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O5cTS3FLLzLzFf8wtrOm0bNYQ9VAAUts/view?usp=sharing

 

Usage:
-- Place MegapackInstaller.exe in the same folder as liveriesmegapack.zip
-- Run MegapackInstaller.exe after which it will extract the liveries to /Temp/ folder
-- After it's done with that, you'll be able to select which aircrafts you want the liveries for and click the button at the bottom. Whatever you unselect, gets deleted from the temporary folder.
-- It will list every livery in the pack with a thumbnail, the aircraft, the name and a tickbox for Player livery and AI livery (where available).
-- Untick whichever you want and click the button at the bottom. The unselected liveries get removed (model, texture folders as well as their aircraft.cfg entries). The aircraft.cfg and layout.json get rebuilt for every aircraft.
-- The temporary folder will be renamed /Build/ when the tool is done.
-- Inside the /Build/ folder you will find your filtered megapack.

 

Enjoy!

 

***NOTE:  This IS some .exe file on a Google Drive link, even though it was posted on that Discord...so, to be completely safe, I'd do a virus scan on the file before you use it....

Edited September 3, 20205 yr by khague3

58 minutes ago, khague3 said:

FYI, for those wanting an easy way to only install selected liveries from the mega-pack, they have released a mega-pack-installer on their Discord channel

     https://discord.com/channels/746450820077453393/751103219148521482

"Usage:
-- Place MegapackInstaller.exe in the same folder as liveriesmegapack.zip
-- Run MegapackInstaller.exe after which it will extract the liveries to /Temp/ folder -- After it's done with that, you'll be able to select which aircrafts you want the liveries for and click the button at the bottom. Whatever   you unselect, gets deleted from the temporary folder.
-- It will list every livery in the pack with a thumbnail, the aircraft, the name and a tickbox for Player livery and AI livery (where available).
-- Untick whichever you want and click the button at the bottom. The unselected liveries get removed (model, texture folders as well as their aircraft.cfg entries). The aircraft.cfg and layout.json get rebuilt for every aircraft.
-- The temporary folder will be renamed /Build/ when the tool is done.
-- Inside the /Build/ folder you will find your filtered megapack."

 

Nice!  Just what I was looking for!

@Keto Ketchup I'd imagine that at some point that may occur, but I know that they have been a little put-out lately over all the complaints they see..."after all, we're doing this for free", etc., etc...hopefully, maybe the developer of this install tool may do just what you're suggesting.  Keep in mind, however, that the download itself is only a little over 2GB in size, when expanded it's 10GB...so hopefully that would help with your downloading.

4 minutes ago, Keto Ketchup said:

It would be nice if liveries could be DOWNLOADED as individual packages rather than the entire 10GB. Not everyone has fiber to the home. Any news on this possibility? 

The Zip file is only 2 GB.  When you unzip it, it's 10 GB.  But it's only 2 GB to download.

2 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

The Zip file is only 2 GB.  When you unzip it, it's 10 GB.  But it's only 2 GB to download.

Really? That seems very odd... What are these liveries using for textures, uncompressed BMPs? Or are the graphics defined using XML files instead of textures? My point being, it's very surprising to me that liveries are so highly compressible.

Looks like the texture .dds files are very compressible -- just an example below:

27 minutes ago, Keto Ketchup said:

Really? That seems very odd... What are these liveries using for textures, uncompressed BMPs? Or are the graphics defined using XML files instead of textures? My point being, it's very surprising to me that liveries are so highly compressible.

.DDS files compress really well. It stood out the other day when I looked at the files for one scenic model, the texture file unpacked was just under 90mb. If that is only one scenic model then space could disappear for many very quickly!

40 minutes ago, Keto Ketchup said:

it's very surprising to me that liveries are so highly compressible.

Without getting overly technical (because I'm not an expert here and honestly don't know the full details 😄 ) DDS files are not optimized for size, they're optimized for performance in the rendering pipeline.  They intentionally contain redundant data so that your GPU has less to compute when it's drawing an image.

So did anyone try the new exe version and can tell us how that went?

25 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

So did anyone try the new exe version and can tell us how that went?

@Andreas Stangenes I tried it, and it worked exactly as advertised -- took a while for the liveriesmegapack.zip file to be extracted, but once that was done, the gui interface opened up and allowed selecting/unselecting of liveries for all the planes included in the megapack.  Once chosen, it re-compressed the file, which I copied over to community, and only the liveries I selected were in the sim.  So, works as designed, in my opinion!

3 minutes ago, khague3 said:

@Andreas Stangenes I tried it, and it worked exactly as advertised -- took a while for the liveriesmegapack.zip file to be extracted, but once that was done, the gui interface opened up and allowed selecting/unselecting of liveries for all the planes included in the megapack.  Once chosen, it re-compressed the file, which I copied over to community, and only the liveries I selected were in the sim.  So, works as designed, in my opinion!

Ok, Im gonna have a look at this tomorrow 🙂 Too busy right now doing my bush flying

yes it works, but i don't like that all liveríes are already selected, you have to go through them all and turn them off, i would rather have them all turned off and just click on the one you want, this took some time 😅