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Any Effects File experts out there?

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Reggie, Holger, Allen or anyone else please help me if possible. I would copy the entire thread but you can read it via the link below. Please see this link and let me know if you can assist in any way. I am at a complete loss on this one. It looks like FS is looking for some invalid .fx files and then some non-existant.fx files and I believe they are leading to Out of Memory errors after long haul flights but do not know how to troubleshoot. I can not find a single reference in ANY .cfg nor can FSM find ANY effects errors yet FS is looking for something it can not find... I really have no clue where else to look. Do I create rogue .fx files? Thank you so much in advance,-Paulhttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...sg_id=2390&pagePrimary RigLiquid CooledAMD FX-57 @ 3 gigsAsus A8NSLI-Premium2 gigs Corsair XMS PC3500LL 2 3 2 6 1TXFX 7900 GTX 690/1750XFX 7800 GTX 515/135024 inch Widescreen LCDDual 19 inch LCD'sRaid-0+1PCPower and Cooling 1khttp://home.comcast.net/~psolk/3monitorsa.htmlBackup RigAMD 4000 San Diego @ 2.72 Gigs Kingston Corsair XMS CL2XFX 7800 GTX 515/1350 Raid-0psolk.jpg


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-Paul Solk

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Guest baksteen33

Hi Paul, if you only log the errors and uncheck FileMon's success box, the logs should become much shorter and you can maybe reduce it to an uploadable size? Perhaps also pause the FileMon scan before doing anything in Windows again? Switching from FS to Windows triggers a lot of action as you probably noticed. Just some ideas... I wonder what bliss.bmp looks like! :-) Kind regards Jaap PS, one cause for fx-calls are some AI planes btw.

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Hi Jaap,Thanks so much for the feedback, I appreciate anything I can get at this point.Regarding Success only, Good idea, I had tried that but then I didn't realize that sometimes something will fail once but be successful the next try so I had a lot of false failures if that made sense. As for switching, you are definitely right on that one, i am so impatient I was alt-tab out of FS to see what FileMon was reporting as I was flying :) As for AI, that is what I thought for the Effects files but Flightsim Manager says no missing effects and a cursory search of the FS directory finds no instances of EFFECTS.FX within any files...I have no idea where the calls are coming from?Thank you so much again Jaap,-Paul


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-Paul Solk

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Guest baksteen33

Welcome, Paul. AFAIK, those strings (or whatever they're called) are generated 'automatically'. So many of the unsuccesful calls mean absolutely nothing (= filename insignificant). It's an individual call amongst similar groups which might provide an indication. As you probably know, FSM can also generate 'false positives'. What's missing in the log you posted - obviously only as far as I would dare to judge - is the event which triggers the search for the effects.cab. FS'whatever' does xxx in c:xxx with a particular name and if it doesn't find it, it goes into loops (resulting in the effects.cab searches you're seeing). AIM, sometimes it's an AI-AC effects file. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap Edit, please excuse me if I wasn't clear, Paul. I meant to NOT log the successes, only the errors. As you probably saw, incl successes, the log quickly grows to a couple of hundred thousand lines. Ugly boring literature! Litterature? :-) :-)

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Thanks Again Jaap, I really appreciate the assistance. I am running out to work now but I guess what I need to figure out is WHAT is making those EFFECTS calls. I tried again last night on a short flight around NYC and sure enough there were a ton of those INVALID NAME for the effects calls like the top section of my excerpt...How do we get to root cause?Thank you so much again,-Paul


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-Paul Solk

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Guest aarskringspier

PaulIm playing with this too if you have msn or yahoo send me a PM and maybe we can bang heads together this evening.

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Hi Jaap,Thanks again for the help. I already PM'd Randy so hopefully we can get this resolved.Here is the dilemma. We only have a certain amount of visibility into the inner workings of FS. For example, I can do a directory search of all file contents for EFFECTS.FX however that only returns results from text based files. It can not search .mdl files, .dll calls, .exe's so I have no clue at all WHAT is actually calling that file.Now as a workaround is that I copied the fx_strobe.fx file from my /effects directory, renamed it EFFECT.FX and copied it to the FS root which is where Filemon was displaying the pointer. I have no way of knowing if this will solve my OOM errors because I do not have time to do a long haul right now but it did result in FS doing three searches for EFFECTS.FX and all three returned success. It never looked again and I did not have a single relevant Not_Found error again. That is definitely a good sign...Thanks again and Randy, I am still up :)-P FilesMicrosoft GamesFlight Simulator 9EFFECTS.FX SUCCESS Attributes: A 8:57:25 PM FS9.EXE:1988 FASTIO_QUERY_STANDARD_INFO C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFlight Simulator 9EFFECTS.FX SUCCESS Length: 1372 8:57:25 PM FS9.EXE:1988 IRP_MJ_READ C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFlight Simulator 9EFFECTS.FX SUCCESS Offset: 0 Length: 4096 8:57:25 PM FS9.EXE:1988 IRP_MJ_CLEANUP C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFlight Simulator 9EFFECTS.FX SUCCESS


Have a Wonderful Day

-Paul Solk

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Guest baksteen33

Although I should be hitting the sack... :-) I'm a bit weary that's the way to go, Paul. Creating random files may eliminate the call quicker, but not be an answer to the cause. Those 'IRP_MJ_Cleanup' messages seem to be related to dlls. As you probably know hardware and software use/have such files. At this point it might be practical if you listed a couple of software and hardware details? Just a wild guess, are you using an older addon which was ported to FS9?Good luck and kind regards Jaap

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Hi Jaap,You can see the system specs below. As for add-ons, not that I know of. I have a pretty trimmed down version of FS using a few sceneries, UTUSA and then my PMDG, LVL-D and PSS birds with FS2Crew. That is about it...I would agree that my "workaround" is not the cure by any means but I have no idea how to get to root cause if it is a dll call.Thanks again Jaap,-PaulPrimary RigLiquid CooledAMD FX-57 @ 3.1 gigsAsus A8NSLI-Premium2 gigs Corsair XMS PC3500LL 2 3 2 6 1TXFX 7900 GTX 690/1750XFX 7800 GTX 515/135024 inch Widescreen LCDDual 19 inch LCD'sRaid-0+1PCPower and Cooling 1khttp://home.comcast.net/~psolk/3monitorsa.htmlBackup RigAMD 4000 San Diego @ 2.72 Gigs Kingston Corsair XMS CL2XFX 7800 GTX 515/1350 Raid-0psolk.jpg


Have a Wonderful Day

-Paul Solk

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Guest baksteen33

Hi Paul, have you had a look at ProcessExplorer from the same company (SysInternals)? Powerful if you like to dig deeper. ;-) Another idea might be, to remove the file you created and then disable all the sceneries. If the message comes again, you can likely exclude sceneries. HST, does this happen with a particular AC or all of them? Have you tried variations? Good luck and kind regards Jaap

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hi Jaap,Thank you so much for offering your assistance and feedback, I really do appreciate it. Always nice to have others to bounce things off of.I have not tried ProcessExplorer but maybe that is the next step. Will that tell me what dll's or bgl's are making a particular call?I have tried with all-add on a/c and the default 172 and all produced the same results.Last step would be to rename fs to fs.bak, re-install and then start adding add-ons one at a time until the error replicated itself. I like your idea of removing all add-on scenery as well. I have a few things to try to determine root cause. but I also have questions I just do not know the answer to like can a .mdl call an effect or is it only in the config? What else besides text based config files call for the effects files. Is it BGL's, .mdl's, dll's, I just don't know...Thanks again. Incidentally, I am going to try a long haul with my dummy EFFECTS.FX file to see if I still get the OOM error. Will be interesting to see despite not "solving" the issue.Thanks again, Cheers,-PaulPrimary RigLiquid CooledAMD FX-57 @ 3 gigsAsus A8NSLI-Premium2 gigs Corsair XMS PC3500LL 2 3 2 6 1TXFX 7900 GTX 690/1750XFX 7800 GTX 515/135024 inch Widescreen LCDDual 19 inch LCD'sRaid-0+1PCPower and Cooling 1khttp://home.comcast.net/~psolk/3monitorsa.htmlBackup RigAMD 4000 San Diego @ 2.72 Gigs Kingston Corsair XMS CL2XFX 7800 GTX 515/1350 Raid-0psolk.jpg


Have a Wonderful Day

-Paul Solk

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Have you thought about doing a find on all .cfg files containing the text "effects.fx"? You may have an AI aircraft calling this file. You could also search bgl files if you don't find anything in a .cfg file, although you may want to try both upper and lower case in either instance. If I'd guess I'd say there's an AI aircraft.cfg that has a typo in it, and that's why you're getting calls to the dummy file.-John

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Hi John,Yep, i did a cursory directory search all cases for EFFECTS.FX in the entire fs directory. Not a single hit hence my questions about .mdl files or .bgl files calling an effect. How would you search a .bgl file beyond a text based search for the string like I have already done? I would not think a .bgl has readable text but I could be wrong...-PaulPrimary RigLiquid CooledAMD FX-57 @ 3 gigsAsus A8NSLI-Premium2 gigs Corsair XMS PC3500LL 2 3 2 6 1TXFX 7900 GTX 690/1750XFX 7800 GTX 515/135024 inch Widescreen LCDDual 19 inch LCD'sRaid-0+1PCPower and Cooling 1khttp://home.comcast.net/~psolk/3monitorsa.htmlBackup RigAMD 4000 San Diego @ 2.72 Gigs Kingston Corsair XMS CL2XFX 7800 GTX 515/1350 Raid-0psolk.jpg


Have a Wonderful Day

-Paul Solk

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I think if it doesnt do anything good or bad, it will in any case loose some i/o burden by not looking for it anymore.Tried it too, saw no difference.. but keep it now.Are there more of these invallid files?JohanA LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, AND A LITTLE MORE ACTION PLEASE

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