Classic British Flight Sim

I fly DM's aircraft alot in FSX, but the load times were rediculously long, especially for the comet. If this happens to you, then the fix may lie in this thread over on SimOuthouse, it's worked perfectly for me:

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/s ... .-.hmmmmmm

Essentially, it's a case of decompressing the gauge cab file then recompressing. The CAB file for the comet only increased in size by 0.2mb, but the load time has been fractioned.

Now off to do the others !

Hope this is helpful,

Cheers

Neil

WOW!!!!!!

Just did it, extracted the gauge CAB files using 7zip and recompressed them using the FSX SDK cabdir.

Comet loading times into the spinner have gone from around 1min to 1s. It's immediately there now.

Good find

Thats a great find. For those of you on Windows 7 and who don't have the FSX or FS9 SDK installed you can run "makecab" from the windows command line (its part o the OS these days)

So what's happening??

Is it that FS.X has to convert it taking time and with this it compiles in a way the FS.X can just access straight off?

Just curious

Ben...Should I have the .cabs for my FS.X versions run through this as a matter of routine???

Yo Garry

This isn't just the preserve of FSX mate.. many folk using FS9 have loading time problems with cabs. Paul Edwards.. who did the Lancastrian and York panels for Manfred Jahn's models found the whole shebang ran faster if he didn't compress the gauges (make them into a cab). Not sure if it is/was system dependant or what

ATB
DaveB

Scratch what I said about Makecab in Win7

Anyway, it seems that when you re-cab them they aren't quite as compressed as they were before, albeit not by much. I wonder if in the past the cabs had been over compressed?

Anything is possible mate. Cabpack has the facility to change the compression ratio and I guess the higher you go, the more work is involved in uncompressing it again.

ATB
DaveB

Aircraft that took ages to appear have had their gauges cab file worked on and it's made a big difference on all of them so far.

Certainly something worth looking into

Thanks for the HU Neil

I've run through pretty much all of the cab files I have for our aircraft.

Really early panels such as the Viking / Valetta etc generate a smaller file (remember these were originally FS2002)
Later ones, including Fraser's more recent updates to the Vanguard etc dont seem to have changed in size.
Some in the middle some of DM's are slightly bigger.

Whatever is going on its a marked improvement.