As a matter of interest (now that I have all my addons all beautifully linked), here are some timings:

None (0)      2:34
All (384)     3:25
NZ only (137) 2:50

I still have 4 ORBX areas active throughout as I don't want to mess with those - so "None" is actually "(4)".

A friend of mine who I cajoled into using the linker went from 9 minutes (gasp!!) to around 3 minutes.

So ... apart from the extensive management functions, the Linker does appear to have a fairly significant impact on loading times. 👍😎

10 hours ago, Adamski_NZ said:

IMHO, the two applications are quite different and don't overlap much, features-wise. The "other" utility (Organizer) may be great for *checking/testing* addons, but only the Linker has all the selection and preset functions for enabling/disabling groups of addons. Being able to manage my bloated Community folder so easily is the primary reason why I'm delighted to use the Linker.

Now that I have successfully migrated all my addons (despite the encryption woes), I'm in a position to do some timing tests - to see if reducing the number of active addons has any real effect on loading times. However - even if I don't see any changes there, just the ability to keep my addons "tidy" makes the Linker indispensable.

I agree. the Organizer works differently as it goes to the content.xml file and makes its operations. I find it useful in order to make sure what is enabled or not in the content.xml. Linker is irreplaceable as it "separates concerns" better. You just unlink everything and make your upgrade. Simple as it should be.

3 hours ago, Adamski_NZ said:

As a matter of interest (now that I have all my addons all beautifully linked), here are some timings:

None (0)      2:34
All (384)     3:25
NZ only (137) 2:50

I still have 4 ORBX areas active throughout as I don't want to mess with those - so "None" is actually "(4)".

A friend of mine who I cajoled into using the linker went from 9 minutes (gasp!!) to around 3 minutes.

So ... apart from the extensive management functions, the Linker does appear to have a fairly significant impact on loading times. 👍😎

I had hit loading times of around 20 minutes before I got the Linker. Once I had the linker it made it apparent what was causing the problem and it is definitely the freeware PG-based add-ons, or to be more precise, those PG addons with huge numbers of files. Some of these addons have upwards of 40,000 files - many of which are tiny little 200 byte things and I guess they all have to be loaded and indexed somewhere in the sim at start-up.

I don't tend to bother with these much nowadays. I don't know if there is a basic limitation in the way the 'google-grab-and-convert' thing works or just that people aren't doing it terribly efficiently, but for me most of those addons don't get used now. There's a couple I might use occasionally but I definitely only ever turn them on if I need them and only one at a time. Given that I also find a lot of them a bit off in the colour matching and also that PG tends to get ugly if you get too close (and I like to fly low and slow, mostly), it's no great loss to me.

And don't think I'm knocking the freeware. As always I'm impressed that people take the time and effort to produce this stuff, but for my particular requirements/taste it mostly brings more trouble than pleasure.

4 hours ago, andy1252 said:

I don't know if there is a basic limitation in the way the 'google-grab-and-convert' thing works or just that people aren't doing it terribly efficiently,

A little bit of both,   There is a set of optimization tools that, from what I have seen, can reduce complexity by a full order of magnitude when they are used.   But there still seem to be a fair number of crudely done ones being done without using it.   (Of course, they also seem to be the ones that don't put any effort into color-matching so everything has that blue hue, too -- if you use that as a visual pre-screen you should filter out a lot of those.)

They are still indisputably heavy, though, even when optimized.  I try to never have more than 4 or 5 of those active at once, if I need any at all, and even then if I weren't on an NVMe drive it would probably be fewer.

19 hours ago, Bad_T said:

👍It^s just that if something better pops i wanted people to know, for me it would be more than fine but i dont want to enter some sort of race for features 😛

There's no need to race for features. As far as I'm concerned, yours is already complete and has everything I need without any bloat.

23 minutes ago, Phantoms said:

There's no need to race for features. As far as I'm concerned, yours is already complete and has everything I need without any bloat.

Right. Think of Norton's Utilities and Nero Burning ROM. Great programs til they decided to be everything to everybody.

I joined the forum to reply to this chain. I originally posed the question to Bad_T the creator of Addons Linker to rename the files. I was dealing with the aircraft performance and GPS mods which require a load order.  I settled on adding a numerical value to the front of each mod to be certain they were ordered correctly. It was a pain to extract/rename a mod each time it was updated. I was, (up until today unaware of the renaming function which is persistant!!(brilliant!). This solves my problem- rename in the program once and each time I load , it will load in the order scheme I want.

Again, many, many thanks to the creator of this excellent program.

 

Steve

Hi @Bad_T, just a quick question. Am I imagining things or has your linker changed from creating Symlinks to using Junctions? I just noticed after my latest sim update (so cleared out all links and then replaced) that my community folder is full of junctions now. I sort of remembered it all being symlinks before,

Of course there is always the possibility I'm just having a senior moment.

@andy1252 you are absolutely right 👍, someone contacted me and convinced me to change to 'junctions' because it seems they are better. It's like that since the first version labeled 0.8 (but the transition was 'transparent' for users because the program could read previous 'links' without problems').

It was mentioned in the changelog for version 0.8.7679.19448 : - IMPROVED : new technology for the creation of links ('junctions' instead of 'symlinks'). These types or links should give more compatibility and can help avoid certain difficulties some users were having

the biggest advantage for junction is that they do NOT require administrator rights, if i had started the tool like that, i wouldn't even have to ask people to run the tool as admin and it would have been 1000% better. I didn't communicate too much about that because, for existing users, now that some files were saved 'as admin' (for example the INI file and your preset files), so if now you run the tool 'not as admin' those files could not be updated so you are pretty much forced to still run it as admin (but it would not be required if you started fresh with new files). Well hmm not sure if it's 100% clear but it's some kind of 'false problem' 😜.

do you think maybe junctions might be problematic for you ? I was thinking that maybe one day i would have an option to let the user choose symlinks or junctions (only admatage of symlinks can be used if you stored you files on a network drive, junctions would not, but not many users would have their FS on a network drive), but then, since no one really brought that up, i didn't do it for now (but it would be possible).

Feel free to let me know if you have issue or other input about this change. Thank you 🍻

 

Edited March 3, 20215 yr by Bad_T

@Bad_T, no problem at all. Never been entirely clear on the difference between the two. I have tended to use symlinks myself rather than junctions for entirely non-rational reasons (they just feel somehow "softer" and less threatening <grin>, and I've got my system set up as well as I can to ignore the need for administrator permissions etc so I've never had a problem.

It was more one of those "am I imagining this?" sort of things.

On a separate issue, does your program maintain a log or error log file? I'm getting errors when I try to show all the thumbnails, but the error message box is just one of those not very specific sort of messages. Again, it's not important but if there is a log file I'll check it out.

I had to hunt a bit to find this thread, so I guess the product is all settled and stable now? Certainly works fine for me and does all I need it to. Can't imagine tryhing to manage my ever increasing collection of sceneries without it, thanks.

@andy1252 woops 😱, if you have an error please send it to me (the full error trace) in a private message, i'll certainly try to fix it. Maybe some files are causing problems and it's not something i encountered in my tests so i'll be very interested to see what might happen when it crashes. There is no log catching all errors for now.

It should be fairly stable, i still have a few requests in the pipeline but they require a bit of thinking. A modification i have already made is a little improvement in loading time if you have tons of addons and another improvement is an option to disable the 'file count' and 'folder size' indication so that will speed up the loading even more for the users that don't require to have those values showing up everytime they use the app (they can still enable it 'on demand' when they want to check the size). This will probably be included in the next version.

Thank you 🍻

Edited March 3, 20215 yr by Bad_T

On 1/2/2021 at 10:45 AM, Bad_T said:

brave man @Denwagg (and maybe other courageous and kind souls willing to test 🙃😱) i tried something to manage your official addons that you wanted to use with the tool.

hopefully it will do the job and you'll find that useful 🤞, i think it's still a bit reserved to 'power users' that really understand how these links work. Like i said in my previous msgs i didnt really want to touch the official folder with this tool but i had a few requests for that so here it is (i'll probably use that for myself too).

Here is the test version (just the EXE to replace your existing one).

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=40872850669877156285

How to use it :

1 : In the options screen there is a new option to enable the 'official' folder management. Enable the checkbox and set your folders

2 : when that option is enable, a new 'folder' will appear in your custom addons folders. It's called OFFICIAL. Every addons that you put in that folder will have its link created in the official folder and not in the community folder

3 : when the link is created it will appear in the right panel even if it's not in the community folder with a specific color (light yellow) indicating that it's in the official folder (there is also a new column 'is official' with the value at 'True'). I also added a new little colored indicator at the bottom to identify and count those elements.

Feedback and ideas are obviously welcome even if not positive because i really didn't know how to implement this so maybe, after a lot of head scratching, i didn't choose the best way to do it. Thank you. 😍

This worked perfectly for me! Thank you so much for this app, it is second to none IMO. My biggest concern is Disk Space as I have MSFS & P3D on the same SSD Drive. It's a real lifesaver for myself.

Best Regards

cool, thanks for the feedback @TomCYYZ

just to make sure, be sure to grab the latest version from flightsim.to and not the one from the link that was in my previous message, that was just a temporary test version and there have been a few fixes since then.

Edited March 5, 20215 yr by Bad_T

Thanks for the heads up. If I uninstall the current version will I lose my settings or can I just run the .exe and overwrite?

Regards

you just have to download the latest version from flightstim.to and unzip all files included in the zip in  a folder of your choice (which can obviously be the same that you used for your current version by replacing all files).

the settings will not be lost because they are saved in another folder --> C:\ProgramData\MSFS Addons Linker

feel free to let me know if you need more help 🍻