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kiwiflyer45

UK Scenery problem

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A week or so ago I found that every time I selected an airport in the UK my system would crash. I tried disabling various sceneries, starting with the ones I had most recently installed and it did nothing. Then I tried disabling AI in case it was a particular traffic file - nothing. I checked for duplicate AFCADS - nothing. Finally I uninstalled every UK addon scenery I had, which is quite a few and then re-installed them one by one. I had no problem with the first scenery, and then the next, until finally I had reinstalled them all. Problem gone! But not for long - now I'm back with the same issue. I have a number of UK2000 sceneries that I've never had any problems with before, plus Aerosoft's Megascenery Heathrow 2008 which I've never had any problems with. I did buy an older UK2000 scenery set recently when it was on sale at JustFlight but it worked fine. And when I disabled it there was no change and when I reinstalled it there was no problem. Until a few days later! I've run out of ideas. Can anyone offer some suggestions?ThanksIanps. Where is Sherlock Holmes when you really need him? tongue.png

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Have you tried a defrag? Al


Alan Bradbury

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I have no real answer except to comment that I always found England a problem (the FS version of it - which I love flying). My old system was borderline for FS9 and I regularly got crashes in the southern part, and also just over the channel, but few from the Midlands up. Is your problem by any chance worse in that area? I have not had the issue on my newer system, touch wood (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3 GHz, 2.75 Gb RAM, WinXP, with Nhancer for some settings we usually set within FS, and that rather than the latest Nvidia driver. I have no idea if that helps!)I am developing a view that southern England wants more system resources than we'd expect for some reason. This may be an FS9 secret nobody talks about.

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I wonder if the order of installation was important. In other words, maybe one scenery installed a texture which another had overwrote? Also, it never hurts to let FS9 rebuild your "Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Microsoft\FS9" folder (at least I haven't found one yet). I recently rolled back to an earlier version of NVidia driver and found that there were two entries for my GTX 560 TI in the FS9.cfg file.So I saved a copy of the FS9.cfg file (so I could retrieve my custom settings from it later) and then deleted the folder. When I restarted FS9 it simply rebuilt the folder and most importantly, created a clean copy of the FS9.cfg file. All I had to do was add my custom settings to it and I was ready to fly. I use TOGGLE_AIRCRAFT_EXIT=188,8 a bunch and didn't want to loose it...Hope that helps!Mark

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Have you tried a defrag? Al
Hi Al. Yes, I have Ultimate Degrag and run it about once a week and have definitely degragged since the problem started. But I'll try again tonight and see if it helps. ThanksIan

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I have no real answer except to comment that I always found England a problem (the FS version of it - which I love flying). My old system was borderline for FS9 and I regularly got crashes in the southern part, and also just over the channel, but few from the Midlands up. Is your problem by any chance worse in that area? I have not had the issue on my newer system, touch wood (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3 GHz, 2.75 Gb RAM, WinXP, with Nhancer for some settings we usually set within FS, and that rather than the latest Nvidia driver. I have no idea if that helps!)I am developing a view that southern England wants more system resources than we'd expect for some reason. This may be an FS9 secret nobody talks about.
I certainly agree that England is resource hungry. Probably because of the density of airports - so many left over from WWII that are still active GA airports as well as RAF and USAF and all in a small area. But it was all working fine until recently, though often there would be some texture stuttering as so many were being loaded. If nobody comes up with a "silver bullet" that identifies a specific problem then what I will probably try is removing all the UK addons that I have and just reinstalling the really good ones and see if that relieves the problem. My system isn't top of the line by any means, but it was optimized to run FS9 when I bought it a year ago and should be able to handle things without any problem. Some other regions like Germany are almost as dense and there's no problem there. Thanks for your input - I appreciate the helpIan
I wonder if the order of installation was important. In other words, maybe one scenery installed a texture which another had overwrote? Also, it never hurts to let FS9 rebuild your "Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Microsoft\FS9" folder (at least I haven't found one yet). I recently rolled back to an earlier version of NVidia driver and found that there were two entries for my GTX 560 TI in the FS9.cfg file. So I saved a copy of the FS9.cfg file (so I could retrieve my custom settings from it later) and then deleted the folder. When I restarted FS9 it simply rebuilt the folder and most importantly, created a clean copy of the FS9.cfg file. All I had to do was add my custom settings to it and I was ready to fly. I use TOGGLE_AIRCRAFT_EXIT=188,8 a bunch and didn't want to loose it...Hope that helps! Mark
I'll give the fresh fs9.cfg trick a try Mark but I don't think that's the issue as I did it not too long ago and since I think the only things I changed was the joystick settings and the vertex level. But it's worth a try. I have tried changing the scener.cfg file to see if different priorities would help but it didn't seem to do anything. It's all a bit weird - I've been using FS9 for nine years and haven't seen anything quite like this before. I'm certain there's a conflict somewhere but all the usual solutions haven't worked so far Thanks for the inputIan

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Another slim possibility is that there is a bad sector on your HD; unlikely to be the cause, but not impossible. Al


Alan Bradbury

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I'm sure this isn't relevant but I'll mention it as someone else might have some experience of this. One other thing that's been happening lately is that every now and then a scenery that I have installed suddenly disappears from the scenery.cfg file for no apparent reason. For example, earlier today I went to PHKO Kona in Hawaii where I have the wonderful FSDT Hawaii 2 scenery installed. All that came up was default scenery. I checked my scenery.cfg file and both entries for Hawaii 2 had vanished. Put them back in the file and they were back again. Probably just a coincidence but I wonder if it's part of a pattern. In case anyone wonders, yes, I have run a virus check and it shows up negative... But maybe it does show some kind of instability. But why the UK sceneries??? Weird!!!!! huh.png

Another slim possibility is that there is a bad sector on your HD; unlikely to be the cause, but not impossible. Al
Good thinking Al. I am thinking this may not be as unlikely as it sounds. If there is a general instability, that might point in that direction. But why a particular set of sceneries that are randomly placed on the disk?Ian

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Well, if your disk is defragged, then the scenery would reinstall in the most convenient available slot, and it is possible that spot might be the one where the scenery had been sitting before you uninstalled and reinstalled it. I know that is a really slim chance, but stranger things have undoubtedly happened, so I'd be inclined to try installing those sceneries on another drive, point the scenery library to them and see if the problem is solved. Admittedly this is a long shot, but since you are stumped it might be worth a go. Al


Alan Bradbury

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I certainly agree that England is resource hungry. Probably because of the density of airports - so many left over from WWII that are still active GA airports as well as RAF and USAF and all in a small area. But it was all working fine until recently, though often there would be some texture stuttering as so many were being loaded. If nobody comes up with a "silver bullet" that identifies a specific problem then what I will probably try is removing all the UK addons that I have and just reinstalling the really good ones and see if that relieves the problem. My system isn't top of the line by any means, but it was optimized to run FS9 when I bought it a year ago and should be able to handle things without any problem. Some other regions like Germany are almost as dense and there's no problem there.
This is what makes me wonder about southern UK. I have very dense airfields in, say, the USA, and parts of Europe, without the issues. I also have piled in all the nice little VFR items to view from my Chipmunk - from city centres to castles and piers and oddball memorials. With all manner of addons UK is still fine on my new setup, which was in fact built with FS9 in mind. So without having a specific fault to point at, and assuming the issue is a resource-hungry region, I wonder what differences between our systems there are which could provide clues, given I had the same problem on my older, slower machine? Seems trange to me. With defragging and reloading and all, your sceneries have probably had several different addresses on the disc - so Chock's idea makes some sense. If you do as he says and still get the problem, blame England! Then I guess it's down to finding ways to get more resources. Used to have a program called "EndItAll", for instance, which let you easily switch off stuff not needed when simming that took up resources in the background. You say it happens if you try to start a flight in the UK. Indeed that was my experience. Also moving into the area (Southern England) via the map did it. I could start at St Just, or somewhere past the Midlands, and fly in, but if I stopped to look at the map, it would crash in map mode too. And sometimes just crash when I had flown some way in.

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Ian - you say the software crashes but you don't say whether FS generates an error message and identifies the DLL that caused the issue. This can be a huge help in tracing issues like this. Or, if it doesn't generate an error message, it can be said with almost certainty that there is an external influence clashing with FS - screen drivers, other software (anti-virus etc), hardware and the like. Speaking more generally, I don't have any issues with performance in the UK (I have all the UK2000s plus odd other ones) other than around Heathrow which is, I understand, a recognised problem through the number of custom buildings in FS in the London area. However, I have a feeling that the levels of AI you may find at Heathrow play a big part too. John


My co-pilot's name is Sid and he's a star!

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Hi guys, if I can drop my money's worth in. It's interesting to note that when you are running scenery with a lot of addon airports close together, as with southern UK, there can often be a problem rear it's head through a fault with a single airfield. If there is a missing file, that can cause unwanted effects. This has recently come to light after many guys on the Obx forum reporting CTDs and dll issues when flying out of Canberra. It appears that the finger is pointing at Ozx add on airfileds. Which run into many dozen in Aus. So it may be worth running the scenery for a little longer without all the smaller UK airfields and see how you get on.have you tried a system restore Ian? Also, can I ask the obvious have you tried a delete of the cfg? Failing that, why not try an FSX repair installation. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you Ian.


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Hi guys, if I can drop my money's worth in. It's interesting to note that when you are running scenery with a lot of addon airports close together, as with southern UK, there can often be a problem rear it's head through a fault with a single airfield. If there is a missing file, that can cause unwanted effects. This has recently come to light after many guys on the Obx forum reporting CTDs and dll issues when flying out of Canberra. It appears that the finger is pointing at Ozx add on airfileds. Which run into many dozen in Aus. So it may be worth running the scenery for a little longer without all the smaller UK airfields and see how you get on.have you tried a system restore Ian? Also, can I ask the obvious have you tried a delete of the cfg? Failing that, why not try an FSX repair installation. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you Ian.
Thanks everybody who has replied. Every one of you has given me some leads to follow and if/when I track the problem down I'll let you know. Some clues might be:1. Right now as I type this I have the excellent freeware RAF Leuchars on my other screen with extremely dense AI and a complex payware addon sitting on the runway waiting for me to take off. So that does seem to point the finger towards Southern England (Nothing personal chaps - my Mum was from London!)2. I recently ran a utility that detects and removes duplicate textures. I will now go and look through all the back up folders and will restore any textures from all the UK sceneries and see if that makes a difference.3. I have dual drives so testing the drive placement theory should be easy enough - I'll give that a go too. I will keep checking back until the culprit is found and the problem fixed and I'll let you all know what I learn]Thanks again mates. It's this sort of help that has made being an FS nut for all these years such a rewarding exprerience. People all over the world taking some time to help somebody they have never met and probably never will. You are all AWESOME!Hug.gif

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I don't see anything mentioned about trying running without AI. Perhaps something with the AI scheduled in that area (and your flight time will affect this) has a problem. Another issue to dig through is to see if this is season related. Before the 9.1 patch certain areas would crash in certain date ranges. Different times should also be used to determine if time of day called up textures are an issue. XP has an event viewer under the admin tools. I don't know about later Win versions. It might show what was going on when the crash occurred. The Sep/Oct issue of Computer Pilot (Vol. 15, Issue 5) has an article on using Ultimate Defrag to optimize the settings for FS. Contents:http://www.computerpilot.com/content.php?pid=4&mid=151 Useful troubleshooting utilities can be found here:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027 Diskmon should log your files loading action. Perhaps loading a specific file is triggering the action. I use Process Explorer when trouble shooting keeping it on a second monitor to keep an eye on resources used in total and by process. ProcDump is a command line utility as described. It probably has a way to to set triggers on what you are looking for.

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Ian, I had CTD's when using Aerosoft (Sim-Wings) EGLL. When I switched to the UK2000 version, no more problems.So, try flying without your AS/SW Heathrow addon and see.

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