"Fatal Error" during long flights

[likeag6 0]

Hey everyone,

 

Recently I've run into a problem where FSX gives me the "fatal error" message followed by a CTD. It appears to only be happening during long flights (6+ hours). My problem is that I can't trace the cause of the issue given that I haven't done long flights in a very long time, and have made a couple changes to my computer since then, so I have no clue as to what (if any of those changes) may be causing the problem.

 

What I've noticed is that I can pretty accurately predict whether or not the CTD is going to happen. Before the CTD happens, the textures of the model become partially messed up (I have a picture but don't know how to link it here), where half the plane looks OK but the other half does not. This usually indicates that at some time shortly after, there will be a CTD. I could simply save and resume from that point (which works) but I also run fspassengers which doesn't allow you to save and resume so that doesn't fix my issue.

 

I've been reading up on a possible solution to this problem and I've found several similar issues but nothing that I would say exactly relates to my problem. I was hoping that if I were to provide you with the information I have, someone might know or recognize my problem and suggest a solution.

 

- I'm running FSX on Microsoft Vista 64 bit

- I've recently upgraded my graphics card from an NVIDIA AMD Phenom to the NVIDIA GeForce GT 740

- I've applied the the bojote tweak to my FSX.cfg (http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html)

 

Again, I'm not sure if this issue started happening before or after those changes. I've tried to see if the Event Log would point to the issue and it does not, the defaulting module is uknown every single time. I know it's not a system issue because I haven't made any changes to it besides the graphics card. The game always runs smoothly, and the tweak to the cfg yielded great results as well. The graphics card also didn't give me any issues and improved my overall simming experience. I do have many addons, including addon aircraft, but I don't think these are to blame either since they've worked before. I also really prefer not to do a reinstall of fsx or uninstall of the various addons to idenfity the culprit, there must be another way...

 

Anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

 

 

Links to the images:

The bad half: http://postimg.org/image/d0p1uzl0b/

 

The good half: http://postimg.org/image/pe1w1waor/

[Jim Young 2,356]

My best suggestion is to read the AVSIM CTD Guide (see link in my signature).  It obviously looks like your system is being "starved" of memory and you had an out of memory (OOM) event.  Our guide provides you more information about OOM's.  Bojote's tweaks are bad for systems built after Sandy Bridge chipsets but still, if not properly employed (and his automatic program to place tweaks in your fsx.cfg does not necessarily mean the tweaks were properly employed), will bring any computer system to its knees.  Your best bet is to move your fsx.cfg to a temporary directory and restart FSX and let the config rebuild (without those nasty tweaks).  None of his tweaks will save you from running out of memory (also known as running out of virtual address space or VAS).  Any flight longer than 2 hours, even with today's modern systems, can be subjected to an OOM depending on your fsx settings and what is loaded for your flight.  If you have a lot of eye-candy running, figure it will take your system down really fast.

 

The images definitely show graphic memory starvation.  Unfortunately you are not going to enjoy flight simulating until you upgrade to the most powerful system out there and even then, you will have to watch your settings.

 

Best regards,

[Imac 0]

Hi, Likeag6. Your post reminded me of a similar problem I faced two or three years ago, and which I eventually resolved. Apart from my own investigations, Jim Young (who has just responded to your post) was very helpful, and there were good contributions from Matt450 and JayBirdski as well. In my case, the cause was traced to a particular HP (Hewlett-Packard) printer file, HPCMPMGR.EXE. If this was running in the background during a very long flight, FS would eventually crash without warning or explanation. 

 

Now, your system is quite different from mine, which was already old in 2013 and is now quite ancient - and you may well not have any HP gear installed. BUT - perhaps you could try to adapt the procedure I used at the time to isolate my problem. 

 

In essence, I set up GameBooster to run flights with ALL of its recommended process and service shut-downs in place. In other words, I was disabling background PC functions which GameBooster then thought were unnecessary for FS to run. Then I tried a very long flight. If the flight failed, I knew that (probably) none of the disabled processes was causing the error. If it did NOT fail, I then disabled only HALF of the processes and services in question. If the next long flight failed, it suggested that one (or more, perhaps) of the re-enabled items could be the culprit.

 

You could probably do much the same using Alacrity PC, which I believe is a well-regarded  FS tool.

 

I guess you get the idea. My approach was to try to find the culprit with a relatively low test flight count. Of course, you could try disabling services etc. one by one, but wow, that could take a lot of long flights!

 

This approach might not be suitable for you, but if you'd like to look back in the Avsim forums for the thread I started, it's still there in the Crash To Desktop forum. Search for 'Very Long Flights Fail', started by Imac ,April 30th 2013.

Possibly something in my investigation, or in the detailed advice offered by Jim, and also remarks by Matt450 and JayBirdski, might be food for thought.

 

I do hope you can sort this out,It's great to know Jim Young and others are still there to help. Good luck!

 

Ian (Imac)

[likeag6 0]

I am in fact using both an HP desktop and printer, so I'll definitely check that out. Thanks guys, appreciate the quick replies! I'll update on any breakthroughs.

 

R

[Imac 0]

Hi again, R.  Further to my remarks about the HP file and its involvement in failures of very long flights, I thought I should mention that (from memory) my failures usually occurred on flights of 9 hours or more, e.g. Hong Kong to London, New York to Tokyo, Vancouver to Sydney. So your failures after 6 hours or so might not be caused by background HP services. Perhaps, given Jim's advice, it's a combination of graphic memory depletion along with an intrusive process such as the HPCMPMGR.EXE which mucked me around. But your system and GT740 card don't sound too bad, so it might still be worth doing the elimination tests I mentioned, if no other explanation pops up in the mean time. Of course, if you have to do a 6hr + test flight each time, it might take a week or more to get an orderly set of results. If you do try this elimination routine, I suggest that you write down the services & processes disabled initially, and again each time you re-enable a bunch of processes, so you can analyse the results logically. If I haven't described the elimination process adequately, let me know. 

Another thought: is there any chance that temperature of the system or graphics card could increase slowly over the time of a long flight? If you live somewhere like Phoenix or Miami, rather than Anchorage or Reykjavic, perhaps the system's thermal performance might be checked.

Anyway, enough. Good luck with your investigations, R.!

Ian, Oz.

[likeag6 0]

I replaced the "bojote tweak" fsx.cfg with the original and it appears to have fixed the issue; 9 hour flight today without any problems, even played around with the views way more than usual just to push it to the limit. And it still runs smoothly so I guess those tweaks weren't as good as I thought they were. Hopefully that's the end of it then!

[Jim Young 2,356]

I'm glad you got the problem fixed.  There have been a lot of problems with the Bojote tweaks and I wish he would take the site down.  It was probably a good idea several years ago but not in today's modern times.

 

Best regards,