MSFS installers insights.

[MIKE JG]

Funny I found this thread AFTER I purchased the game, lol. Not to worry, it's running fine for me so far. i7-10750H, 16GB RAM (probably need more), GeForce RTX 2060. Wanted 32GB of RAM with a terabyte SSHD but had to settle for 16GB with a 512GB HD due to the clusterf@ck with everything right now.

[Firebird]

To be honest, Mike, my mate borrowed another 16GB of RAM for his PC to see if it made a difference and the answer was surprisingly no. His 16GB ram was not exhausted by the game, something that i will also confirm, but it made almost no difference with 32GB. What I mean is that very little other memory was used and still did not exhaust the original 16GB installation.

So I decided that for my new Windows 11 compatible PC that i am building I decided to save the money and just have 16GB.

I do have a 1TB SSD for the game purely as I was not sure about how much space it would grow into. It has proved very useful for re-install purposes, which i will now explain.

OK. So everybody that has downloaded the game knows the amount of time it takes. I concur with Mike that mine took around 10hrs.
Not really a big deal - unless you have/want to do a reinstall.
There are a few reasons for this, moving to a new drive, wanting to refresh the game, having a corruption or even the very annoying download loop.

Firstly I will explain the loop issue. When you get either the initial download or an update it does not download a single file and then expand it. The download actually consists of several, and in some downloads 100s of small zip and rar files. If it is downloading a folder it will download all of the archive files pertaining to that final folder and then expand them at the end of that particular download and deleting the archives.
This sounds like a good thing, and it is. However, occasionally what you can get is a corrupt archive download. If you are watching the download you will see the % go up and when it reaches 100% it will expand the archive. If there is a corruption then it will re-download that archive again and retry.
This sounds like a very good idea, and it is, except that it doesn't download a fresh copy of the archive but retries the corrupt virtual copy from the cloud server. So the download completes, again, and the expand fails, again, and it restarts again.

I have had this 3 times with updates now. In theory you can cancel the download, close down the game and then restart to retry. What should happen is that it continues from the archive that was corrupted. What I found though was that it doesn't, it continues from the next archive, presumably because the system thinks that you have already downloaded it successfully.
So you basically have a hole somewhere that may or may not catch you out at some point in the future.

Currently, the only sure way to ensure that you have a completely successful download is to uninstall and reinstall and get the time and bandwidth issue.

BIG TIME SAVING TIP
However, following some comments I read online I decided to try a different approach before my last re-install.
The key piece of information is that all the install archives, including SU and WU updates are all downloaded to and expanded to one folder. The folder is called 'OneStore' and is located in the path that you set for for installation under the 'Official' folder.
So for example for me the installation is at 'Z:\MSFS' and so the full path of the data is 'Z:\MSFS\Official\OneStore'.

So what you do after an update is then create a backup of the OneStore folder somewhere safe. Now please take into account that the Premium Deluxe version PLUS all the World Updates and free stuff is currently 163GB.
So once you have a safe copy then should you need/want to do a fresh reinstall then you can go ahead.

What you then do is when you reach the point on the initial load that you set your installation folder, or confirm the default folder, and the download kicks off you can cancel the download and exit the game.
What you then do is replace the 'OneStore' folder that was created by the install process with your backed up one.

What you then do is restart the game and then when it checks for updates it will find the complete OneStore folder. I found that it made a small download of about 500K and then moved on with the load process.

So in all, as I had already made the backup, I found that the uninstall, reinstall, copy process took less than 45 mins. Obviously it can vary depending upon the write speed of your media.

I personally find that a useful safety tip, if you have the space. The only thing you have to remember is to take a fresh backup of that folder after each SU or WU.

[MIKE JG]

Oooh, that's a good tip. Almost like you're tricking it into believing you don't have an install so that it only downloads the true updates and not all the other garbage?? Is that about right?

[Firebird]

It is closer to the opposite. You are tricking it into thinking that you do have an install so you either get no downloads if you are recovering to the same version or everything but the latest update if you get an issue with an update installation.

The best example I can give really is the example of the free airport Paderborn that is available through the market from Aerosoft. It comes out to about a 4GB install. The trouble is that every update of that scenery is 4GB, because of the way Aerosoft do it, every update is a complete 4GB download.
If you do not have it at the moment and select it for install you would end up installing 4GB four times over, the initial install plus the 3 updates, over 17GB from scratch - if you do it now.
This method saves you having to download superceded files that you would do if you started from scratch. I suppose it is similar to a point in time recovery for a Windows backup.

I had done a total of 4 complete re-installs from scratch due to issues, literally days of wasted time. Now I can live with around 45 mins recovery time from a clean system. It would obviously be less if you did not do the uninstall/reinstall part but just the files restore due to a corruption. It would be a simple deletion of the OneStore folder and however long it takes to copy your backup across.

This is made possible due to the MS installation method. I believe that it is a happy accident rather than design, otherwise they would have made this info available to all.

[Firebird]

OK just got and installed SU6.

I haven't had a chance to see what has changed but a quick flight in the TBM does indeed reveal that the notes were correct that drag from the flaps has been decreased.

The LOD slider now goes from a top of 200 to 400. What that means I will only find out in time.

The update, in game is approx 8.9GB plus the additional updates for the WU sceneries.

The key thing is that they have announced that there is a GOTY (Game Of The Year) edition. This edition will be a free add-on available on Nov 18. The key note for us here is that the F/A-18 is one of the additional free aircraft, and Miramar is a free add-on scenery.

Details here https://www.flightsimulator.com/coming- ... r-edition/