NZFF

A few months back I went on a freeware scenery binge and DL's a whole bunch of sceneries from the Walhalla Freeware scenery website (most of you would've heard of it). Anyway, when I tried to start up FS2004 it took upwards of 5 minutes to start up FS. I traced my problem to the huge number of sceneries installed, and deleted all the non-NZ ones. I now have most freeware NZ sceneries available. However I'd like to also have some foreign scenery.

Is it possible to have both a large scenery library and maintain normal startup times?

Hi monkeybdg. Up untill about 6weeks ago, i was working on my original install of FS-9, from November 2003. I did a fresh install, as it was becoming a little unreliable. Just before i uninstalled it all, i had over 300 Non-NZ sceneries installed, plus all my NZ Sceneries. Speaking from my own experiance, YES, it does slow down the start time of the Sim. Since the fresh install, i currently only have 80 NZ Scenery items in there, (including 20m mesh & Topo) plus the Default stuff, and the Runway-12 Static Objects Library as well. My FS-9 takes about 18-20 seconds to start up. It used to take about 3 minutes or so to start. Also, i have 2 close friends who's sims both seem to take longer to start, the more they add to it, both sceneries, and aircraft. I will, of course, eventually put a lot of the overseas sceneries back in again, (but not all i had before), and invariably slow down my start time, but hey, at least it starts !!

Lawrie.

Everything you add slows up the load times.
FS loads up all its gauges and aircraft too, so if like me you had a zillion AI planes plus 3 years worth of flyables, it was a painful process to fire up.
With 1 GB of memory though, subsequent starts were much faster provided your machine had not rebooted.
This led to other interesting anomalies when you refreshed an aircraft file on the fly though, it would sometimes re-invent a previous incarnation from stored RAM info!

Howdy,

Why not check out:http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$ ... o/scen.htm?

Originally written for the scenery .cfg problems associated with FS2000 and the limited number of scenery entries imposed by various (earlier) versions of Flight Sim, it is a simple way of having a large number of scenery entries as well as grouping them in a logical (geographic) manner.

Has served me well for the last two versions of FS, and I have upwards of 450+ sceneries.

Of course, with the huge amount of AI AddOns I'm running, the benefits I once experienced of fast loadup times have dwindled dramatically.

I know what you mean. Usually you will be interested in one area for a while,the same way we only listen to %10 of our music collection in any one 'phase' we're going through at that particular time.
So use your Scenery Library, the 'Add Area' and 'Delete' functions are the answer.Everything still stays on your hard-drive and in the addon scenery folder.It is down to you what scenery you have 'Activated' in the library at any one time.
Obviously the RBE mesh & topo and most if not all your NZ stuff needs to there all the time but some of these big U.S.A and Europe addons are big files and if you are not currently exploring that area then don't have it activated.It's always there when you want it you will just have to start your sim twice! Kind of ironic really but it will still be faster!

Yes Codge I agree with your comments regarding the scenery,but also remember that the aircraft and gauges also take up a lot of room and I have found that Flightsim manager by ranaside is a great little program for dealing with those very items.If I have aircraft that I am not using for a while I get flightsim manager to put them in the hangar along with the gauges that they use.Then ,when I want to use that aircraft again I just take it out of the hangar.this,coupled with your idea of the scenery is a good way to keep your flightsim starting up faster.I think Flightsim.com and AVsim.com both have the program or you can go to the web site http://www.ranainside.com and download the program from there.

it took upwards of 5 minutes to start up FS.

It takes me about 3 minutes worth of SplashScreen before I actually see the main menu of the sim after double clicking my FS9 Icon.

There is also about a 20 second delay after I click, change Aircraft thanks to the excess number of planes I have installed.

Usually you will be interested in one area for a while,the same way we only listen to %10 of our music collection in any one 'phase' we're going through at that particular time.
So use your Scenery Library, the 'Add Area' and 'Delete' functions are the answer.Everything still stays on your hard-drive and in the addon scenery folder

Now that sounds very clever, I have never heard of that idea before but I think I will give it a go. I have heaps and heaps of photoreal installed for many places I don't fly much. Is it possible to just 'un-activate' them and save loading time rather then deleting them?

thats exactly what Codge is saying,Just deactivate them and they don't load up when you start Flightsim.If you want to fly to a particular area then you just have to reactivate and you are away