Any way to improve load times by unzipping files?

[goot]

Is it possible to improve load times by unzipping any of the compressed files?

i notice that a lot of the zip files have common files so if you try unzip, it asks to overwrite the same file

[Gunn]

Originally posted by goot:

Is it possible to improve load times by unzipping any of the compressed files?

i notice that a lot of the zip files have common files so if you try unzip, it asks to overwrite the same file

That's because you're not supposed to unzip the files. They're not "common" files, they're the same file split up. It's called archiving. But no you should not be trying to unzip those files.

FWIW: There are ways to unzip and gain access to those files, but you'll gain nothing and just make your DCS install even larger, probably MUCH larger. They're compressed for a reason.

[Troll Norris]

You can speed up loading times by excluding DCS folders from anitivirus.
Also you can speed up MP loading by pre-loading terrain in mission editor.

[Insônia]

Only when your harddrive is way faster than an old CPU. then unpacked small files is faster than packed.

If you feel DCS multithread is bit of slow, might be a bug already discussed in the forum. workaround is that you can try disable few cores in taskmgr

In general.
Packing small files into larger ones improves loading speed. letting Windows to seek files on drivers costs significant overhead. Loading a packed asset into memory first, then seeking within memory, has significantly less overhead than seeking each small file on disk then loading into memory.

4k/8K DDS texture is humongous, can have about 50%~80% compression ratio even with basic zlib. compressed texture can still load fast on modern CPU and take less space.

that;s why almost every game use packed asset instead of small files

The game was designed to let players override assets with small files, making modding easier. However, steam updates/patches do not always delete old files while updating. If you receive a file already exists warning and you have never worked with textures before. Those could be leftover old files, the newer asset is packed.

[goot]

Originally posted by Troll Norris:

You can speed up loading times by excluding DCS folders from anitivirus.
Also you can speed up MP loading by pre-loading terrain in mission editor.

how to pre-load terrain?

[Troll Norris]

Originally posted by goot:

Originally posted by Troll Norris:

You can speed up loading times by excluding DCS folders from anitivirus.
Also you can speed up MP loading by pre-loading terrain in mission editor.

how to pre-load terrain?

Open mission editor, choose map, select"fly"
Exit mission, join MP session with the same terrain