300gb scenery and growing

[Foxwolfen]

Hi all.

I have been flying flightgear forever, and in my flights over the years I have covered a significant portion of the planet. To the point were my scenery folder is now 300gb in size. Over 100gb has been added over the past couple of months flying my favourite routs over Europe. I have to assume there is new data and its big. I am out of SSD space. As its been sitting in my Home folder on a 500GB NVMe along with my OS. I prefer NOT to buy a new SSD simply for it, and only have a spare 250gb SSD to throw at it. Is there a way to add a second location for scenery files and still allow Terasync to do its thing?

Or can I move some of the data to the spare SSD and symlink it back to the scenery folder? Anybody know how big this thing is gonna grow?

I use KDE Neon and the latest version of FG (2020.3.17)

I gotta say though, the new data is gorgeous. You can fly most of Europe using visual landmarks, rivers, lakes. It seems very accurate.

[david.megginson]

Soon I'll have the same available for part of North America. I'm building good VFR scenery for the St Lawrence Seaway area, including w100n40 to w060n40 and maybe w070n50 to w060n50 (to capture the northern part of the Gulf of St Lawrence. It's taken me longer than expected b/c I keep learning new tricks and going back to the start, but I feel like I'm at the 80:20 point now, so it's just a matter of building, testing, and uploading.

tl;dr Buy that new drive.

[wkitty42]

I have been flying flightgear forever, and in my flights over the years I have covered a significant portion of the planet. To the point were my scenery folder is now 300gb in size. Over 100gb has been added over the past couple of months flying my favourite routs over Europe. I have to assume there is new data and its big.

sounds like you may have OSM enabled... it does add a lot of additional items to the scenery...

I am out of SSD space. As its been sitting in my Home folder on a 500GB NVMe along with my OS. I prefer NOT to buy a new SSD simply for it, and only have a spare 250gb SSD to throw at it. Is there a way to add a second location for scenery files and still allow Terasync to do its thing?

you can tell FG that the entire terrasync directory is somewhere other than the default location on disk... i did this because on the default location on disk is in a normally hidden-by-the-OS directory and tools like TerraMaster, which i was using at the time, could not see the hidden directory... so i moved my terrasync directory to my myflightgear directory for easier access...

Or can I move some of the data to the spare SSD and symlink it back to the scenery folder?

you could try that but it may be a manual labor nightmare... easiest would be to move the entire terrasync directory to some (large(r)) device and tell FG where it is now located... i use the following line in a config file i tell FG to use but it will also work from the command line as well as from the launcher's Additional Options...

Code: Select all

--terrasync-dir=/home/myuser/myflightgear/TSScenery

be sure you have copied/moved all of your existing terrasync to the new location before starting FG after adding the above line to your startup process... i would probably dedicate at least a 500GB drive to terrasync... at least for now... if its size gets close to filling that, then i would certainly upgrade it to a 1TB... especially with WS3 on the horizon and the easier ability to use photo scenery, both of which could easily double or more the storage requirements of terrasync...

Anybody know how big this thing is gonna grow?

i do not any more... at one time i was maintaining a local copy of the entire terrasync but things beyond my control happened and prevent me from doing that any more... i'd bet, though, that one of the two or three scenery server maintainers could tell you/us what the entire structure is in numbers of directories, files, and the total size of it... those would be one of the t[h]orstens and merspieler, IIRC... my apologies for any butchering of the names... merspieler (again, sorry if i butcher the name) is the one that generates and maintains the OSM scenery stuff which is synced to the other scenery servers... i hope i got the names correct but i am still working on my 1st c0ffee...

on my old system, my terrasync was last updated Jan 2021 but it is only 91.2GiB (97933742497 bytes) in size with only 46485 directories holding only 1833939 files...
on my new system, my terrasync was last updated Sep 2022 and is only 267.5Gib (287257969066 bytes) in size with only 48611 directories holding only 2664430 files...
both of these systems have OSM enabled to provide the additional details to the scenery...

[Foxwolfen]

Soon I'll have the same available for part of North America. I'm building good VFR scenery for the St Lawrence Seaway area, including w100n40 to w060n40 and maybe w070n50 to w060n50 (to capture the northern part of the Gulf of St Lawrence. It's taken me longer than expected b/c I keep learning new tricks and going back to the start, but I feel like I'm at the 80:20 point now, so it's just a matter of building, testing, and uploading.

tl;dr Buy that new drive.

LOL - I have a feeling I will have to buy a new drive.

By the way, I am in Peterborough, having moved here from The Glebe in Ottawa about 4 years ago. I am planing on returning to Ottawa, hopefully this year. So... I am very much interested in seeing what you come up with. About half my flights in Flightgear start at CYOW. I have been pondering learning how to fix the scenery in Ottawa as its ... well... not great. Then Montreal, then Toronto (T.O. is rather disappointing). Let me know if I can help with testing or something.

[Foxwolfen]

on my old system, my terrasync was last updated Jan 2021 but it is only 91.2GiB (97933742497 bytes) in size with only 46485 directories holding only 1833939 files...
on my new system, my terrasync was last updated Sep 2022 and is only 267.5Gib (287257969066 bytes) in size with only 48611 directories holding only 2664430 files...
both of these systems have OSM enabled to provide the additional details to the scenery...

I had a feeling it was going to be a bit of a losing battle. OSM just keeps getting better and better, and thus bigger and bigger. I suspect that it may become exponential. The payoff is that some places are rivaling MSFS2020 in sheer beauty... the Bonn to Frankfurt, or Marseilles to Grenoble corridors are stunning. London City is... wow. San Fran/Oakland is incredible. Other places.. not so much. NYC is a disappointment, as is LA. Africa is... forgotten it seems, and Hong Kong is a mess, though dense. Tokyo is only half loading. OSM cuts off at the first line of skyscrapers and there is nothing but flat textures behind it. Not sure what is going on there. My only complaint with the scenery now is the building textures are cartoon like. Been wondering if there was a way to fix that.

[wlbragg]

Been wondering if there was a way to fix that.

Yeah, get involved and supply better textures.
Not trying to sound mean, just a fact. There are many areas more and better textures could really help the project. You could spend months on it.

[Foxwolfen]

Been wondering if there was a way to fix that.

Yeah, get involved and supply better textures.
Not trying to sound mean, just a fact. There are many areas more and better textures could really help the project. You could spend months on it.

OK. Where is the right place to learn? I have been through the docs and they are less than helpful, with so much information so out of date. Step one would be?

[MariuszXC]

You might want to contact Volador, he has been active in this area for quite a while.

[david.megginson]

Soon I'll have the same available for part of North America. I'm building good VFR scenery for the St Lawrence Seaway area, including w100n40 to w060n40 and maybe w070n50 to w060n50 (to capture the northern part of the Gulf of St Lawrence. It's taken me longer than expected b/c I keep learning new tricks and going back to the start, but I feel like I'm at the 80:20 point now, so it's just a matter of building, testing, and uploading.

tl;dr Buy that new drive.

LOL - I have a feeling I will have to buy a new drive.

By the way, I am in Peterborough, having moved here from The Glebe in Ottawa about 4 years ago. I am planing on returning to Ottawa, hopefully this year. So... I am very much interested in seeing what you come up with. About half my flights in Flightgear start at CYOW. I have been pondering learning how to fix the scenery in Ottawa as its ... well... not great. Then Montreal, then Toronto (T.O. is rather disappointing). Let me know if I can help with testing or something.

I learned to fly at CYOW in 2002 and kept my plane there for the first few years, before moving to CYRO. I had to sell the plane last November for health reasons.

The new scenery is out, but you might want to hold off a couple of days, because I'll be uploading a new version with some bug fixes.

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