MSFS software diet

[andy1252 3,934]

Official folder for me is 290Gb, Addons pushing towards 3Tb now, but then I'm a scenery junkie.

[jrw4 626]

Official folder is at 280 GB, but I don't have many of the WUs installed other than US, UK, and Canada. Anglocentric, I guess. When I do install a different WU, I remove it when I stop flying in that region.

Community folder is less than 1 GB at the moment and includes only the Navigraph files plus one utility, the one that makes it easy to select and display sim rate acceleration. This folder was larger in the recent past, but MSFS wouldn't finish loading after the latest SU, so Community was moved elsewhere and only the essentials will be installed as needed. Previously, the Community folder ran around 50 GB.

Advantages of this "diet" include reasonable load times (2:15 to the Welcome/Profile/Options screen), and excellent stability. Performance has been excellent as well since the latest update, but heaven only knows what has caused that. I'm guessing that KISS applies to MSFS as it does to so much else in life.

[Alvega 2,125]

22 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

Official folder is at 280 GB, but I don't have many of the WUs installed other than US, UK, and Canada. Anglocentric, I guess. When I do install a different WU, I remove it when I stop flying in that region.

Community folder is less than 1 GB at the moment and includes only the Navigraph files plus one utility, the one that makes it easy to select and display sim rate acceleration. This folder was larger in the recent past, but MSFS wouldn't finish loading after the latest SU, so Community was moved elsewhere and only the essentials will be installed as needed. Previously, the Community folder ran around 50 GB.

Advantages of this "diet" include reasonable load times (2:15 to the Welcome/Profile/Options screen), and excellent stability. Performance has been excellent as well since the latest update, but heaven only knows what has caused that. I'm guessing that KISS applies to MSFS as it does to so much else in life.

So you don't use any AI traffic addon?

[blueshark747 1,845]

The numbers start to look like this when you have every DLC installed and tons of 10GB+sized single addons like GAIST, RKSI etc etc

This is by far the biggest piece of software I've ever experienced, but it's also the most beautiful!😍

Vanilla MSFS Folder Size

 

My Community Folder Size

Edited December 9, 2023 by blueshark747

[Gazzareth 817]

Mines at about 350 gigs, in comparison XP12 sits at just over 100 and p3d5 just over 60.

Seems mad when most of the scenery is streamed, I do have world packages installed - but nothing additional...

 

G

[blueshark747 1,845]

3 minutes ago, Gazzareth said:

Seems mad when most of the scenery is streamed

I started to ponder the same while reinstalling the entire sim, but I guess its the cost of this sort of streaming tech.

Here we are the same folks who used to complain about XP Ortho scenery sizes.🤣😂

[Gazzareth 817]

6 minutes ago, blueshark747 said:

I started to ponder the same while reinstalling the entire sim, but I guess its the cost of this sort of streaming tech.

Here we are the same folks who used to complain about XP Ortho scenery sizes.🤣😂

I've not used Ortho on XP, but have to say the default airports on that Sim destroy the defaults (obviously non custom) on the other two platforms - hopefully the scenery gateway / world hub will start to put that right on MSFS for not too much disk space .. ..

 

G

Edited December 9, 2023 by Gazzareth

[hugojans 2]

9 hours ago, ndts said:

I've tried using the the "compress files to save disk space" option on my community folder (I use addon linker, so it's not the official community folder), and it saves a significant amount of disk space without a noticeable impact on loading times, so that may be worth a shot.

Tried that, it saved me 30GB on disk. BUT, I notice a lot more stutters, AND an increased CPU usage and temperature. Obviously, the CPU has a lot more to do to decompress a lot of files on the fly... I'll decompress the community folder again...

[Cognita 1,110]

My official folder is 235 -- I have deleted all the aircraft, liveries, training missions, scenic flights, bush flights, etc., that I do not use. My community folder is 135 at present, and I am also somewhat careful at what I put in there, keeping only the items I am actually using.

What seems to have happened with MSFS is developers have been much more liberal in their use of texture sizes and there seems to be much less optimization than in previous sims. I suspect this is partially because MSFS handles these better, partially because people now expect a fairly high level of visual fidelity, but also because many developers do not know how or do not take time to optimize. I purchased one scenery from the Marketplace, I think St. Louis, and the installed footprint is 12G, and it is not a super high-resolution, high-quality airport, nor is it that large. Compare that with iniBuilds JFK at 4.5G or the very impressive Flightbeam KMSP at 1.2G. I have never reinstalled St. Louis. And I suspect that at some point, optimization is going to need to come back into fashion.

[jrw4 626]

2 hours ago, Alvega said:

So you don't use any AI traffic addon?

Nope. Too resource intensive and quite distracting because of its mediocre quality. I prefer to run 4K HDR with what is otherwise a fairly modest system. If I want traffic and ATC, I log into VATSIM.

[Alvega 2,125]

2 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

Nope. Too resource intensive and quite distracting because of its mediocre quality. I prefer to run 4K HDR with what is otherwise a fairly modest system. If I want traffic and ATC, I log into VATSIM.

Don't you also need to have an AI traffic addon installed to see the correct liveries on VATSIM?

[jrw4 626]

1 hour ago, Alvega said:

Don't you also need to have an AI traffic addon installed to see the correct liveries on VATSIM?

Yes, indeed, one does need to install the models into the Community folder and a .vmr file is placed in an appropriate folder set up for vPilot to provide model matching for vPilot. No separate injection app is required. vPilot doesn't seem to be much of a resource hog compared to the usual injection software, at least in my experience. I should try a comparison again because things change. When I do, I will report back here.

[fsiscool 251]

MSFS 2020 on a diet is called MSFS 2024 😉 

[blueshark747 1,845]

2 hours ago, jrw4 said:

Nope. Too resource intensive and quite distracting because of its mediocre quality. I prefer to run 4K HDR with what is otherwise a fairly modest system. If I want traffic and ATC, I log into VATSIM.

Understood! Now looking at your hardware specs FSLTL will indeed take away and play tug of war at your 4K performance.

It certainly comes with a noticeable performance hit. 

[109Sqn 1,583]

I posted the following after in the SU14 Update thread, after unintentially re-installing MSFS side-by-side with my original install:

Quote

The new install currently takes up 8.01GB compared to the original (with everything disabled in AddonsLinker) being a whopping 450GB. The difference is accounted by 0kb vs 286GB in Official/OneStore; 0kb vs 4.69GB in Community (the odd things that AddonsLinker doesn't seem to cope with); 184kb vs 1.83GB in LocalState (mainly dll files in 'packages' associated with various aircraft) , and an Official folder (non-existant in the fresh install) containing 162GB in OneStore. Yes, I have two Official/OneStore folders with a lot of files duplicated (not symbolic links), so probably a lot of unnecessary bloat.

 

That doesn't include the AddonsLinker folders where Airports, Aircraft and so on are kept.