these don't convince me the software is inherently unstable.

 

Many people will never experience a crash. Others will. For most people who do experience crashes, it seems to be ok for a long time, then the crashes start and don't stop. I'm lucky that mine stopped.

 

FSX is inherently unstable, but that instability doesn't affect everyone. That's the best way I can put it.

 

So my point is, it is possible to get fsx rock solid (i would not have believed that a year ago), but I'm not 100% convinced how you do this.

 

I know, Rob. If we could figure out the 100% fix for this, we could get rich fixing people's FSX installs.

 

Hook

Interesting thread. Ive been running FSX since it was released, and for the most part would call it unstable. You never know when it would CTD. Different hardware, different OS, different addons, different tweaks, through the years, and same thing of wondering if you can succesfully complete a flight.

 

Now I run Prepar3d which is essentially the same code reworked , and I rarely get CTD. Its more susceptible to OOMs, and you have to exit p3d if you want to change your situation, so pick your evil.

Never ever had a problem with stock FSX Acceleration after adding HIGHMEMFIX=1 in the fsx.cfg. On average I've done two weekly flights since october 2006.

 

I tried out SP2 a couple of times and found many annoying bugs...

 

When installed with lots of addons FSX has always kneeled at some point.

 

My simple approach to all of this: Less is more - both in terms of tweaks and addons.

Now I run Prepar3d which is essentially the same code reworked , and I rarely get CTD

 

I researched P3D last year some time due to all the CTDs I was getting with FSX. The LM forums had plenty of cases of people getting CTDs in P3D. It maybe wasn't nearly as bad, and I remember seeing LM reports of memory leaks fixed, so there's hope.

 

Hook

Hey Larry,

 

What I was saying was that the program can be broken, not installed correctly etc and still run, and this is the issue. It isnt unstable so much as it wont tell you when its broken until it just crashes. Whereas your normal program will tell you upon start up that x y and z are not functioning and either quit or crash upon start. FSX however doesnt moan and just carries on trucking until you happen ot hit the broken part and then whack, gives the apparence of an unstable program. Like a hole in the road, you could drive the road a 100 times and think its fine but as soon as you hit that bump, that road need repairing.

FSX is all about timings and reliable systems. Since it has many processes, threads and fibers going on at the same time it is critical that they all work in a concerted fashion. Crashes occur when one or more of these events has an abnormal termination. For instance, if a terrain fiber gets a bad response from the graphics engine, that error will trickle up to the main process and may or may not be handled gracefully (may or may not cause a crash). These terminated events can be caused by many things including hitting memory boundaries, CPU bound situations ecetera. IMO the FSX engine is solid but can be taxed to limit with say a to high LOD setting or flakey CPU / GPU due to Overclocking. The goal then is to keep the FSX engine happy by providing reliable services like the graphics, storage, memory and processing systems and not to push these beyond limits with non-conformant configuration settings. IOW config settings must be in sync with hardware capabilities. If anything is compromised (usually dues to misconfiguration, flakey drivers or unreliable overclocks) then FSX will respond accordingly. Kind of like the old of adage garbage in garbage out. Finally the reason why FSX can't give specific reports an unhandled exceptions sometimes is because it has no control over the sub-systems it is using. Anyway - provide FSX with a solid platform and it will run that way. Cheers jja

What I was saying was that the program can be broken, not installed correctly etc and still run, and this is the issue. It isnt unstable so much as it wont tell you when its broken until it just crashes.

 

Thanks, Lewis. I understand and I agree.

 

But look at HighTowers' post. His experience is typical.

 

Ive been running FSX since it was released, and for the most part would call it unstable. You never know when it would CTD. Different hardware, different OS, different addons, different tweaks, through the years, and same thing of wondering if you can succesfully complete a flight.

 

You'd think that at least some of his installs would have been good. Something gets broken, and we don't know what it is or what does it, but FSX is a prime candidate as a cause. It doesn't even matter what part of the system is corrupt, or what causes it, but it manifests itself frequently in FSX. This is why we say that FSX is unstable, even if the FSX code was perfect.

 

I suspect some kind of memory allocation problem in FSX, which only manifests in some cases depending on how other programs outside FSX, even system programs, allocate memory and in what order. I remember in the DOS days the order of program loading sometimes made a difference in program crashing. Thankfully, this was a rare problem. It doesn't fully explain HighTowers' problem, with multiple systems and OSs and such, but it's still a possibility.

 

Hook

FSX is all about timings and reliable systems.

 

I agree, but some people are getting errors without all the normal culprits like overclocking or too high settings. Getting the timings and synchronization right on multiple processes isn't a trivial task, and problems may be caused by some slight imbalance anywhere in your hardware.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why people can have problems across multiple computers and operating systems.

 

Gawd I hate being this contrary, but those who haven't experienced constant crashes no matter what fixes you've tried have no idea what we're going through. Or why, in the end, we just give up and accept it.

 

Hook

So, theoretically it is stable, but in practice (what counts) it is a nightmare for a lot of people

Yea you don't know what you don't know. If one starts with a standard FSX.cfg and has issues then I would be prone to believe that there is something wrong with the platform. Its the programmer in me that makes me think like that. Also remember that FSX is a static codebase and we all assume that it will work perfectly in a landscape of changing hardware that it was never designed to run on. That it still does so well is amazing to me. Phil Taylor and the Aces team should be commended. Cheers jja

Its the programmer in me that makes me think like that.

 

You will eventually run across a situation that will make you wonder forever after.

 

My best friend was a field tech for a word processor company some years ago. One of the word processors kept throwing carriage returns for no apparent reason. He was dispatched out to see what the problem was.

 

After the usual diagnostics turned up nothing, he decided to just sit back and watch. It turns out that the secretary using this word processor had her desk in the lobby. Can you guess what the problem was without looking below?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every time the elevator stopped at the floor, it made a ding. Since this secretary had been using normal typewriters for many years, every time she heard the ding she hit the carriage return key, never noticing that she'd done it. It was automatic.

 

Yeah, I know it's called the Enter key now, but in the early days it was still labeled Return.

 

Sometimes a problem is buried in several layers of indirection. And yeah, although I'm retired now, I started my professional programming career in March 1976. I've seen problems like that a time or three.

 

Hook

LOL good one Hook! Cheers jja

Hm, I wonder if I can tell you what the word processor was. It was a Wang.

 

Edit: Oh look, that got past the censor!

 

Hook

I am inherently unstable; for instance, I am not wearing pants while typing this!!!! Haha, what do you flight simmer enthusiasts think about that?

I see the pattern. You fix one thing, but create 5 others inadvertanly which will soon rear its head unbeknownst to you what caused it.

 

Kinda like my prescription drugs. take new one that is supposed to treat and help the problem but creates three others. So it will always be an inherent loop.