Latest update feedback

@drhotwing:

Are you still working on a solution for Radeon graphics cards?

Do you suggest I do a complete uninstall/reinstall?

OK. Total new full update, afaik. Steam did its thing and downloaded the beta update over night. 76.2 GB but all DLCs seem to be present and accounted for. No problems found with the scenery tiles around Monument Valley airport that I reported a couple of days ago.

Updated started late afternoon and continued through the night. After a cup of coffee I checked on the download and had 6 min remaining so with a second cup of coffee and I am up and running - clean and sober - with the offending scenery tiles fixed.

I will make a few other general checks and report back, but, all is well with this new re-download.

Regards,

Ray in central USA.

Quote from drhotwing1

@jchall
I would first suggest that you finish the update posted to Steam yesterday and after the download is complete let us know if you are still experiencing problems. We haven't confirmed that there is any problems with ATI cards yet.

Thank you for replying to one of my questions, drhotwing1 (IPACS).

What update are you referring to?

As I said earlier, "I just finished the 61-GB download (it took around 90 minutes at 8-10 MB/s). Steam showed the installation completed. I re-started the PC (Windows 10, Radeon R9-270). Nada. Still garbage tiles everywhere."

Aerofly FS2 tells me I have Version 2.0.1 EA4.10 (20170406).

My Radeon R9 270 is running driver version 15.301.1701.0

So, have I finished the update you are referring to?

Is there any hope for users of Radeon cards? (My FSX Steam Edition has no such problems)

I tried the update but it failed as I had only 58 GB free on a 250 GB ssd, 2 GB short! As my aero under steam apps/common is already 107 GB it would help if non core elements could be split up on different drives. I tried all the usual disk clean ups. My entire C drive contents are Windows 10, Aero FS2 and Euro truck 2 (only 1.8 GB so not worth deleting)!

P.S. I have heard that loading a ssd above 90% of its capacity causes a massive increase in memory writes and can cause an enormous reduction of the drive's life.

As Jeff pointed out, we will try to fix the issues with AMD GPUs next week, give us time to get one of those cards for test purposes. Its probably related to the fact that we use a new method of uploading aerial images. For AMD card we can revert to the default.

Overloaded: Your fear regarding SSDs and using over 90% of its capacity is a myth. On our development systems we use INTEL and SAMSUNG SSD drives and write tera bytes of data each day. So far we have not found a single SSD that has failed or decreased in performa ce. If you can afford it, get a 1TB SSD drive for Aerofly and your other Steam games. If that is no option or its too expensive, get a >= 4 TB drive, that will give you plenty of space for Aerofly and you will hardly feel the lower performance.

Quote from jk1895

I had the same problem. Steam wanted to reserve ~70 GB but I only had 68 GB. I moved the steamapps\common\Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator\scenery\images\world folder to an another drive to make room for the update. After the update was finished I moved the folder back.

And this is why I always have lots of extra storage capacity. So I can transfer and reorganize main/working drives at will.

Hear my sad story...bought Aerofly FS2 for the VR purpose with the HTC Vive a little over a week ago. I also order a flight yoke, pro pedals, and throttle quadrant...the day the yoke shows up the Utah update begins. Everything was fine before then, ever since I can no longer start in VR mode, have been trying installing and uninstalling for days and have given up, took days before I could even post this to the forums...if I didn't already rack up a bunch of hours I would be asking for a refund...only reason it was purchased was for VR. 2d is useless to me, there are tons of 2d flight sims out there. I have now wasted more hours of downloading than playing...very disappointed and I never write reviews but I might just have to on this one, from what I've been reading having to delete what has taken me countless hours to download is just ridiculous

IPACS support, thanks for dispelling the 90% SSD myth.

I had no idea that PC FS2 would grow to such an amazing size and require an additional enormous reserve storage space for an update. I built a new PC just as PC FS2 was coming out and a warning of the planned inflation in storage requirements would have been very helpful.

The inordinate free storage demanded for an update, in a way resembles one of the iOS mobile AF2 requirement scenarios at the time of the .... was it the Southern California release?
I think it needed an extra original installation sized amount of storage space reserved plus the upgrade data space on top of the existing installation's storage space. It was not easy in a fixed storage apple tablet.

Can some sort of an efficient PC update method be considered?, perhaps splitting the job into more digestible portions or perhaps making use of a secondary disk to store the original installation's data (or the update data) while rebuilding the new program in a space limited (250 GB in my case) SSD?

If a new larger SSD is the best option is a complete re-download recommended or are the recently described steam move methods perfectly reliable, considering all future updating requirements?

Well, how the Aerofly FS 2 update is delivered is up to Steam, there isn't much we can do. Like we said, getting a big HDD really doesn't cost anything these days and you won't suffer from very long loading times as well. So if your budget is low get a good quality 4 TB HDD and you will be set for many updates to come.

If you want the benefit for a shorter initial loading time, go for a 1 TB SSD.

The last update we published really was an exception as we changed many files, so the old installation was required and Steam downloaded the new update in the background which resulted in around 200 GB of space required. One option would have been to completely delete Aerofly and download it from scratch. This would have consumed just the 120 GB that is required by Aerofly right now.

It is great to have such a beautifully natural view out the windows, the New York scenery is a spectacular success and well worth the download. The recommended storage requirement was 40 GB and in less than a year a 250GB SSD containing windows 10 is too small for the latest update download. If I get a 1TB SSD what happens when PC FS2 grows to over 500 GB?, acquire and reload into a 2TB drive?
Is there any merit in using secondary drives to help with huge downloads? Is FS2 one of the biggest programs on steam? Is steam in need of a revised download procedure to cope with Aerofly?

Can FS2 or the entire drive be compressed to allow the update to fit into a 250 GB SSD? I imagine when the update has been installed the drive can be uncompressed if desired.

Again, if you want to be safe for a while, follow our recommendation of getting a 4 TB or more hard drive. They are cheap but have high transfer rates. Install all your Steam games on this drive. The performance drop is probably not noticable.

SSDs are of course faster, but this comes at a price and a compromise as well. High capacity SSDs are way more expensive than HDDs so users tend to buy the biggest drive they can just afford.

Follow our recommendation and get a 4 TB drive. You won't be disappointed.

Is FS2 loaded in a compressed manner so that disk compression is pointless? Will the FS2 update process perform well enough in a compressed disk for the upgrade to install perfectly?

I think I will get a bigger 1TB SSD but they fall in price by about 70% per year and you might not issue such an enormous download for a while. Based on the information available in May 2016 a 250 GB SSD seemed more than adequate.

Quote from Overloaded

Is FS2 loaded in a compressed manner so that disk compression is pointless? Will the FS2 update process perform well enough in a compressed disk for the upgrade to install perfectly?

I think I will get a bigger 1TB SSD but they fall in price by about 70% per year and you might not issue such an enormous download for a while. Based on the information available in May 2016 a 250 GB SSD seemed more than adequate.

Well, new simulator platform with photorealisric ground scenery and a wannabe SDK for third parties to develop sceneries and aircraft should ring a bell to everybody that it will much grow up when successful.

I installed my AeroflyFS 2 on a 2TB HHD, and regarding load times we're talking about 19s on NYC.
I dedicated a 1TB SSD to P3D and we're talking about minutes for load times...

Just my 2 cents...

Cheers
Antoine