My Bad, a P3D hang, hell then salvation....

[John_Cillis 2,406]

One must know me, over the past couple of days I cleaned up my D drive, where I keep my photoreal scenery for P3D, then I made scenery covering all of Wyoming, then installed my Colorado scenery again (here in Avsim's library), since I had space for it as well.  I made the requisite entries in the scenery.cfg (I prefer to manually add them), and fired up P3D.

P3D went thru the familiar MSFS and P3D routine, rebuilding the scenery indexes upon recognizing my new scenery.  It got to 99 pct, then just hung.....  I thought "what the heck"?, and waited thinking it was just out for a cup of coffee.  I waited and waited, finally went to task manager and the app was not even showing, I could not even kill it, so I did a restart.

Upon restart my computer immediately reloaded P3D and the hung window just stood there......  So I did a shut down, same behavior after I turned the system back on (but at least Microsoft took the time to install some new updates for me).

So I invoked process explorer, since P3D wasn't showing in Task Manager, and it showed up there, along with the server.  I was thinking "this is really bad, something I have done has royally hosed my P3D"  I killed the P3D server and executable

So I went back to the scenery.cfg (I always advise, do not do a blanket reinstall of the sim when this happens, backtrack to what you've just done).  I commented out my scenery entries for Colorado and Wyoming, started P3D, and it ran right away, ignorance is bliss.

Hmmm I thought, then I remembered, when I copied the bgl's to my Colorado scenery folder, did I forget something?

I sure did, I forgot to create the scenery and texture subfolders there, and paste the bgls in the scenery subfolder.  A moronic mistake big time, since I authored Landclass Assistant I should have known big time what I had done.

So the story goes, if you get something as fatal as my P3D (or FSX adventure, if you are still on that sim platform), always backtrack, do not panic and uninstall, just go thru what you've just done recently.  Even the worse of us, like me, can make mistakes, lol...

John

Edited July 19, 2018 by Cactus521

[edpatino 1,960]

That's something annoying and weird from P3D, it fails to load the complete sim, just because a single one addon is failing or not correctly installed or not well identified. To me, these are glitches from old programming techniques.

Good for you who had the patience to look back and solve the issue.

Cheers, Ed

 

[John_Cillis 2,406]

1 hour ago, edpatino said:

That's something annoying and weird from P3D, it fails to load the complete sim, just because a single one addon is failing or not correctly installed or not well identified. To me, these are glitches from old programming techniques.

Good for you who had the patience to look back and solve the issue.

Cheers, Ed

 

I agree that they should have more robust error handling, something like "unable to locate scenery in scenery folder" or to that effect.  Because if someone gets panicky because of a simple mistake, they might go for the nuclear option only to find the problem is still there, then worse, dump all their add-ons instead of thinking clearly about their most recent steps.  I have felt the misery of those who come in here and force themselves to do that or do it at someone's suggestion.  There are some freeware authors around especially who either narf the instructions, or get their installation executable going down the wrong path.  That is why in my case, I made Landclass Assistant an independent program even going out of my way to avoid populating the registry with data when an .ini or .cfg in my own program folder would do.  Mainly that is because I started writing programs for Windows long before the registry came into play, which I feel is abused by so many vendors (not singling out flightsim vendors here) when they do not clean it up if someone chooses to do an uninstall. My motto is if someone wants a proggie gone, it should vanish without a trace, clean as a whistle.

John

[edpatino 1,960]

26 minutes ago, Cactus521 said:

something like "unable to locate scenery in scenery folder" or to that effect.

Absolutely!.

Cheers, Ed

 

[ARCO 245]

One way to avoid this (I fell victim to this annoying problem too!!!) is to always keep a backup of your scenery.cfg file that works, before installing a new scenery. That way you are sure that if something goes South with your new scenery installation, all you need to do is to revert on your previous cfg file and you're done.

[edpatino 1,960]

1 hour ago, Jean-Claude said:

One way to avoid this (I fell victim to this annoying problem too!!!) is to always keep a backup of your scenery.cfg file that works, before installing a new scenery. That way you are sure that if something goes South with your new scenery installation, all you need to do is to revert on your previous cfg file and you're done. 

Yes, it's always good idea to keep all the config files in backup. The problem with P3D is that you never know what's the cause of the issue, so, at the beginning you're lost.

Cheers, Ed