Horizon Simulations released their VFR scenery for England and Wales and it is pretty stunning.However, it has thrown up a worrying problem. This problem could become a lot more widespread as more and larger VFR sceneries are released.It is reasonable to expect that, when loading VFR scenery, it will take somewhat longer due to the many textures that have to be loaded (although currently there's no autogen to be loaded). However, quite a few users are reporting loading times up to twenty minutes! There are two parts to the problem:1. When loading FSX, and when the GUI first appears, the GUI is unuseable for some period due to intense hard disk activity. On my system it takes two minutes, but others report periods of maybe ten minutes (I only have one third of the full install). FSX doesn't know that I intend to use the VFR scenery at this stage, so I believe it is executing some kind of indexing operation on all the scenery files. Normally this is no problem, but the VFR scenery files are enormous (tens of megabytes up to 100 megabytes). FSX may be choking on these big files, leading to a delay before you can even choose a flight.2. The load times of flights can be enormous. Some have reported loading times of about twenty minutes! Can you imagine that? For me, load times are about two minutes, not significantly more than non-VFR flights. Significantly, some users have reported extremely long flight load times when *not* loading VFR scenery. Therefore the long loading time is not simply due to the large amount of data required to load.My feeling is that, provided you do not actually load a VFR flight, then the installation of VFR scenery should not affect loading times, either of FSX itself or of non-VFR flights.I had noticed one curious FSX feature long before I installed the VFR. After loading FSX, and when the GUI is visible, FSX continues to access the hard disk for maybe a couple of minutes. During that time the free memory continuously goes down. The hard disk activity is not intense enough to lock up the GUI, so a flight can be started at any time during this operation.I wonder if this is some kind of indexing operation intended to speed things up when a flight is launched. Or possibly it is pre-loading textures. Either way, it may be accessing *all* the scenery files.Now, with the VFR scenery installed, this operation causes the HD to thrash continuously so for about two minutes the GUI is completely locked up and a flight cannot be started. For me it's only two minutes, but for other users (who may have a larger proportion of the VFR set installed) this time can be far longer.It's ironic that this operation (whether indexing files or pre-loading textures) must have been intended to speed things up!It's not quite so obvious why loading times for flights could be so long. It's conceivable that a flight can be started before the indexing operation has finished, so you could have a situation when FSX is indexing while attempting to load the flight. If this happened then loading times could be multiplied by an enormous amount.I tried launching FSX from the command line with a flight specified, hoping that the delay when the GUI appeared would be eliminated and that FSX would skip the indexing operation. No luck - the file loading screen appeared quickly, but stopped at 5%. It started to load again after two minutes, exactly the same length of time as the GUI pause. This suggests that the indexing operation is not optional and that FSX insists on doing it, one way or another.The signs are that, as you install more VFR scenery, the loading times go up almost exponentially.There are several obvious questions:1. What causes the long delay between the FSX GUI appearing and it being useable?2. How can the installation of VFR scenery cause extremely long flight loading times, even when the VFR scenery itself has not been selected?3. If FSX is performing some kind of indexing or texture pre-loads, is there an option to switch it off?In the case of this VFR scenery, the textures are incorporated into the bgl files, so the files are enormous. Most likely all future VFR releases will use this technique, so loading times may well become a big issue, particularly when people want to install a number of different VFR sceneries.Any ideas, anyone?Best regards, Chris

Hi ChrisI have noticed the same thing.From first clicking on FSX icon to when the menu first appears is around 1 minute, but the Free flight menu is not usable for another 2 minutes while the hard disk flickers away. (The plane remains frozen during this time, and only afterwards starts rotating as normal.) So that

Yep, same problem here too. If I try and reset a flight or alter anything in terms of scenery where fsx requires to re-load textures then it takes about 10 mins and everything crashes and even windows does not function properly, I have to re-start my rig.Total nightmare.

Hi Chris,while I haven't tested this myself it has been reported here that FSX indeed pre-fetches a flight situation on first load, namely the one set as your default flight.Thus, the logical suggestion was to set up a default flight in a "simple" area, like some far-off island, or at least avoid a default flight located in an area covered by photoreal textures.Cheers, Holger

Holger is correct. FSX tries to preload the default flight to reduce load time once you click "Fly Now". If you change settings or start location, the preloading process starts over again. To disable it, add the following to the [Main] section of FSX.CFG:DisablePreload=1-Adam

>Yep, same problem here too. If I try and reset a flight or>alter anything in terms of scenery where fsx requires to>re-load textures then it takes about 10 mins and everything>crashes and even windows does not function properly, I have to>re-start my rig.>>Total nightmare.I am amazed at how many Intel core chips seem to have problems with FSX. I too have the new Horizon VFR scenery, but I don't experience these massive load times.AMD X2 4600+, 2Gb Ram, twin 7800GT in SLIRay Keattch.

You're the best, Adam.I'm going to send you candy with your Christmas card.DISCLAIMER: The above text statement ("THE POST") does not guarantee, explicitly or implicitly, the delivery of Christmas cards or tasty candies.

>Holger is correct. FSX tries to preload the default flight>to reduce load time once you click "Fly Now". If you change>settings or start location, the preloading process starts over>again. To disable it, add the following to the [Main] section>of FSX.CFG:>>DisablePreload=1>>-AdamHoly moly. Nice to be able to turn that off or on!I noticed the pre-loading too. I did finally figure out what FSX was doing, thanks to the handy FILEMON.EXE program.I think I will turn it off...at least for a while. I rarely need/want my default flight pre-loaded, as I usually want to fly somewhere else.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Adam, thank you very much for that. It explains exactly what I observed before installing the VFR scenery.I tried DisablePreload = 1 and it certainly works. That's the good news.After FSX had loaded and the GUI appeared the Trike immediately started to spin, showing that the GUI was immediately useable. Without the mod the Trike would not spin and the GUI was unuseable for almost two minutes due to intense HD activity. This looked *very* promising. And now for the bad news. I then started a flight. Almost immediately the progress indicator stopped at 5%. You can probably guess it. The time lost here was just about exactly the same as the time gained by the mod! This is extraordinary. It's almost as if FSX insisted on first loading the default flight before loading the selected one.Here are my timings.1. WITHOUT DisablePreload = 1A. Time between double-clicking FSX icon and GUI appearing: 110 seconds.B. Time between GUI appearing and it being useable: 80 secondsC. Time to start flight: 105 seconds Total time: 295 seconds2. WITH DisablePreload = 1A. Time between double-clicking FSX icon and GUI appearing:105 secondsB. Time between GUI appearing and it being useable: zero!C. Starting flight - time stuck at 5%: 90 secondsD. From 5% to start of flight: 103 seconds Total time: 298 secondsNote: before the timings I restarted Windows. This is essential as Windows does a lot of caching and subsequent reloads can be a lot faster because of this.The two times are nearly identical.Bear in mind that I only have one third of the total VFR loaded and the increases in load times are not so bad. But others with full installations are seeing load times up to 20 minutes!I hope there can be a solution for this, particularly as there will probably be many other, and possibly larger, VFR sceneries released. By the way, this VFR scenery (Horizon Simulations) is truly spectacular, and really shows what FSX is capable of. I would love to know what FSX was doing when it was stuck at 5%. Can it really be pre-loading the default flight?Many thanks.Best regards, Chris

Adam, just another thought. In my first post I mentioned that a user reported something very odd: he got very long load times (ten minutes, I think) when loading other, non-VFR scenery. This is very surprising.But it ties in rather neatly with my measurements. Before installing the VFR I did notice the pre-loading but it was low level and I could immediately use the GUI. With the VFR installed the pre-loading seemed to lock up the GUI for almost two minutes. But the default flight is not VFR scenery!These observations do seem to be consistent with a very disturbing situation: that installing VFR scenery can increase the loading times of completely unrelated, non-VFR scenery.One last thought (for now!): When I saw the long pre-load times after installing the VFR, I tried calling FSX from the command line with the flight file name, hoping that eliminating the GUI would eliminate the delay. The flight immediately started to load but - guess what! - it stopped at 5% and (presumably) did the pre-load anyway.It really looks like FSX *insists* on doing the pre-load one way or another, even if disabled in the cfg file. Very strange....Best regards, Chris

Hi,What you describe sounds as if your HD partition that you loaded the scenery onto was perhaps very fragmented, I have just finished a section of my Photoreal scenery at 30cm covering just 1000 sq miles and it is 20Gigs worth(!) at about 70 files of 200-300mb each, it takes FSX about 3 minutes to load, It is set to start off at the new scenery area.Stunning! Much better than even the 1m England VFRI think it is fantastic and incredable infact that it can do this on this old system! I would have to say very good use of recources.I am running at 1600x1200 on an old XP2600 (mobile) running @2.7Ghz with just 1gig of ram with a Bliss7900GT-512mb AGP card at 8sxAA and 16xAF with all sliders to the right except Mesh=19m AG=low Scenery obj=normal texture "detail"=off, water=2.0 and clouds=low and I get constant 15-20 FPS in the default Cesna.I cant wait for the Duel Core system/G80-DX10 system when FSX is patched for Vista/DX10!Try using a good frager like O&O if you think the sho fits.

I agree with player1. It sounds like Chris' hard drive needs a good defragging. In our experience, photoscenery designed for FSX, such as England VFR, loads much more quickly than photoscenery designed for FS9. That leads us to another possibility, however. Chris, have you installed any FS9-style photoscenery in FSX? If so, that could be causing lots of disk access because of all the separate .BMP files required by FS9-style photoscenery.One final possibility is that your hard drive is operating in PIO mode, which is very slow and CPU intensive. To check, open Device Manager, expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" tree, and locate the primary and secondary IDE channel items. Right click on each of those and select the Advanced Settings tab. Then look at the current transfer mode. If any of them show "PIO Mode" then you're not getting the best performance from your hard drives and you might have a cabling problem or settings that need to be tweaked on the motherboard. To get the best performance, you want to use the faster DMA mode. Good luck,Adam

The VFR Scenery is 1220 files (59Gb) but includes at least 5 corrupt bgls. Is it possible that FSX is repeatedly attempting to read these corrupt files?Before adding DisablePreload=1, it was taking about 3 minutes for the preload and 5 minutes to load the flight. The scenery is in the first partition on a SATA 2 drive defragged by O&O with the name option. FSX, XP Pro and swapfile are on three separate drives.George

Adam, my drive probably could use a defrag. But it doesn't explain how the cfg change seemed to have moved the preload to loading the flight (the long wait at 5%). It also doesn't explain how the installation of VFR scenery can cause long loading times for non-VFR scenery. Also, on the Horizon forum, at least one user reported very long load times, despite having defragged his powerful system.One thing is apparent. There is an enormous variation in load times. Some do indeed report reasonable times of perhaps 2 minutes or even less, but others have reported up to 25 minutes! Clearly something very odd is going on....I checked the drive settings and both were on DMA. I may well try a defrag.Do you have any thoughts on my observation: that FSX still seems to do the preload when loading the first flight, despite the cfg change?Many thanks.Best regards, Chris

Hi George, Using TmfViewer I identified 7 corrupt files, all of which I've removed. However, when flying SW of Liverpool I consistently get a lockup, so there are probably some corrupt files that don't show up in TmfViewer. It's conceivable corrupt files may have something to do with it. Hopefully we'll be able to check that when the patch arrives next week. But it's difficult to see how corrupt VFR files could cause long load times for non-VFR scenery.You quote moderately long load times before adding the cfg mod, slightly longer than mine (I only have 3 areas installed). Did you see any difference after making the cfg change? It made no difference to my overall load time (between double-clicking the FSX icon and actually flying). Be careful: if you had already run FSX it's essential to do a Windows restart before doing new timings. I find subsequent reloads of FSX are much faster due to data being cached by Windows.Best regards, Chris