Hi:

Don't know if it was discussed before, but how many addons installed in the Community folder can the sim handle?.

Could you share your experience?.

Cheers, Ed

If anyone has an issue with it now, we are in for big trouble. We don't have but 8 or 9 addons now. Wait until we have 100 and then ask.

 

Vic

I have over 50GB of addons installed and haven't experienced any performance drops. I think the sim does a good job of only loading things in when needed, for some of the handcrafted community airports there's not even stuttering as long as the developer spent time optimizing textures, etc. 

I have 33GB of add-ons, including scenery and liveries. What I've been noticing is that sim loading times have increased to a point on which I have to wait close to 5-7 minutes after the flight conditions screen select until I hit the yellow button to go flying.

As Vic mentions, if this is the case now that we have relatively few add-ons, I could not imagine how the situation would be when we have more than 100GB of data.

Cheers, Ed

I have 80 GB worth of Payware/Freeware addons installed in 128 Folders, scenery exclusively. No issues with performance so far, but loading seems to take a bit longer now but I didn't measure it.

I am sure we'll hit a wall sometime, though.

Kind regards, Michael

9 minutes ago, edpatino said:

I have 33GB of add-ons, including scenery and liveries. What I've been noticing is that sim loading times have increased to a point on which I have to wait close to 5-7 minutes after the flight conditions screen select until I hit the yellow button to go flying.

As Vic mentions, if this is the case now that we have relatively few add-ons, I could not imagine how the situation would be when we have more than 100GB of data.

Cheers, Ed

I have only a half dozen add-ons totaling about 1.2Gb and it has increased the loading time of the sim. Not sure what takes more time, aircraft or scenery.

4 minutes ago, pmb said:

I have 80 GB worth of Payware/Freeware addons installed in 128 Folders, scenery exclusively. No issues with performance so far, but loading seems to take a bit longer now but I didn't measure it.

I am sure we'll hit a wall sometime, though.

Kind regards, Michael

Wow! I only have 29 GBs... LOL 🙂 And I through I had too much. 

2 minutes ago, Manny said:

Wow! I only have 29 GBs... LOL 🙂 And I through I had too much. 

Some addons come with a multitude of folders, notably some freeware NZ addons which I enjoy. So it's not that I installed 128 addons ... yet. 😉

Kind regards, Michael

I think you'll run into problems with different mods 'stepping on' each other by modifying the same files long before the number of mods becomes a problem loading time wise at this point.  At least right now, it's already happening with just a few things. 

Hopefully the mod makers start following some best practices for isolating their mods from each other.

Edited October 11, 20205 yr by marsman2020

The beauty of the community folder system is that you can temporarily swap out any mod you like to the desktop or somewhere else and save loading time when you want to fly a specific addon or scenery. I think it works very well and saves all of those FSX/P3D endless installer complications, xml files, addon cfgs etc. I always think the simplest way possible is the best route. The community folder material is instantly recognised and what could be more convenient than moving folders in and out of it. I think this is one of the best features of this sim.

3 minutes ago, robert young said:

The beauty of the community folder system is that you can temporarily swap out any mod you like to the desktop or somewhere else and save loading time when you want to fly a specific addon or scenery. I think it works very well and saves all of those FSX/P3D endless installer complications, xml files, addon cfgs etc. I always think the simplest way possible is the best route. The community folder material is instantly recognised and what could be more convenient than moving folders in and out of it. I think this is one of the best features of this sim.

That's what I have been experimenting with. 

PS love the turbo Bonanza.

 

My community folder is 8,67 MB large. 

you can use that utility that only puts stuff in the comm folder that you really need for that flight.

The biggest issue is mods conflicting with each other.

Part of the problem is people not quite understanding how to build a lean mod and basically rewriting the entire config file even though they only modify a small part.

A mod like that will overwrite any game updates to the config as well any mods to the same aircraft or scenery that were loaded earlier.

7 hours ago, robert young said:

The beauty of the community folder system is that you can temporarily swap out any mod you like to the desktop or somewhere else and save loading time when you want to fly a specific addon or scenery. I think it works very well and saves all of those FSX/P3D endless installer complications, xml files, addon cfgs etc. I always think the simplest way possible is the best route. The community folder material is instantly recognised and what could be more convenient than moving folders in and out of it. I think this is one of the best features of this sim.

That works of course, but that requires a discipline to plan your flights in advance to know which ones to keep in or swap out. I think this is still something to be improved in this sim, so after your selection of airports (TO/FROM), aircraft, weather, time of the day, the sim should only load the required scenery saving the loading time of a lot or stuff not required for your trip, including mods or repaints except for your selected aircraft.

From my long days in P3D, there's an excellent utility (P4AO Addon Organizer from Lorby-SI) that allows you to simply click on the regions or scenery you don't want to use in certain conditions, to avoid long loading times too. It's very simple to use. But still, there's the point of planning your flights in advance, something that you don't always want to do if you are a casual flyer that day.

Cheers, Ed