active Orbx True earth and Xplane taking 20 minutes to load over these regions

[SamTurner9]

HI Guys 

 

Just wondering if anyone knows why my XP is taking ages to load over True earth regions The time this usually takes is 20 minutes Over the true earth UK regions in the Zibo

 

Any help would be appreciated 

 

Thanks 
Sam 

[BradB]

When I start up my XP11 it can take upwards to 10 minutes to load in a single prop . I am using Vulcan also .

 

Cheers

John

[renault]

Hi  Sam & John

 

 @SamTurner9 @BradB

 

Jon Clark @Jon Clarke is superb at dealing with tricky XPlane issues with Orbx scenery and difficult XPlane problems in general  and I "copied" him on this note also. His advice is invaluable in my experience. 

 

Just for comparison I did a test loading  of the Laminar B737 at Orbx Southampton with TEGBS using Vulkan on my system

 

My load time off a mechanical hard drive (Both XPlane 11.50R3 Vulkan and all my Orbx scenery are on this drive) was:

 

Time taken was 1 min 36 sec, 1 min 22 sec and 1 min 35 sec for 3 trials.

 

Observations:

 

1) Is your internet connection active and working at normal speed. I have encountered the issue that my service provider was in "go slow mode" on occasion and because XPlane checks its license against Laminar's servers it took about 5 minutes to load.

 

Things that I have done that might help.

 

1) Make sure that what ever virus scanner(s) you are using are excluded from scanning both XPlane and more importantly Orbx scenery. Windows defender is really bad for this, but the solution is very simple to implement. In windows go into "Virus &  threat protection"  and then to "Exclusions" and then exclude the relevant folders from scanning.   Also, I have other virus/malware products and do the same in them.

 

2) I use O & O defrag for my mechanical drive  and I "defrag by name". It can definitely take a long time to defrag, but this results in the fastest access.  I also have my Orbx Ms2020 airports on the same drive (all my other drives are SSD's) and I don't notice any lag loading the Orbx products in MS. I have found defragging to be one of the significant factors in significantly improving load time. A trial version of O&O defrag can be obtained from  https://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIksjfmvbL7AIVZRitBh1gFATMEAAYASAAEgIzovD_BwE

 

3) Check the log file to see if there is any indication of an issue

 

4) Have a look at this topic

 

5) This is a "long shot" Sam , but it may be worth checking if nothing else above gives you any joy.  Excessive load times were a problem with some of the XPlane 11 Vulkan betas, but this was fixed several beta versions before the R3 release version. However, the topic may give you a test protocol to see if it helps reduce the load time issue you are experiencing

 

In the text of this posting is the following which I would try first before the .lua script I mentioned in the discussion

"

2) A additional speed improvement. This was also documented at XPlane-org, but I found in combination with the above , it works really well

 

Before you begin the loading process either initially or selecting a new airport location, move the texture slider to minimum.  As soon as everything has loaded, move the texture slider back to your normal value (in my case Maximum). You will be at your preferred texture selection virtually instantly ( some background loading will still be going on for a few second, especially with a mechanical hard

drive, but you will generally not notice it visually close to your point of view) "

 

As I said this issue was fixed long before the release of Vulkan, but I included the reference just in case nothing else works

 

6) This is a screenshot of what was loaded at the end of my test trials . In XPlane I have all my sliders to the right with the exception of the Texture quality which is on high. I see no difference visually with this texture setting, but there is a significant difference in scenery load time if it is set to the  highest setting.

 

I hope this of help and may give some things to check.

 

Cheers

Pete

 

 

 

 

[BradB]

It's not that big a deal for me , I rarely use XP anymore . I do have a fiber internet connection that gets up to 40 bps .

 

John

[Jon Clarke]

11 hours ago, SamTurner9 said:

HI Guys 

 

Just wondering if anyone knows why my XP is taking ages to load over True earth regions The time this usually takes is 20 minutes Over the true earth UK regions in the Zibo

 

Any help would be appreciated 

 

Thanks 
Sam 

Hello Sam

There are several aspects that govern load times and they are not unique to XP.

The read/write speed of your Disk is one major factor. which is why it is recommended that a SSD or better, like NVME M2. is used. The advantage of those is that they will load the sim quicker than a mechanical HDD. That is the only advantage of the SSD, NVM£ M2 drives. Loading time.

Another major aspect is the amount of addons in your Custom Scenery folder. XP has to read and find the contents to pick out the relevant ones for your chosen flight. Just because you type in EGLC as your departure airport doesn't mean XP ignores everything and automatically hones in on EGLC and then TEGB South. It has to locate those files in order to load them.

 

The XP settings has a major impact on load times. Have you noticed how quick XP loads if all the XP settings are at default? If you choose Truro in TEGB South it will load much quicker than if you choose EGLC (Orbx payware version with PBR and animations). The reason being the area around EGLC is hugely impacted by ai buildings, road traffic, ai air traffic (if chosen to be active).

As Pete mentions, there are ways to increase the load times but not significantly. Since Vulkan the need to restart XP if the Texture Quality setting was changed after loading the sim has gone. There is no need to restart so the suggestion of setting that to minimum and then reverting back to you normal setting, does improve the load time.

Not all the TEGB addons are slow to load because it very much depends on the location you choose to start at. I have found that i can get a quicker load time if i choose a relatively low demand area to start at and then immediately go to the Flight Configuration option and change location to a higher demand area.

Load times improve after the initial start up of XP and first flight.

So to summarise:

Disk speed

Amount of addons in your Custom Scenery folder

Density of autogen/POI, additional related addons in the chosen area of flight like a payware Heathrow and EGLC in London

XP settings

Weather setting

Screen Resolution

PC specs

I forgot to add that the TEGB series are in HD ZL17 and there is no SD version since these were the first True Earth addons developed by Orbx. HD will take longer to load than SD.