Large Scenery Files

Hi guys and gals:

 

I am not a scenery designer. I'm a pilot, but I like to see nice airports when I fly places :). So my question is why have the scenery files seemingly grown so much. Back in the day if I downloaded a scenery for FS9 or FSX it might have been 5 meg or so. But now I see airport scenery 100 meg and up. This is making a serious dent in my 2 TB hard disc to the extent I've started passing on these huge files. So my question to you folks is why are the files growing so large?

 

Thanks and best regards

One reason might be the inclusion of photoreal ground textures.

 

With seasonal variations, night textures and autogen PR files can get pretty big.

 

Another reason could be that some designers insist on including 3rd party objects libraries, and their textures, that should not (IMO) be included.

 

I have also seen some addons (not 100 Mb in size, smaller) that were more screenshots than scenery files.

 

Some designers include AI traffic for their scenery addons. Instead of simply including instructions on how to install the AI, they will include all of the necessary files.

 

There are probably more reasons for download bloat.

 

If you give us a specific zip file name, we can give it a good look for you.

 

peace,

the Bean

2TB HDD....try 160GB HDD with 149GB on it! I have lots of addon scenery airports and Bluesky Photo-Real scenery for FSX. Actually the downloads to look out for are the aircraft downloads from FSlightsman David Grindel. Some of those were over 1GB of pure manure. The aircraft, itself, was only about 56MB.

One reason might be the inclusion of photoreal ground textures.

 

With seasonal variations, night textures and autogen PR files can get pretty big.

 

Another reason could be that some designers insist on including 3rd party objects libraries, and their textures, that should not (IMO) be included.

 

I have also seen some addons (not 100 Mb in size, smaller) that were more screenshots than scenery files.

 

Some designers include AI traffic for their scenery addons. Instead of simply including instructions on how to install the AI, they will include all of the necessary files.

 

There are probably more reasons for download bloat.

 

If you give us a specific zip file name, we can give it a good look for you.

 

peace,

the Bean

 

Thanks for the insight. What I have noticed in some of these files is that there is a fairly normal size airport scenery layered on top of a huge (100 meg +) "photoreal" layer. In the one case I tried, I simply deleted the photoreal layer and the airport itself looked fine nestled in UTX and GEX. Not a big fan of photoreal anyway. So maybe I'll keep trying this and see if I can do it in all cases.

Thoughts?

The seasonal textures, night and whatnot do bloat the .bgl-file.

It is about the compression, and what the author of the file wants:

More compression, less quality of the photo scenery

or

Less compression, more quality of the photo scenery (means higher texture resolution).

 

But again, when downloading and finally deleting the photoreal layer, think about the hard work one put in it. Blendmask, Watermask, seasonal/night textures, compiling and whatnot.

I personally believe that it would hurt me more deleting one's photo scenery and just letting the bare AFCAD there, as I here and then develope some home-made sceneries too. :p