SLX crashes every time opened + some initial thoughts

[szcsongor 4]

Hi,

I just started to use SLX, it seems nice but a bit complex to me. I still don't find very intuitive though, have to look for options and stuff all the time (even though I read the manual), but I'm slowly getting to know it better.

Yesterday I tried flight planning, but I had troubles with understanding its logic. Can't write ICAO codes for dep. and arr. airports in the little boxes next to the plans name or even in the boxes down at the details, drag and drop not working as I thought it should, flight planner tries to plan a route between two airports through my planes current (random) position (do I have to move my plane first to the departure airport?) etc., so all in all I have mixed experiences with user friendliness so far.

But the main problem is now, that after rebuilding the aircraft/scenery library again (installed a new scenery), SLX crashes every time after started (right when the little donation windows appears in the corner, I don't know if there is any connection to this or just a coincidence). I tried the repair function of the installer, but the problem is still there.

Should I delete everything in the documents\simlauncherx folder to let itself setup again? Or do I have to reinstall it again?

Oh and one more thing. I think the launcher icon handling also needs an update. I added now a dozen icons to the launcher tab there which I want to start before I start P3D but I don't understand why can't I reorder them in any way I want? If I want to put the most important icons in the upper row, then I have to literally play a puzzle game, because now first the first 2 columns are filled then the next 2, and so on. And when I finally reordered them to my taste I see next time that some icons went back to their old position...

Hope you don't take my critics personally, I think it can be a great software after dealing with the bugs and you're awesome sharing it for free. I've seen much worse softwares sold for a lot of money...

[szcsongor 4]

Ok, I think I solved the problem but I have no idea what could have went wrong.

After randomly removing files from the ...\Documents\SimLauncherX folder, I found that when I removed (deleted) the SimLauncherX.P3Dv3.AircraftRatings.xml file, it did not crash after start and after closing it just recreated the file with the exact same content. Now it works... No idea why it did this.

UPDATE:

Now I tinkered again a little bit with flight plans. Moved the plane to the dep. airport, set it all up, then it says the flght plan can't be saved, so it also doesn't start p3d (error message in the log file: "System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object").

Ok, I thought I close SLX and start again making sure it's started in admin mode. And now it crashes again every time I try to start it and the method above does not work this time. I did not do anything extra with it, just tried to set up a simple flight.

I give up... :(

[mawibo 33]

Hi ??,

First of all, please comply with the forum rule and sign your post with your real name.

The troubleshooting section in the user guide does include a suggestion to delete all files in the [Documents]\SimLauncherX folder.

To set an airport as departure/destination airport for a flight plan, you can

1. select the airport from the dropdown list in the flight plans window; once the dropdown list is open, you can start typing the ICAO code
2. select an airport in the Airports window or on the map and select 'Set as departure/destination airport' from the context menu
3. select an airport in the Airports window or on the map and drag the airport over the departure/destination part of the flight plan.

To create a flight plan with a certain departure airport, select the airport in the Airports window or on the map and select 'Create new flight plan' from the context menu.

It all seems very user friendly to me.

I don't know why you think that the flight plan route goes through your 'planes current (random) position', but neither the position of the selected flight nor the position of the user aircraft within the simulator has any influence on the route of the flight plan. When you create a new flight plan, both the departure and destination airports will initially be set to the airport closest to the position of the selected flight.

You will not be able to save a flight plan if this flight plan contains errors.

Organising the launch entries works just the way it does because it's a third party component.

Most users seem to be perfectly happy with the user friendliness of my application. 

I do not exclude the possibility that I made a mistake somewhere, but a user error, a misconfigured/misbehaving OS or a hardware problem can also cause these kinds of crashes. If you want me to diagnose the problem, you do need to send me the [Documents]\SimLauncherX\SimLauncherX.log file. Without a log file I cannot diagnose anything.

Once I have a log file and I can pinpoint the cause of the error/crash, I will most likely fix it within a couple of days or even within a couple of hours and that's not something most (payware) developers will do for you.

Maarten

P.S.: what version of SLX are you running? The latest one or the version from the library? The library version is quite old.