Glad I found this topic, just about to give up on Prepar3d due to horrific loading times...

 

Sometimes it loads reasonably, others takes forever with no changes...Not sure as to why it's so inconsistent..

 

I use Simstarter as well so only loading what region I will be flying, makes no difference..

 

I will keep an eye on this thread for ideas...

I have an update for everyone.

I have became impatient and sick of this word not allowed, I am talking about loading time.

I just deleted scenery.cfg. I wanted to see what effect this have, taking into account that I will add sceneries one by one with xml method. P3D rebuilt the file with its basic sceneries - 126 entries.

Long story short - NO EFFECT
This means that the more add-on.xmls you have, the longer P3D will load. I hope they'll fix it

13 minutes ago, vl1 said:

Long story short - NO EFFECT

 I hope you saved the scenery.cfg but also that many here would have told you that there would be no time savings. The more XML addons you have also will not increase load times any more than through the scenery.cfg. 

No I didn't. If we switch to something new, then everything old has to be removed.

There is a question that bothers me. There are a lot of scenery entries in add-on.xmls that use same layers. The most popular being 999. Does it have any significance?

 

  <AddOn.Component>
    <Category>Scenery</Category>
    <Path>scenery</Path>
    <Name>29Palms - MYKONOS</Name>
    <Layer>628</Layer>
  </AddOn.Component>

Edited October 9, 20223 yr by vl1

This from an older thread from this forum:

 

Quote

You are absolutely right with your assumption. Using the add-on.xml method does indeed increase the loading time compared to the scenery.cfg. When I changed my own installation to the xml-method after the release of v4 I encountered the same problem and did some tests with my 250 somewhat non-ORBX add-ons: Loading time with them registered via the scenery.cfg was around one minute but over 5 minutes with the xml-method.

What helped my to decrease the times was to combine multiple airports in a single xml. For example, I moved all Aerosoft airports into a single file. You could to the same on a continent or country base instead of the developer.

ORBX does now also use the xml-method for their library approach and uses an individual xml for every scenery. Hence, the loading time will significantly increase if you have a large ORBX collection and move them to the library outside of the sim. But, combining the ORBX xmls to a single file would not play well with Central and therefore I still avoid to install ORBX to a library.

 

All of my scenery addons are installed in the Scenery Library in P3Dv4.5HF2. Far too many issues in the past with the addon.xml method, so the only products installed this way are a handful of utilities.

Edited October 9, 20223 yr by Christopher Low

On 9/25/2022 at 8:45 PM, vl1 said:

15 minutes??? My waiting time is +-3 and I ain't happy, but have 600 sceneries and 1500 airlines installed

Count your blessings. MSFS users that have added many AIG airlines are suffering load times of up to 15 minutes.

You can spend your 3-4 minutes planning your flight if you have a second PC for flight sim use.

Or if those load times are still too long consider SimStarterNG where you could have different scenery.cfg files. One per continent perhaps so you don’t load US airports for a flight in Europe. And vice versa.

2 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Count your blessings. MSFS users that have added many AIG airlines are suffering load times of up to 15 minutes.

Sorry Ray - urban myth. Check my post here:

 

17 minutes ago, SierraDelta said:

Sorry Ray - urban myth. Check my post here:

Perhaps you don’t have many Addons as this poster…

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/625063-fs-2020-hangs-for-over-6-minutes-on-loading/?do=findComment&comment=4855174

Anyway, I don’t want the discussion to deviate. It was a post on the MSFS forum that caught my eye.

Update.

I moved away all folders that have add-on.xml and generated a scenery.cfg file for the remaining scenery - that is 350. Plus I have all ORBX available and 1500 AI Airlines.

From starting P3D.exe to tarmac - 35 seconds. This THIRTY times faster!!!

I have no idea what to do with the other add-on.xml sceneries. I have 200 of them and each scenery has it's own effects folder. So I can't just drop them in a single folder....

Edited October 9, 20223 yr by vl1

I drop all effects folders in the main P3D effects folder, whether from aircraft or sceneries, and that works just fine. 

Jorgen

16 minutes ago, jorgensandersen said:

I drop all effects folders in the main P3D effects folder, whether from aircraft or sceneries, and that works just fine. 

Jorgen

And what are you going to do if you need to update a scenery? Say RIO2020 to RIO2022 that has completely different effects... You are screwed. You need to find old installation file, install the city again, check and compare fx files, remove them and only then install new scenery.

Bad idea

I have another update. I put all sceneries that have add-on.xml into ORBX folder together with orbx sceneries.

Then I started ORBX CENTRAL. It showed me the library size as the exact size of the folder.

I don't know if Central did any magic, but now loading time of the P3D is not 5 min, it's 2-3 minutes, TWICE faster.

Still envestigating.
Who can elaborate?

3 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Or if those load times are still too long consider SimStarterNG where you could have different scenery.cfg files. One per continent perhaps so you don’t load US airports for a flight in Europe. And vice versa.

I use that method Ray, seems to make no difference..

Edited October 9, 20223 yr by davenicoll
Grammar

1 hour ago, vl1 said:

Then I started ORBX CENTRAL. It showed me the library size as the exact size of the folder.

That's interesting...shows my library size as zero even though there is an enormous amount in there...

 

Am I doing something different?