Selecting aircraft screen takes forever

[WTE_Pharoah 7]

hi guysI've collected quite a few a/c for my FSX game and now, every time I hit select new aircraft, it takes like 10 mins to load!!! is there anything I can do to speed this up?thanks

[n4gix 4,947]

Yes. Move the ones you aren't currently using into a "Hanger" folder to park them out of the way so they don't clog up the Menu system... ;)

[WTE_Pharoah 7]

Hi BillI'm assuming you mean in the actual FSX/simobjects/airplanes/ folder right? ie. just create a new folder called 'hangar' and move the a/c there?I'll do that...Cheers

[Guest fsxmissionguy]

Most aircraft come in a variety of liveries.You can signifantly diminish the load time by unticking the "Show All Variations" checkbox on the Select Aircraft screen.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/188108.jpgThis will reduce the variety you have when selecting an aircraft, but in your case, since it's taking 10 minutes to load all those liveries, this might be a good option for you.Cheers,

[WTE_Pharoah 7]

yeah mate, my problem is with none of the variations showing. Some of the problems though stem from payware a/c that create variations as individual a/c eg. euro typhoon which had like 10 diff liveries and each showed up as a separate a/c rather than the 1.

[STUART_H 12]

I think this aircraft selection was one of MS/ACES worse GUI design flaws with FSX over FS9. In FS9 it was possible to select an individual aircraft manufacturer / type, from dropdowns, before getting to the variations in texture. When FSX was first released I posted a suggestion that setting the checkbox at the bottom should only effect the selected aircraft, but this does not seem to be the case, since as soon as one unchecks the box, having highlighting the aircraft of choice, the screen then displays every aircraft again. Also then having selected your preferred texture, the checkbox then remains unticked the next time one enters the screen - so back to long load times....DOH !A plea to ACES - PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE improve this aircraft selection process in the next FX11 ........Cheers,Stuart

[Guest PPSFA]

Personally, I dont need 32 variations of the same plane, so I remove them from the cfg file, and leave only the liveries I fly. It cuts about 80% of the planes from the menu and loads a lot faster.

[beatle 0]

Hey All,I'll step up and apologize for this one :-> This dialog was sort of the albatross of the FSX UI development. It got redesigned 5 or 6 times (I still think the 1st and 3rd versions were the best ones :->), and by the end I had spent so much time in this one dialog I just implemented what ever was given to me to get away from it as quickly as possible :->.I'm not doing the UI for FS11 (I'm over in ESP land now), but all of the UI is being redesigned using the same technology used by the kneeboard, MP in-game chat window, ATC window, XPack in-game Race Results window, etc; so you at least shouldn't have this particular UI issue to complain about next time (although I'm sure you all will find a new one :->)

[Guest fsxmissionguy]

Tim,Any chance you could explain what that part of the UI is doing in the background when you open it? Displaying a scrolling list of .bmp images can't be all it is doing, given how long it takes.

[Mace 1,904]

>Tim,>>Any chance you could explain what that part of the UI is doing>in the background when you open it? Displaying a scrolling>list of .bmp images can't be all it is doing, given how long>it takes.I would think it is scanning your entire /Simobjects/Airplanes directory, and any other dir you have defined in your FSX.CFG, for aircraft.cfg and sim.cfg files. And then it's parsing each of those files to located the variants.I can see how that would take some disk activity and cpu time.Filemon would tell you exactly what it's doing.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

[beatle 0]

>Any chance you could explain what that part of the UI is doing>in the background when you open it?Pretty much what Rhett says above. The UI code calls some code elsewhere to give it a list of user selectable SimObjects, the UI code then has to convert that flat list into a set of heirachically indexed lists to populate and support the filter combo boxes at the top of the dialog, add in a UI framework that was getting a little long in the tooth (like I said earlier, we are replacing it completely for future releases) and didn't gladly support some of the things this dialog was trying to do natively, and the fact that you guys generally have a lot more aircraft in your lists than we do during development, plus all the stuff I mentioned earlier - add that all up and you wind up with a crappy dialog :->