10 hours ago, Sesquashtoo said:

What I didn't get at first is what do i do with my 137 GB's of current 'junk'.   I see now that I merely move all of that into my Add On folders and sub folders...then having a physically empty C.F.   Then, the program uses link references.

Taking this a step further...so, when clearing the community folder for an update, with Addon Linker all I have to do is uncheck the checkboxes on the right-hand side, and all of those symbolic links will disappear from the community folder?

2 minutes ago, Mace said:

Taking this a step further...so, when clearing the community folder for an update, with Addon Linker all I have to do is uncheck the checkboxes on the right-hand side, and all of those symbolic links will disappear from the community folder?

I just unchecked the items on the left side and they disappear on the right. One other reason i like it is once you acquire a large number of add-ons you can run into conflicts and even CTDs, so only loading what you need (and know plays nice together) is another big plus imo. 

1 hour ago, captain420 said:

Yup, what would be great is if the mod allows dynamic loading/disabling of the addons we need on the fly, without having to quit and restart the sim.

Yep would be cool but unfortunately that's not possible because the sim loads them at the start, so there's nothing the tool could do to change this.

As for speed yeah you're right, some see big difference some not, i think the most difference is obtained when people use a lot of photogrametry addons, those sometimes use thousands of files and that will certainly make the loading a bit slower. At the beginning i had reports of some people gained a lot of time by disabling huge addons (like going from 30 min to 2 min .. oh man 30 min i would have given up a long time before that 😛)

Now i guess if you lots of small addons it's probably less visible, maybe also SU5 brought some improvement in the loading time, haven't really done any tests about that.

One of the man idea of the linker was also to let you choose how to organise the addons (even on other drives) without putting them all at the same level in the community folder, that was, for me, actually even more important than speed because i never really had speed problems (never had that many addons).

I also don't really know what 'many' addons is for a standard user, at first i thought 200-300 was a lot, that was until i saw people having 8000+ addons installed 🙊

The free addons support of MSFS is certainly the most amazing thing, so many to choose from and some are really great quality, if it wasn't for a bit of lack of time i'll probably also download 1000's of them, really fantastic !! 👍

 

10 hours ago, Sesquashtoo said:

What I also thought was the use of this program, was to automatically source out any updates from the web and download them. I see that that is not what this program does, and you still have to manually go and 'see what if'. Also, I see that any Orbx expects to see physical Orbx files in your C.F.  so they still have to be physically in your C.F.

I have had several requests about auto updates of the addons, but that's not really something i think i can do. To do that, you would need access to the database of addons and then compare the database with what the user has on his systems. The flightsim.to database is not publicly accessible and creating my own database would be impossible with so many existing addons and new addons coming out everyday. I would really love to have that feature but i wouldn't know where to start to implement it.

The existing update tool does sort of that, it has an internal database for the main mega-fantastic-blockbusters addons (fbw, working title, ...), and i think an option for a community driven database for others addons, i haven't tested it but it seems very well done.

15 minutes ago, Mace said:

Taking this a step further...so, when clearing the community folder for an update, with Addon Linker all I have to do is uncheck the checkboxes on the right-hand side, and all of those symbolic links will disappear from the community folder?

Yes, all inks will be deleted in 1-2 seconds and the folder will be empty for the simulator

 

If you're a new user, please read the TXT file that comes with the ZIP file, always try first with one addon to make sure it works for you before more 100gb and getting angry (rightfully so) because it doesn't  🙊😁🍺

Thanks all for your feedback 🍰

 

Edited August 15, 20214 yr by Bad_T
typos, typos

2 hours ago, captain420 said:

Yup, what would be great is if the mod allows dynamic loading/disabling of the addons we need on the fly, without having to quit and restart the sim.

Technically, you could do this. MSFS would have to be in developer mode though and you would reload your scenery/aircraft/etc.

3 hours ago, captain420 said:

Yup, what would be great is if the mod allows dynamic loading/disabling of the addons we need on the fly, without having to quit and restart the sim.

That's not possible, not down to any limitation with the tool, but simply because of MSFS's architecture - the contents of the Community Folder are loaded once, shortly after the sim is launched.   So changes made in the Linker Tool can never be reflected when the sim is already open.     

I understand your point though, it would be great if that could have been done.

 

11 hours ago, regis9 said:

There is another program, I think called MSFS Updater or something like that which will allow you to update many of the most popular mods without having to go look for files yourself.

Now that I'm in front of my computer I can correct that it's called MSFS Community Downloader.

5 hours ago, ThrottleUp said:

Just curious - so you keep having to exit & restart the game if you want to fly in a different scenery area with different planes?

I much prefer putting up with the long load time and have everything available once in game. 

Yep you do.  That is the downside of it.

It is useful for isolating scenery that has a disproportionate effect on load time like the NZ vegetation and some freeware meshes and freeware photogrammetry though I suppose you could just chose not to use those at all.

It is also useful for where you may have conflicting mods for the same aircraft, for example the stupid number of Cub mods available most of which do not play nicely with each other, or the Turbo Bonanza Mod that currently conflicts with quite a few other mods.

I suppose the third reason would be to clean up your aircraft selection screen, you could put all the rarely flown peculiar aircraft like the Raphael and the Bleriot in a separate preset to reduce the planes that appear.

But true, if your happy enough to remove conflicting stuff like the Turbo Bonanza entirely and just wander off to make coffee while the game loads up if it is taking too long, that is an equally valid choice.

 

 

 

Edited August 16, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

7 hours ago, RobJC said:

I just unchecked the items on the left side and they disappear on the right. One other reason i like it is once you acquire a large number of add-ons you can run into conflicts and even CTDs, so only loading what you need (and know plays nice together) is another big plus imo. 

Keep in mind that scenery is loaded in alphabetical order.

Always let an airport load over the city/landmarks to avoid that with certain airports objects do not appear. I have renamed a few airports/cities next to airports so they load below the airports ….

Eg :

Airport Zurich

City Zürich

Edited August 16, 20214 yr by GSalden

The way it works, does it make any difference to have the scenery addons on a HD vs a SDD, knowing that the sim and its Community folder are on a SSD ?

47 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

The way it works, does it make any difference to have the scenery addons on a HD vs a SDD, knowing that the sim and its Community folder are on a SSD ?

No it doesn't except for the loading times. As others said i am using the program to load only the things i need for every flight, so the addons are not too many, meaning that it will not make a huge difference in loading.

22 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Yep you do.  That is the downside of it.

It is useful for isolating scenery that has a disproportionate effect on load time like the NZ vegetation and some freeware meshes and freeware photogrammetry though I suppose you could just chose not to use those at all.

It is also useful for where you may have conflicting mods for the same aircraft, for example the stupid number of Cub mods available most of which do not play nicely with each other, or the Turbo Bonanza Mod that currently conflicts with quite a few other mods.

I suppose the third reason would be to clean up your aircraft selection screen, you could put all the rarely flown peculiar aircraft like the Raphael and the Bleriot in a separate preset to reduce the planes that appear.

But true, if your happy enough to remove conflicting stuff like the Turbo Bonanza entirely and just wander off to make coffee while the game loads up if it is taking too long, that is an equally valid choice.

I can see the appeal of it now that you mentioned the bit about conflicting mods. I have heavily modded games like Skyrim and Fallout managed using mod managers and they do warn of possible conflicts so it will be handy to have that in MSFS. 

As of now Im happy without the Linker program and just keep dunking mods right into Community. 

Im planning on building a new rig with SSDs so im curious to see how the load times improve.

On 8/15/2021 at 5:12 PM, Mace said:

Taking this a step further...so, when clearing the community folder for an update, with Addon Linker all I have to do is uncheck the checkboxes on the right-hand side, and all of those symbolic links will disappear from the community folder?

Easier yet, just make up and store a totally empty Addon Linker Preset and load that whenever you want to clear out the Community Folder before a sim update, etc.

Al

48 minutes ago, ark said:

Easier yet, just make up and store a totally empty Addon Linker Preset and load that whenever you want to clear out the Community Folder before a sim update, etc.

Al

No need to even do that.  You can de-activate everything with one click by default.

How will this work if we use the flybywire installer to update our planes? The community folder will only show a shortcut or link to the actual folder. But the FBW Installer requires the installation to be placed directly into the community folder. How do we get around this?

Whenever I try to enable an add-on, I see 'could not read the manifest.json' file.

Edited August 17, 20214 yr by captain420

23 minutes ago, captain420 said:

Whenever I try to enable an add-on, I see 'could not read the manifest.json' file.

That typically happens if you drag an addon out of the Community folder.

If you download that addon and drop it into your "Addons" folder, this problem should not occur.