Performance Question

Over a period of time my Aircraft hanger grew to a point where it became bloated with add-ons & payware. Because I am not

particularly interested in flying in some countries or on some air routes I have made it a point to remove some liveries from the

menu by entering the panel=off command in the aircraft config file.

 

I am curious to know whether this alteration actually benefits loading times or not. I am guessing that when FlightSim starts up

there are all types of files to be loaded including scenery, effects, textures etc, but are the aircraft texture files only loaded

after hitting the "fly" button?. Would all the textures for a particular aircraft be included regardless of the panel=off command?

If so, would removing the individual textures & config entries themselves improve loading times? They can always be re-entered

later if necessary.

 

Just a thought.

Im in much the same boat. If i dont fly it, than i just delete the whole folder. If you remove the panel folder, FSX determines it to be AI and ignores it. FSX I believe only loads the Display pic not all the textures when picking a plane. textures are only loaded in teh preview window. I am looking at deleting all my not requred paints to save Disk space i dont have a big ssd but it would not help load time..

Not sure about load times, but it definitely improves start time of the sim if FSX doesn't have to scan the folders and files at all. I'm using different subfolders and symlinks, I make sure that when starting FSX it can only see those planes that I need for my flight. And I do this for scenery as well, I'm not only deactivating unused scenery, I remove it from the scenery cfg. By using a few tools my sim is set up to 'optimum' configuration in about 5 minutes.

... I'm using different subfolders and symlinks ... By using a few tools my sim is set up to 'optimum' configuration in about 5 minutes.

 

I would like to know what tools are you using and how do you create sym links?

I would like to know what tools are you using and how do you create sym links?

 

Hi, Simstarter to manage the different profiles and scenery sets, TweakFS Scenery Tool to quickly sort them, two programs of my own creation to cleanup a scenery.cfg and match it with Simstarter ScenerySets and one to reduce a scenery.cfg to only the active sceneries.

 

Symlinks you create with the Windows command "mklink".

 

Basically my "Simobjects/Airplanes" folder does not exist, it is just a link. I use batch files to set that symlink to the folder I want in that particular flight.

 

Example for such a batch file:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects

rmdir Airplanes

mklink /j Airplanes AirplanesPMDG

 

In addition I have a script to link the default planes in all my airplane folders, so that addons may always find the default files. You could also just copy the 'Airplanes' folder a number of times and then remove the planes you dont want in the particular folder. Takes more space than symlinking the defaults (because there is a copy of them in every folder) but it is easier to set up.

nuitkati

 

Thank's for a nice and good description!