Saving HD space by having a common sound pack folder

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
Again, this may be old news to most of you...but for those who are new to simming, I'd though I would share this little tip.

I have a dedicated folder on C drive into which all of my sound packs go. I simply named it MOTOR. Inside the MOTOR folder, I have an ever growing collection of sound packs, representing various planes, engines, and various combinations (single, twin, triple, quad) of engines. Each individual sound pack with in the MOTOR folder has its own name to tell me what plane or motor that sound pack is for. Examples:

F4F, Beaufighter, B-17, AmphibTwin4s, TwinR-985, EarlyJet, A-90, R-2800

Inside the individual plane sound folders, I alias the sound to the needed sound pack with in the MOTOR folder...like this:

[FLTSIM]
ALIAS=C:\MOTOR\F4F

or

[FLTSIM]
ALIAS=C:\MOTOR\SingleJet

I have several jet aircraft that are single engined...and using this method, instead of having a dozen copies of the same sound pack on my HD, I have one copy that I share amongst all those planes.

Using this approach, I am able to have a HUGE library of sound packs without eating up too much of my HD space. I currently have 240 individual sound packs inside my MOTOR folder, and that number grows each day.

OBIO
 
Motor Head.........:icon_lol:


I got so much HDD space I will never fill it all up I think.....LOL

I like the idea though...:applause:
 
great tip.

You can do the same for repaints and gauges as well.

For 99% of plane variations (ski, tundra, with bombs, etc), their texture folders are actually the same. By aliasing your paint, all the variations can share repaints; saving you a ton of HD space. I do this for many of my planes, such as the RealAir scout packages, the Maule, the FSD Porter, etc.

Here's an example of the Realair regular wheel version using a texture from the amph. version:

texture=..\..\..\RealAir Scout Amphibian\texture.n6459

Gauges for the same way (i do this because i don't keep any 3rd party guages in the gauge folder). When the gauges are not inside the gauge folder, you have to copy them into every panel folder (such as panel.vc, panel.vcw, etc.) Instead, you can just direct the path of the guage to any folder. *note* this is not the same as aliasing the panel. When you alias the panel, the *exact* panel is cloned. You only use this method when the panel.cfg is different for each plane, but uses same gauges.

here's an example of the Bear Studio Mig-15 aliasing a guage from the BIS version to use in the UTI version.

gauge00=..\aircraft\MiG_15Bis\Panel\Rus1950!UTI_Main, 0,0,1024,768

by doing the above, sometimes you don't even need any texture or panel folders inside the aircraft folder. For my RealAir scout for example, i only have the model folder, aircraft.cfg and the air file.

-feng
 
Yep...my MOTOR sound pack is shared between FS2004 and CFS2. Not a single one of my aircraft have sounds in their folders...well, helicopters and a few odd balls have their sounds in their own sound folder, but 98% of my aircraft are aliased to a sound pack contained within the MOTOR folder.

OBIO
 
I too have been using dedicated folders one for soundsets and one for panels for aliasing purposes. Found after a while that the name (acronym) alone wouldn't make me remember what that particular soundset for example could be used for so I started book keeping by way of listing all sets in a Word.doc with explanations for my muddled head. I keep one Word.doc in each folder. Meantime the lists in the .docs have become so long and instead of keeping an alphabetical order - (have become too lazy) - I give the old Ctrl+F a good workout when I'm not sure whether I already have this panel or soundset or where they are :running:
 
I knew that sounds and panels could be aliased, but didn't know textures and individual gauges could be. Thanks for those tips.
 
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