Please, remove unnecessary liveries from DCS builds. Put them in separate packs

I do support the idea.

1) Have a one default livery as a placeholder for ANY other livery there can be, SP or MP.

This way you do not need to load more than just one as default and have others as additional packages.

2) Implement a system to download the official liveries like other modules. So player can go to module manager, open the module and click there "Install livery package 1, Package 2" etc. 

Those who want a extra liveries, custom liveries etc, gets to fill their storage as much they want by doing so.

This will not just save space on default installation, but it will as well minimize ED internet bandwidth use to transfer these liveries that isn't used.

Anyways the ED has said that MP users are clear minority among all DCS users, so why argument about the online players missing liveries?

+1. I'd love to have the option to remove unnecessary liveries, without having to re-download them every time. Like others say, just have a default one, that will be used if the other person is using a different livery and then allow us to download the ones we want via the module manager.

Do hardrives suddenly cost several times what they did a few weeks ago? *looks online* Nope, you can get SSDs for about $80 a TB, and disk drives they practically give away.

Seriously, of all the things for people to complain about... diskspace?

It would have been useful 5 years ago, it's when I made a big deal about it roughly, now I'm slowly getting to a new PC with 1TB NVMe SSD already here, tho I really need that for work more than games, but I let DCS be one of the exceptions

But I've obviosuly have to wait for RX6000 and Zen3 to become available at reasonable prices to finish the new beast up, right now I only use it for testing/maintenance and running linux, with a cheap second hand CPU/RAM just so it boots

So for a while I'm still going to be running DCS on the refreshed old PC on a 250GB Sata SSD and it'll fill it up with DCS, so not much space left for pretty much any modern game (tho I don't really in a hurry)

So it's kinda back-and-forth, it seems like it's not needed anymore, then well, you get into a situation when you'd need some extra space again, in this case it would be rather wasteful to spend money on old SATA SSDs so that's why I'm sort of artifically capped with the SDDs I have at home right now.

But it's still not actually a problem, what I want to point out now, is the future when we would like to push graphics up, and texture detail, liveries are the place where you want as high-quality as possible, HDR, WCG, that'll add to the space requirements and it may start catching up again with the expanding storage, so the ratio of how much liveries take space may actually stay similar or same which might make it an issue give or take, or again in this area where it's hard to say whether it's an issue or not.

I certainly don't want livery quality to be sacrificed, so from the get go I realized this should be figured out before so that all liveries could be enjoyed without the size being the limit, you just don't need to have them installed at at once, in theory.

I got another idea, perhaps I mentioned this in the past, but apart from the Multiplayer stuff I talked about, Mission Editor could support, for mission authors to select which alternative livery to use if the primary selected one is missing, it gets more complicated tho if the alternative is missing too, then you need to go down to second alternative, third alternative and so on, so kinda gets to the point you ask your self why just don't buy more space and get over with it, so I completely understand, but me being a wiseguy if I entertain the idea to put this aside for now, for an edge case when someone has enoguh to affort a beast of a computer but not a little bit more for more storage, further there could be a user prompt when the mission is loading, with a GUI to download it or skip it, or use and alternative suggested by the author of the mission, or use an already installed custom alternative livery decided by the user.

But there's always a simpler solution or something else I haven't think of that provides a similar effect.

6 hours ago, zhukov032186 said:

Do hardrives suddenly cost several times what they did a few weeks ago? *looks online* Nope, you can get SSDs for about $80 a TB, and disk drives they practically give away.

 

Seriously, of all the things for people to complain about... diskspace?

 

Feel free to buy me a TB SSD, then... they are really cheap and money isn't an issue, right? 

Now seriously, not everybody has $80 to spare for a TB SSD that wouldn't be needed in the first place if DCS didn't come with a host of useless liveries that are ridiculously heavy. 

If you don't like that argument, then consider the bandwidth problem. Many people around the world are charged per MB downloaded by their ISP, so these heavy and useless liveries that people are forced to download in order to play DCS are definitely bad news.

Also, consider the time (and server load) saved by removing non-essential liveries from DCS builds... but I guess that faster and cheaper downloads (for everybody, including ED) are a bad thing in your opinion.

Finally, consider the additional stress you're putting on your drive by having these useless and heavy liveries stored in the DCS folder... we're talking over 10GB here, which is a big deal for people who still rely on 120GB SSDs (many people like that still around, believe it or not). 

This isn't a brainless moaning thread, it simply points out a very real problem that many DCS users have, which defies common sense, and tries to provide solutions, in the hopes that ED devs will take note.

Now, you might be surprised to find people pointing this kind of stuff out, but I'm just as surprised at the ease with which you dismissed this obvious problem without even thinking it through. 

Just cleared like 35Gbs from a light cleaning of a bunch of useless liveries. They still haven't removed the Hawk as a core module, and for those of us that don't do WW2, please give us the option to opt out of downloading them.

+10000

I have only DCS and windows in my 500gb ssd and I am almost out of space for no reason. 

* Modules should come with only one default livery and players should be able to select from the marketplace

* Player shouldn't be forced to download all new modules. ED should provide a low poly 3d models instead. Again, players should be able to download high poly versions from the marketplace.

Otherwise this game's file will reach a few TB's. Now I see lots of new modules are coming. I am not interested almost none of them but they will steal space in my ssd. This can't go on like this.

Personally I want more liveries.

I've advocated for a livery manager before. The idea is that somewhere in the options you can choose what liveries are downloaded. Liveries that you don't have are replaced with a default, some place holder, or maybe we could download low resolution versions of liveries we don't plan to use ourselves.

With this systems devs won't have to try to find a balance between liveries per module and space usage. They could create 100 GB of liveries per module and every user would be able to change settings to fit on their drives.

Adding a bit more detail I guess we'd also ideally want settings for first module download (ie what happens when we go into module manager and get the popup alerting us that we have new modules to download). Settings would be as above, download all, download default only, or custom which would let users select liveries to avoid downloading and whether to download high or low resolution liveries for those that are approved for download. Once everything is installed, I suppose the liveries would appear on their own tab in the module manager so that players could go back and make changes later if necessary.

There is User Files for extra liveries,

but that page needs to get an overhaul, tons of fictional liveries make it very hard to find realistic ones. I'd love if that could get organized.

Just now, Furiz said:

There is User Files for extra liveries,

It's not a great solution though, even if it were improved. If you only play by yourself it's fine. But if you're a mission maker and share content then you don't know who is going to have what livery from the user files. A larger list of standard liveries that players can opt out from is much better. It means the liveries that you intend to be used in your mission are always available to everyone and if people would rather save space than see your liveries, the choice is up to them. With user file downloads, they might not even know that they're seeing the wrong liveries.

there can be ingame workshop or something like that. I hope the devs will think something useful

I think the solution would be a launcher like other games have, where you can change settings, install/remove modules, mod manager (repository support), livery manager, updater/repair etc. 

I have diskspace (for the time being), but I do understand people who doesn't. So I support the request! 

This is still a massive issue. Liveries should be an entirely optional thing.

75+% of my install size is Terrains,
With EVERY Aircraft Module installed, Includes retaining the VEAO_HAWK Art Assets

My Aircraft folder is ~50 GB, CoreMods is ~110 GB, Terrains being about ~317 GB For all of them.

Still an issue with no response. Please developers, fix this.

31 minutes ago, RazerVon said:

Still an issue with no response. Please developers, fix this.

So, because you and maybe a few others have an "issue" with disk space, ED should "fix" that for you?

Sure, the liveries file size for some modules might be getting out of hand a bit and could maybe use some new rules/restrictions from ED, but you make it sound like something is broken.. it's not.

I do support this idea. File size is not a problem for me personally, but i see that folks in other parts of the world might not be able to buy big SSDs. Download speed might also play a role for some people, especially in remote areas.

My very own issue with this is clutter. A lot of the extra liveries are pure fictional. As a realism guy, these are just annoying entries in the liveries dropdown i got to scroll past. Please give us one realistic default livery per plane, make the rest an optional download pack.

As a side note: ED recently made the Caucasus and Marianas terrains an optional download. You can also choose which modules to install, you do not simply get all your owned aircraft modules force downloaded. So they apparently got an eye on customizing your downloads.

8 hours ago, RazerVon said:

Still an issue with no response. Please developers, fix this.

It’s funny you expect ED to drop everything they’re doing to comply with your personal request

Hard drive and even SSD space has become very cheap so such requirements aren’t a big deal. I would rather they spend their resources on more important things. 

On 5/7/2023 at 10:16 AM, SharpeXB said:

It’s funny you expect ED to drop everything they’re doing to comply with your personal request

Hard drive and even SSD space has become very cheap so such requirements aren’t a big deal. I would rather they spend their resources on more important things. 

What would you like to see them do? Please start a thread in the Wishlist.  I honestly want to know. No one expects ed to drop everything but we do expect them to consider putting it on the to do list 

24 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

What would you like to see them do? Please start a thread in the Wishlist.  I honestly want to know. No one expects ed to drop everything but we do expect them to consider putting it on the to do list 

Sure. By all means, wish away! But expecting an immediate update to this game is rather naive. Especially for something that’s a non-issue. By the time they got around to this we will all have 200TB hard drives

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

Sure. By all means, wish away! But expecting an immediate update to this game is rather naive. Especially for something that’s a non-issue. By the time they got around to this we will all have 200TB hard drives

 

What do you think needs to be dealt with? Why not post about them or are you afraid we'll give you the same respect you give others?

12 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

What do you think needs to be dealt with? Why not post about them or are you afraid we'll give you the same respect you give others?

I have a few worthwhile suggestions here…

I run a 2TB 980Pro for DCS alone so I've not really got a dog in the fight, but... I do think it could be useful to have a checkbox in the special options for each aircraft that will tell DCS to DL all liveries or some core set of like 3-6 liveries for each individual aircraft.

THAT SAID...  Can someone explain to me in clear technical terms exactly how ED is supposed make the updater decide who has what options set BEFORE the game is running?  I mean...  I can think of a couple ways but I just love how folks are always like "JUST GIVE US A CHECKBOX EZ PZ HOW HARD CAN IT BE???".

14 minutes ago, M1Combat said:

I run a 2TB 980Pro for DCS alone so I've not really got a dog in the fight, but... I do think it could be useful to have a checkbox in the special options for each aircraft that will tell DCS to DL all liveries or some core set of like 3-6 liveries for each individual aircraft.

THAT SAID...  Can someone explain to me in clear technical terms exactly how ED is supposed make the updater decide who has what options set BEFORE the game is running?  I mean...  I can think of a couple ways but I just love how folks are always like "JUST GIVE US A CHECKBOX EZ PZ HOW HARD CAN IT BE???".

Selected options are stored on files (like graphics options stored on options.lua), updater just has to check that file a do what is set on it, thats exactly how actual module manager works. Making the default option not download adittional liveries would fix the problem before the first run

It would be best if the official skins were locked and unalterable like other files. Deleting then can be an exploit in MP since many planes have bright metal as their default.