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>Hi Greg.>>There is a problem. Go to LFNC at December 25, 2003... with>the FS2002 seasons.bgl, and it causes a CTD on my system. I'm>attaching the FLT and WX.>>That suggests the seasonal transitions have a different timing>for FS2002, but the CTDs remain at the season changes in some>locations.>>( And once again, Joachim's terrain.cfg fix cures the problem>).>>DickDick,I'm just wondering if you used any particular methodology to come up with that example or whether it was a "random" example you came across? Although swapping out the seasons.bgl file works for all the other examples I've seen, this one remains a problem. What is strange is that on the other example you had, I tried a whole heap of winter days and fall / spring days either side. I couldn't find a single day it would bomb out on. I'm just wondering if there are two issues, not just one.

Hi Jon.What I did was to test if a later date would trigger the CTD, because teh seasonas.bgl was different. It took about 5 date changes to find it. I was pretty disappointed, but it seems to confirm the seasonal CTD bug.I think what we're looking for is a seasonal transition from fall to winter, or winter to spring. For some reason, Europe seems more prone than North America... I think due to the airport background textures used, and the surrounding landclass. In the Alps, there are cultivated fields at higher elevations and near steep slopes, and that seems to be a clue.I think they are the same seasonal CTDs, as the terrain.cfg fix is the cure for these.Dick

Ok,I'd say you guys have found circumstances to consistently reproduce the crash. The question now is what is crashing - i.e. which part of FS or more to the point which part of the hardware is being trampled on?I am still intrigued as to why some machines will crash with the Terrain setting to LOW whilst others will successfully load the flight.Looking on in anticipation.--qnh

>Ok,>>I'd say you guys have found circumstances to consistently>reproduce the crash. The question now is what is crashing ->i.e. which part of FS or more to the point which part of the>hardware is being trampled on?>>I am still intrigued as to why some machines will crash with>the Terrain setting to LOW whilst others will successfully>load the flight.>>Looking on in anticipation.>>--qnhWhen you say low do you mean the terrain texture size slider? I know Chris mentioned that, but it didn't seem to make a difference to me. One thing I have definitely noticed with every test so far is that on my machine it makes zero difference what settings I have in FS2004. I can pick any combination of slider settings and check boxes I like, but doing that makes no difference in being able to reproduce the CtD or not.

Terrific thread (with one exception). My hat's off to all you guys for spending so much time on this. Too bad you're not on microsoft's payroll.Now I'm glad I didn't toss my FS2002 disks.

I am glad it is helping you. The more I think about it, the less I think it is one single type of event that triggers a CtD. I only mentioned to Greg again last night that maybe he should fly as often as he can while it's still northern hemisphere winter and see how many CtDs he gets. The sim may not inherently be CtD free, but it's still possible that using the other seasons.bgl will reduce the occurances, perhaps significantly. As I say, apart from Dick's latest example :-( I've never had one except when using the seasons file that shipped with FS2004. What interests me is that on my machine, Dick's latest example makes it CtD no matter which seasons.bgl file I use. But with the old FS2002 seasons file, I can't get any other example to fall over no matter what date I try. That's what is making me think there is more than one trigger.While Dick's example is tough nut to crack withour resorting to that airport texture fix, we still seem to at least be having success with the other reported CtDs.I guess what would be "helpful" are reports of other CtD scenarios (ie attach the flight to a post here) when using the FS2002 seasons file. Then it's easy to see if the CtD is an isolated event or can be replicated on all setups.

On one machine I can create ENAN CTD with the terrain texture size slider set to high. Lower it to medium and no CTD. On another, less powerful machine, I get the CTD regardless of the terrain texture size slider setting.I still think this problem has multiple causes.--qnh

Someone pointed out that the first TERRAIN.CFG edit suggested will still CTD in some cases. If you see this, try also setting MaskClassMap=3 to MaskClassMap=0 in the file.

Thanks for sticking with it, Jon, even it wasn't happenening to you. I think one thing that's making it hard to track down is that various combinations of mesh, landclass, and seasons.bgl will make the same bug show up in different places, making it look like there are multiple bugs. That's why it's important to find a case with a clean install of FS. Once we surround that scenario and force it to surrender we can apply the workaround to other cases and see how it holds up. That's why I'm curious to see if the TERRAIN.CFG edits (which have prevented CTDs in the clean install case) hold up when used with add-ons. Of course, if people see CTDs it doesn't mean the workaround doesn't work--there really could be bad data in the add-on--but at least it's a start.(And for those of the "we shouldn't have to do this if M$FT had done their jobs" ilk I say I like mysteries and like playing detective sometimes!)