However its very small in content and implies GSX is loading (not loaded). Now this is the interesting bit, if I simply wait after about 5-10 mins the icon in the sys tray will say "airport regeneration complete" or something like that. If I check the log file again its absolutely massive and appears to have scanned all my airport scenery paths amongst other things.
At this point GSX works!
That's concludes the issue. GSX ALWAYS WORKED, it just it took way longer than expected to create the airport cache.
OK great....kind of. The annoying thing is when I land at my destination and fire up GSX via CTRL-ALT-F12 I see the GSX menu but the spinning circle of doom with a "GSX is loading please wait" - it never does. The only way I can get GSX at destination is to kill the process, restart and wait 5 mins. Not ideal on vatsim after just vacating the runway!
Here, instead, is not normal you should wait again, since the airport cache should be remade each time, but only when something in the configuration of sceneries changes, like if areas are added/removed/disabled/enabled.
I have GSX installed on my C drive which is an SSD - which is only 120GB and I typically only have the OS installed here. My Sim is installed on a D drive (the old spinney fashion) - is this a factor?
Well, of course it is! By installing the sim in a mechanical drive, you have hampered *everything* in the sim that requires disk access. And since everything in the sim basically access the disk, your MSFS install is really crippled by using a mechanical drive.
Just to give some numbers, a good mechanical drive has a transfer rate ranging from 100-150 MB/Sec, a SATA SSD is around 500-600MB/sec, and NVME drives are at least 2000-MB/sec, with the latest ones reaching 5000MB/sec easily.
And it's not just the transfer rate, the seek time is also massively different, from about 9-12 msec on a mechanical drive to 0.08/0.12 msecs on SSDs, and this matters a lot when, instead of large files ( where transfer rate is important ), we are dealing with lots of smaller files.
I have about 250 airports freeware/pay - including the premium deluxe airports. Does the regeneration depend on amount of additional scenery in \Community folder??
Sure it does.
Either way I'll be honest I spent every day since I bought GSX about 2 weeks ago trying to trouble shoot and this is best way I can describe my issues but I'm no further on.
Your last report seems to indicate GSX never had any issues to begin with, it was just hampered by your slow hardware.
HOWEVER, this won't be an issue anymore very soon, because when we'll release the update to use the new Navdata API that came with SU10, and will allow us to get the airport data directly from Simconnnect, not only we'll be able to use Marketplace encrypted airports but,
the Airport Cache will be gone!, no need to have one, if the simulator can just tell us where the parking/taxiways/runways are.
It shouldn't take too long, we already have a version working in test right now, we are just working around the SDK limitations to find Jetways, since they are missing entirely from the new API, so we need workarounds to identify them.