What's the size of your plugins folder?

[RP912 1]

Probably 10 mbs since I just started using mods. By next week it will be a gigabyte, I'll guarantee it.

[CahosRahneVeloza 385]

If you have the NAM that easily adds 800+ MBs to your total.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Depends on what part of the NAM you select.  I omit RHW, GLR, and RRW and get something quite small.  My current size has grown a little to 978.9 MB with one uncompressed lot.

[Cheddar 119]

My plugins folder recently passed the 4 GB milestone after a big downloading spree, which is a big no-no in terms of game performance. Currently in the process of cleaning it out to scale down to the 3.75 GB marker. 

[CahosRahneVeloza 385]

Currently at 3.5GB with 13,0000 files altogether.

[jmsepe 2,039]

Depends on what part of the NAM you select.  I omit RHW, GLR, and RRW and get something quite small.  My current size has grown a little to 978.9 MB with one uncompressed lot.

 

I wonder how you keep your plugins folder so small. Do you not update your plugins in a habitual basis?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I add an occasional new lot when it seems worth having.  Yesterday, I added one but didn't convert it to a .dat as yet.  This saves a small amount of space and changes the loading time a little.  Generally speaking, if there is a growable and a ploppable, I only keep the growable.

[Sabretooth78 808]

...Generally speaking, if there is a growable and a ploppable, I only keep the growable.

Well me too, and I still ended up being over 4 GB.  More than half of what I have that isn't NAM and other miscellaneous dependencies is growable content.

 

I don't find it's any bit of my business as mayor to be messing around with R&C.  I do have a few large C ploppables that I may reserve the right to use if I'm going for some kind of effect (malls and such) but in general I stay hands off.  On the other hand, I sometimes needs some help so I'm a little more liberal at placing fillers, etc., or again if I'm going after a look that is going to be exceedingly difficult to achieve just through natural growth alone (especially some of the excellent oversize warehouse & mill buildings available on the LEX).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

It seems that large custom collections are a concomitant of CJ builders.  Did you clean off all the non-plugin files?  My little GB is without any documentation, pictures or other junque.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Yes.  Generally once I download something I'll copy the full download into a backup folder and then strip everything unnecessary or internally conflicting (documentation, unwanted lots/models/dats etc.) before loading the items into DAMN and ultimately my plugins folder.  Datpacking generally catches the few that slip through (and when one does, I'll root it out once Datpacker tells me one was found).  One thing about Macs is they tend to stick a hidden .DS_Store file in every directory and it catches all of those.  (They're roughly analogous to the thumbs.db and desktop.ini you get in Windows.)

 

As I've said before, tastes change and sometimes I go to plop something and find I don't quite like it and then I'll get rid of it.  Either that or I don't like some property of it which causes an impromptu session of Reader editing.  Ideally I would like to cull it down to about 3.5 GB but we'll see.  Losing that extra half gig isn't going to markedly increase performance, not that that would be my motivation anyway - as tight and lean as possible for a given volume is more of the goal.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

True.  Performance depends on how often you change the POV.  I do it ad lib, so I get a lot of disk action during play as images get renewed from the Plugins files.  The more custom content you have the more an SSD becomes justified.

[Titanicbuff 1,262]

3.10 GB of plug in on a brand new Asus Windows 8 Laptop. Running fast.

[Sabretooth78 808]

I actually almost bought myself an SSD a few weeks ago when it looked like it was only $80.  Then I noticed it was on the wrong place on the shelf and that it was actually $130.  One of these nights I'm going to try it on my wife's machine with the SSD and see what kind of difference it gives.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Just putting your plugins on an SSD will make a huge difference because the access time is without any disk latency or seek time.  I would avoid putting my regions folder there.  Just use a short-cut in your regular C: structure for the Plugins folder on the SSD.  Be sure the name of the shortcut is Plugins.

 

MS has made shortcuts (links) more complicated than they need to be, but they do work.

[Shortsonfire 67]

I'm at 3.55GB with 10,167 files.  I originally installed SC4 for my new computer on my boot SSD by accident and the game loaded faster than I could look at my laptop and back.  Now that its installed on the other drive it only takes about a minute or so to load a city.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Try moving only your Plugins to the SSD.  All you have to do is copy the Plugins folder to the SSD, create a shortcut there (on the SSD) then move the shortcut back into the SimCity 4 folder with the exact name Plugins (I don't think the link extension counts).

[Haljackey 17,398]

Mine

 

 

I'd like to one day get it to down to 4 or 3.5GB.

[Bastet69008 1,102]

26 470 files for a total of 11.8 GB... No wonder it takes more than 10 mins for my Lot Editor to open!

[Sabretooth78 808]

So why is it that you wouldn't want your regions on the SSD as well?

 

For a MacBook Pro as I am running, it's possible for me to swap a second hdd into my optical drive bay (considering I can't even remember when I last used it!) and I would be able to run two drives.  Or just replace my primary hdd outright and recoup some of the cost of the new drive by selling the old on ebay.  The ones I was browsing at Worst Buy were actually hybrid SSD drives.

 

I just tried it on my wife's MacBook Air with the SSD - copied the whole skin as well as the Documents/SimCity 4 folder over.  Honestly, I have to say I'm not really impressed - the initial game loading time seemed about the same.  While the initial city load did seem a few minutes faster (maybe 50%), the subsequent city load times seemed about the same (although they tend to vary a bit on my machine for whatever reason - current memory load perhaps).  In-game seemed about the same, maybe even a bit slower (more like how it ran on my machine prior to my recent Wine engine upgrade).  Granted, my machine specs better so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison (pun not intended) but I was expecting a bit more noticeable improvement at least with the loading time.  Maybe there's some limiting function in Wine that isn't allow the full potential to be realized?  Either way I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

 

Of course there are the other benefits outside of running SC4, such as a computer that boots virtually instantly - it's just a cost-benefit question.  Is it worth a few minutes a day?  At this point probably not.  If my hard drive fails tomorrow, though, case closed!

[piercing_arrow 76]

330 Mb of Plugins. It takes around 1 minute to open SimCity, because the game will freeze once it opens and then runs through normally. 

[Compdude787 916]

If you have the NAM that easily adds 800+ MBs to your total.

Nah, it doesn't take up that much space. For me, the NAM only takes up half a GB, and I have pretty much everything installed.

 

The RHW is the largest part of the NAM--it takes up close to 125 MB. If I didn't install that, my plugins folder would be closer to 1.1 GB (currently it's 1.37 GB).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

So why is it that you wouldn't want your regions on the SSD as well?

 

<snip>

Regions are more often written and go multi-extent than plugins.  They are better on a device where you can defrag them which cannot be done on an SSD.  People will say that fragmentation on an SSD doesn't matter, but it is a real matter of wasted space for the links, and general checker boarding of the space.  You get an SSD for speed, so there is no point in impairing it deliberately when there is an alternative.  This whole thing comes down to system awareness.

[nygiants2007 0]

Today I just learned my folder is 2.18 GB.

 

Holy cow....

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

Reached 7GB some days ago, but I don't play so much, so I save them in a pendrive after I exit the game.

[CapTon 592]

I'm currently at 2.35 GB .

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Today I just learned my folder is 2.18 GB.

 

Holy cow....

Are they cleaned of documentation and other junque?  You should only have plugin stuff in there, and preferably compressed into .dat files.  I think I have a few raw BATs in mine, but I have to do a cleanup soon as I am getting close to 1GB.

[nygiants2007 0]

 

Today I just learned my folder is 2.18 GB.

 

Holy cow....

Are they cleaned of documentation and other junque?  You should only have plugin stuff in there, and preferably compressed into .dat files.  I think I have a few raw BATs in mine, but I have to do a cleanup soon as I am getting close to 1GB.

 

Thanks for the tip. Turns out i had a ton of installers hogging up space in my plugins folder(due to incorrect installation on my part). After cleaning the readme files and the installers I now have 1.87 gigabytes(still a lot).

 

Reached 7GB some days ago, but I don't play so much, so I save them in a pendrive after I exit the game.

That...is...ridiculous.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

If you have the full NAM, you can't avoid being somewhere between 1 and 2 GB.  I don't load much of the NAM, only the parts I use.

[Sleeping Politician 32]

I think my plugin folder is around 2 gb.

 

It takes almost 20 minutes for the game to boot becuase my PC is a piece of (hfgjlhzd), with only 2 GB of ram and 60 GB HD at 5400 rpms. Playing the game is like a sloth in a marathon.

 

I am getting a new laptop soon when I go back to the US for college, so maybe the game will work better then.

[jmsepe 2,039]

Rechecking my plugin folder for this month:
 
JULY Stats:
 
Size: 4.03 GB (4,334,852,855 bytes) [size on disk: 4.06 GB (4,364,791,808 bytes)] 
13,684 Files, 2,543 Folders
 
JUNE Stats:
 
Size: 3.79 GB (4,074,044,346 bytes) [size on disk: 3.81 GB (4,100,706,304 bytes)] 
12,250 Files, 2,394 Folders
 
Hmm. I should probably try that SSD, is it like an external hardrive? Things have been getting really slow lately.