Black Screen Again

[floydcox 3]

Been working well all week (no reboots) this morning back to black screen, totally mystifying.

[Howiefly 10]

Yes, I agree with floydcox and his observations. I have the same results.  90% of the time it starts perfectly and 10% it doesn't.

[floydcox 3]

Getting very bored of spending most of my time verifying xplane files, reinstalling GTN, rebooting windows, ec, just to get 1 flight before the inevitable black screen, please fix or refund.

[RXP 2,336]

Hi, believe me I share the frustration. Nonetheless there is no need to reinstall everything.

The issue seems highly related to something happening when Windows try to load some DLL and this seems to fail from time to time. We are touroughly investigating this and so far, the best and easiest course of action is to try again a few times, otherwise reboot the computer.

v2.4.8 is already offering feedback when booting up: it shows a dark gray instead of black screen when the trainer is running and alive.

Should the screen shows black, there is a problem with the traine process, our our modules.

Should the screen display dark gray instead, everything is booted up and in working order.

From then, if this stays dark gray too long (it can take few seconds to load all db files) the trainer failed with DLL loading and we're adding more log data to rxpGtnSim.dll.log file to trace this in the next v2.4.9 update.

[nirgal76 100]

it happens to me today, just one time, both GTN (750 & 650) in VC have freezed on gray screen (with "starting" displayed at bottom left). After  rebooting my computer, everything was ok.
I have used a aircraft with GNS just before and have done lot of configuration change on that aircraft (modifying panel.cfg manually and reloading the aircraft perhaps 10 times).

nb: My GTNs are a bit overloaded as i used huge database (like US terrain in 2.5" resolution, one of the biggest database "available". Since i use it, i can see this gray screen at each unit startup during 2 or 3 second, i didn't see it before).

[RXP 2,336]

Hi,

A status update about this: we might have finally found the precise point causing this today, at last. I keeping my finger crossed but we've finally managed to influence the trainer to hang on boot, or not, modifying this and that here and there.

Tomorrow we'll certainly spend the day deciphering all the ramification around this particular point so as to assess the reason, and more importantly, fix it for good.

I don't want to give false hopes too soon, but I think the 'black screen' problem is now having a clearer explanation for us.

[floydcox 3]

Don't know if this helps but when I don't have black screen the GTN starts in its remembered place but I cannot click on the continue button. I have to turn off the GTN using the plugins menu then restart the GTN, sometimes it fires up sometimes it stays black. The continue screen I see is the one with 'licensed to' and my name but the program will not respond to clicking on continue. Hope this info is of use. 

[RXP 2,336]

Hi and thank you for the additional information. It might be related to what I've mentioned yesterday. Today has proven to be productive in that we haven't been able to repro the black screen inspire starting and closing the trainer at least 20 times in a row. We'll continue with additional tests tomorrow to confirm or not. At least, the vast amount of changes we have done over a week on this revealed corner cases where the solution might have failed, fixed now.

[RXP 2,336]

Hi,

Hopefully this is my last update on this topic!

We've been driving the trainer crazy today within FltSim and X-Plane to make sure our fix is solid, and I'm 99.99% confident it is now. There is a particular and nasty process related issue that was causing this, and we've had to resort to very low level debugging techniques to find it out.

I sincerely hope there is not another similar issue lurking behind a corner that would surface in the future, because the process to find this one out has been quite long, hard and exhausting.

Nevertheless, tomorrow we'll be working on preparing the update release, which requires packaging the files, conducting flight tests on all platforms, then publishing the links!

Please note depending on the time, we might be able to only release FltSim update tomorrow, followed by X-Plane the next day, because we have additional XP11.1 related code to validate.

[Howiefly 10]

Thanks Jean-Luc.  I am looking forward to this update.

Howard

[RXP 2,336]

Hi,

I've been releasing the v2.4.9 update for FltSim a few minutes ago, the X-Plane version is coming up tomorrow, as we couldn't manage to release 4 products at the same time.

Hand in there with us!