Huge downloads, size of your HD's?

1st Official Post

    After suffering a devastating breakdown of my main HD a few months back. I purchased a Samsung 1TB SSD drive, and had to re-install Win10 and everything else. All personal files were all backed up on portable HDs, so no loss there. I have just got round to installing Aerofly FS2 a massive 88.6GB download and took a few days to complete, with the PC running for hours and hours. Now it wants to download the High Res Textures at 57.2GB which will take about 11hours to download! As you can see I do not have superfast broadband. And even though I live in London UK, I do not have the option for the superfast broadband. Compared to most other countries, the UK is lagging way behind with its superfast broadband. These 2 downloads add up to 145.8GB, a fair chunk from my 1TB drive. If I were to download ALL of the extra scenery and other stuff, what space would be left on my HD? Some of you do, but what size are your HDs?

    PC i9-11900K, RTX3090 24GB, 32GB Ram, Gen4 2TB SSD, Oculus Quest 2, Saitek X52

    • Official Post

    The scenery high resolution textures and the base Aerofly scenery take up most memory. Its mostly scenery that fills up the hard drive, the high resolution images have to be stored some how.

    My Aerofly Steam folder has 128 GB. That is with Innsbruck and Meigs from Orbx, default scenery + high res, Utah, NYC and Switzerland. So pretty much anything that you can download at the moment, no custom made scenery yet.

    So even if the download size combined adds up to more gigabytes, some files will be replaced by newer files or the High Res texture files.

    We have changed the scenery texture file format in the past which caused that massive re-download of a lot of files but that is unlikely to happen again. Most of the download size vanishes into replacing old files. So the total size shouldn't be that high actually.

    One help that is available is to add another folder on a separate drive (maybe just a fast HDD) by adding this line to the main.mcf file in your Documents\Aerofly FS 2 folder. I used Aerofly Extension for the name but you can name it anything.

    <[string8][extra_user_folder][E:\Aerofly_Extension]>

    and in that directory (folder), you have "scenery" and then below that, "places" and "images"

    • Official Post
    Quote from whitav8

    One help that is available is to add another folder on a separate drive (maybe just a fast HDD) by adding this line to the main.mcf file in your Documents\Aerofly FS 2 folder. I used Aerofly Extension for the name but you can name it anything.

    <[string8][extra_user_folder][E:\Aerofly_Extension]>

    and in that directory (folder), you have "scenery" and then below that, "places" and "images"

    If you know any way to tell steam to download to that directory, I'd like to hear it!
    I think the extra user folder is just for your own creations, your custom made scenery. Yes that can be moved to another drive.