Version: SU5
Frequency: Consistently
Severity: High
Context: When compiling for Marketplace
Bug description:
Building times are incredible long when compiling for marketplace, and there is a bug where it leaves your “package” folder in a stage where all textures become uncompressed, until you restart MSFS, then it realises it, and re-compress it again.. making the build process again slow.
Let me explain further:
- You are working on the project normally, hitting compile is fast, seconds, since you have it all already compiled.. so you hit compile, it takes 2 seconds, 5 seconds, etc. At this stage the project package size is 18Gb (yes is big, because it has 30 liveries, which is normal for popular aircraft products)
- You then get ready to submit to MP, you hit Export for MP, and you select a directory where you want the .ZIP. So far all is okey..
- Then the process to pack your project starts, this is when things drift and go wrong, instead of doing it all in the exporting directory (as I was expecting), it starts building to the project package folder 1st instead, and suddenly the project package becomes 77GBs!.
- Then the zip file for MP appears on the selected exported folder as zero bytes.. the building time now takes 20 minutes before the .zip is completed. This an incredible fast PC, with M1 Keys, 128GB of Ram, 5090 GPU and INTEL CORE i9-14900K. The final .zip was 7GB.
- The upload process to MP then takes about 1 hour for it to upload, and you have to keep watching the page, as you have to hit “save” when it finish uploading or it might go wrong.
- When the process is completed, your package folder size (inside the project) will remain now at 77GBs on further compiles, until you restart MSFS. Then, the compiler realises it and starts shrinking the textures back to 18GBs, this process now will take once again 20 minutes (MSFS remains unresponsive during this time).
- If you find a bug, or need to re-pack to MP, the whole process repeat, and you have to go thru the entire process again, 20 minutes to MP, 20 minutes to go back at your normal project package.
This made me waste yesterday easy 6 hours of back and forth as we were packing to MP and confirming certains things were working correctly in “draft” mode before requesting the MP team to release.
Surely, our package folder should be left alone at least for this process? in a way I can understand the compiler taking 20 minutes to prepare the MP Package, but having to then wait the same time to be able to continue working to fix bugs is too much, in the ideal world, we should hit pack for market place, things happens on the export folder selected and our project is left intact so we can continue to work as we were before the MP build export process, so if we find something to correct, we can do it immediately and then re-issue the MP build.
A further improvement would be for the compiler to keep track of two folders, the MP build, and the normal project folder, so the 1st time you build for MP would take the 20 minutes, next builds to MP should be a DELTA, and take seconds, my project folder left intact, fixing bugs should take also seconds.
You need to appreciate, submitting to MP is a long process, where you discover missing components for career mode, errors on ingestion, market place team requesting changes, etc, etc.
Upload times are a pain (I have 800mbps connection, uploading to drop box takes me 5-10 minutes) but uploading to marketplace takes 50 minutes!..
We might not be able to overcome the limitations of upload, but adding these compiles times to the entire process makes things much worse, we need some improvements here.
Repro steps:
As above, I think I explained it very well
Regards,
Raul M.