Interesting cause for CTD

There have been many many posts at various forums of people with FSX crashing to desktop (CTD) when a saved flight is used.

The usual fix is just to delete the "corrupted" saved flight and create a new one.

If that stops FSX CTDing then that would be proof that the saved flight somehow got corrupted.

Why that flight got corrupted is usually unknown.

 

But I had quite an interesting CTD experience myself yesterday.

The CTD was a bad one too because it reset my FSX.cfg (all settings gone) and reset the FSX controller interface (joystick setup) to default. Especially that last part is very annoying if you are already using FSUIPC to control some of your hardware.

 

The CTDs followed after I booted FSX into a saved flight.

This saved flight was created last summer with the PMDG777200 sitting on the ground in Fly Tampa Vienna (LOWW) with real world weather from that day. OpusFSX weather in my case.

 

The important thing however is that the flight was saved/created with the FSX setting for cloud draw distance slider at minimum (60mi/96km)!

 

Here comes the interesting part.......

I was experimenting a bit with this slider to test the difference and at 90/mi/144km......boom CTD!

 

Each time if I start this saved flight with a much higher FSX cloud draw setting as what the flight was originally saved with (60mi/96km) it crashes!!

 

If I put the slider back to minum (60mi/96km) then all is fine and the saved flight boots no problem.

I tried around a bit and 70mi/112km, 80mi/128km causes no problem either.

But from 90mi/144km and upwards that saved flight CTDs.

 

As a test, I put the slider at 90mi/144km (or higher) and created a new PMDG777 flight.

No problem!

So it is not that my system can not handle high cloud draw distances.

 

Only that saved flight with a significantly higher cloud draw distance as what the flight was saved with, causes the CTD, and each time at 83% loading where it hangs at "creating world-wide weather".

 

 

Lesson learned: try to avoid booting FSX from saved flights with changed FSX settings (in other words, set it and forget it)

 

 

I know that different systems behave differently......but I thought I would pass this on anyway.