Spent an entire day working on a pernicious issue with the ILS not being received in any plane on any runway at the new Orbx Atlanta airport in MSFS 2024.

It appears the issue is related to having too many Asobo FS24 streaming packages active in conjunction with the very object-intensive KATL scenery.

The Orbx guys responded quickly to my support ticket, and showed me a LitteNavMap snapshot that verfied the ILS approaches are present in the scenery. I did the same, and yup, they're there. But none of my planes--default or add-on--could receive an ILS on any runway there.

I cleared out the community folder, and still had the same problem, so it wasn't a conflict with a 3rd party add-on. Then I started progressively disabling the city and world updates, and the hundreds of airplanes and liveries included with my Aviator edition of FS24. At about the halfway point, the ILS came back...then I got out of the sim and restarted, and the ILS was gone again. Disabled some more, and the ILS was alive after a restart. Then I re-enabled a bunch of the disabled stuff and the ILS disappeared again. Then I selectively disabled batches of different packages to see if maybe there was a conflict specific to one or more of them, but no, the killer was pretty clearly related to the number of packages active, not any specific package.

I watched resource usage throughout, and didn't come anywhere close to VRAM/RAM limits (~14GB out of 24GB VRAM, peak physical RAM ~34GB out of 64 GB, and swapfile a reasonable 15GB on a fast SSD with 2.5TB available).

By going through and selectively enabling only the FS24 streaming packages that I actually use, I was able to stay under the threshold that triggered this issue.

So my conclusion is that there is some internal limitation associated with keeping a very large number of streamed packages enabled, even though they came as part of the sim and are not used during the session.

Oh, and startup times improved noticeably, from ~4 min to 2.5 min. The object count shown during startup now climbs to ~950 where it was over 3000 before.

I wonder if this is related at all to my problem now and again with the ILS 04 approach at EGSS London Stansted? All of my European airports and world updates are installed, but there are plenty of other airports and world updates that are streamed, even though I rarely use them. My object count at startup is just under 2600.

Edited yesterday at 05:45 PM1 day by Christopher Low

When you refer to streamed packages are your refering to scenery only or other options like POI, Adventures, planes, etc. Thanks for the insight.

Edited yesterday at 05:47 PM1 day by Wise87

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

I wonder if this is related to at all to my problem now and again with the ILS 04 approach at EGSS London Stansted? All of my European airports and world updates are installed, but there are plenty of other airports and world updates that are streamed, even though I rarely use them. My object count at startup is just under 2600.

I don't have any of the Asobo stuff downloaded/installed locally, but I'd guess that the effect is the same. My guess, absent decent documentation, is maybe there's an internal navaid table overflowing as the result of too many active scenery add-ons, including the enabled streamed sceneries. I also noted that the VOR at KATL was inop while this was going on as well. I use the absolutely marvy Addon Linker utility to selectively activate the 3rd party add-ons used for each flight, so it's not a matter of 3rd party stuff...but the accumulation of Asobo stuff in all the World/City updates is substantial, especially for the Deluxe+ versions of the sim. Just the loading time improvement alone from doing a selective cull was worth the tedium of sorting through it all.

23 minutes ago, Wise87 said:

How do we go about turning off streamed packages? When you refer to streamed packages are your refering to scenery only or other options like POI, Adventures. Thanks for the insight.

Go into Marketplace -> My Library at the main menu, and you can select packages and disable an entire package or items within it there. A bunch of stuff can't be disabled for some reason, like Challenges/Missions (they're marked as such), but much of the stuff included in the World/City updates, as well as Asobo aircraft/liveries can be disabled individually. The Aviator edition has an absolute buttload of sceneries, airplanes and liveries for them, which might explain why I'm among the first to notice this.

45 minutes ago, Bob Scott said:

A bunch of stuff can't be disabled for some reason, like Challenges/Missions (they're marked as such), but much of the stuff included in the World/City updates, as well as Asobo aircraft/liveries can be disabled individually. The Aviator edition has an absolute buttload of sceneries, airplanes and liveries for them, which might explain why I'm among the first to notice this.

Also having the Aviator Edition, I had previously disabled the majority of aircraft and airports that I’m not using for a flight, including the MarketPlace content.

Mainly to avoid potential conflicts and/or instability (as an aside, this type of strateegery takes me back to the Mac OS days before X, when that was absolutely critical 🤣).

And yeah, there’s a LOT of things that can’t be disabled (kind of annoying TBH) - seems to be everything OEM to the Standard Edition, AFAICT…?

Hadn’t occurred to me to go after World and City Updates, as well, but it does make sense in this perspective.

Thanks for slogging through all this. 🙏

I’d go so far as to suggest this be a pinned comment, too. 👍

The hand crafted Gaya LEBB Bilbao is apparently one of those items that cannot be disabled, but I managed to disable it by editing the content.xml file. That eliminated the terrain mesh elevation issues at the BMWorld version of the airport. The latter now works fine.

Edited 22 hours ago22 hr by Christopher Low

I just checked and my object count is at 962 when starting up. That may well be the reason i almost never have any problems.

Thanks for this important finding, Bob!

1 hour ago, Bob Scott said:

use the absolutely marvy Addon Linker utility to selectively activate the 3rd party add-ons used for each flight,

Two additional options for reducing bloat:

1. Addon Linker can also be used to manage Orbx addons (of which I have…ahem…”a few”).

2. AL also offers an Advanced feature to manage addons in your Official addons folders (you will have one for 2024 and one for 2020). I.e., enable/disable addons purchased & installed through the MarketPlace.

I’ve been managing the Orbx addons for quite awhile using this with no ill effects (addon updates are unaffected, too 👍).

I’ve just enabled the Official folders feature, too. Testing with just one addon each so far, as recommended by AL.

Edited 21 hours ago21 hr by UrgentSiesta

Is it safe to edit my content.xml to disable Challenges/Missions? I use a program called real content manager for msfs 2024 to which allow me to disable them. I don’t see it causing an issue.

Edited 18 hours ago18 hr by Wise87

33 minutes ago, Wise87 said:

Is it safe to edit my content.xml to disable Challenges/Missions? I use a program called real content manager for msfs 2024 to which allow me to disable them. I don’t see it causing an issue.

WHOA!!!

This app looks like a real gem! There are a bunch of Default aircraft that I rarely fly (and some that I’ll probably never touch at all).

Definitely going to give it a try!

As to your question, IDK (YET!). 😁👍

2 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

I’d go so far as to suggest this be a pinned comment, too. 👍

I'll probably add it to the Tips and Tricks forum after some more testing. So far everything is working as it should and several confirmation excursions have reproduced the problem when I add a bunch of Asobo streaming stuff back in. I haven't tried to separate out Asobo's streaming sceneries from the acft/liveries bundled into the premium edtions to see if only scenery has this unhappy effect, but I do suspect that's the case.

27 minutes ago, Wise87 said:

Is it safe to edit my content.xml to disable Challenges/Missions? I use a program called real content manager for msfs 2024 to which allow me to disable them. I don’t see it causing an issue.

As I understand it, after SU4 or 5 the Content.xml file was deprecated and is no longer used by the sim. I'm positive it's no longer used to establish loading priority, and after removing a whole lot of Asobo sceneries, they still appear in my Content.xml (but not in the package reorder tool), and the file has not been altered in months. I suspect that your utility is something of a placebo now as a result.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Two additional options for reducing bloat:

1. Addon Linker can also be used to manage Orbx addons (of which I have…ahem…”a few”).

2. AL also offers an Advanced feature to manage addons in your Official addons folders (you will have one for 2024 and one for 2020). I.e., enable/disable addons purchased & installed through the MarketPlace.

I’ve been managing the Orbx addons for quite awhile using this with no ill effects (addon updates are unaffected, too 👍).

I’ve just enabled the Official folders feature, too. Testing with just one addon each so far, as recommended by AL.

I keep all of my third-party add-ons in a separate folder, with scenery organized by region, country, and (in the US) state. I move my Orbx sceneries there as well, and when active (via a symbolic link placed in the real community folder by Addon Linker) the Orbx Control Center finds them and updates them as if they were in the real community folder. Some others, most notably the iniBuilds manager, require you to move the scenery back to the Community folder when updating.

50 minutes ago, Bob Scott said:

I'll probably add it to the Tips and Tricks forum after some more testing. So far everything is working as it should and several confirmation excursions have reproduced the problem when I add a bunch of Asobo streaming stuff back in. I haven't tried to separate out Asobo's streaming sceneries from the acft/liveries bundled into the premium edtions to see if only scenery has this unhappy effect, but I do suspect that's the case.

As I understand it, after SU4 or 5 the Content.xml file was deprecated and is no longer used by the sim. I'm positive it's no longer used to establish loading priority, and after removing a whole lot of Asobo sceneries, they still appear in my Content.xml (but not in the package reorder tool), and the file has not been altered in months. I suspect that your utility is something of a placebo now as a result.

After the last SU updates my Content.xml moved from the LocalCache folder to the LocalCache/UserName folder, user name being your Xbox name. In there is my Content.XML that is currently being used. The one in the old location hasn't been touched in months but the new one is active. Just aded a scenery and checked after boot and its in the current content.xml.

Edited 18 hours ago18 hr by Wise87

1 hour ago, Bob Scott said:

I keep all of my third-party add-ons in a separate folder, with scenery organized by region, country, and (in the US) state. I move my Orbx sceneries there as well, and when active (via a symbolic link placed in the real community folder by Addon Linker) the Orbx Control Center finds them and updates them as if they were in the real community folder. Some others, most notably the iniBuilds manager, require you to move the scenery back to the Community folder when updating.

Did you submit a ticket to Asobo about this issue?

4 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

WHOA!!!

This app looks like a real gem! There are a bunch of Default aircraft that I rarely fly (and some that I’ll probably never touch at all).

Definitely going to give it a try!

As to your question, IDK (YET!). 😁👍

lol..Well I guess I have to wait until the creator re-opens it to download the app. He stopped it from anyone downloading at the moment.☹️