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RALF9636

MCE hanging temporarily

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For me 90 % of the time MCE works perfectly fine in every respect.

 

But sometimes during a session MCE starts to "hang" somehow:

Working a script takes awfully long. Sometimes there are 30 seconds between the execution of each line where it is 1.5 seconds normally.

Also the voice recognition rate drops significantly, from maybe 95 % where it is normally for me to less than 30 %.

Strangely the FO still responds to PF3 ATC without any lag during these events.

Also the checklist speed itself (next checklist item after reply to the previous item) is not decreasing, but checklist working suffers from the reduced voice recognition (where normally there are no problems at all).

And the sim is running normally while MCE hangs, no drop in FPS, I'm steadily reaching my target frame rate.

 

Sometimes MCE seems to repair itself and all is back to normal after a few minutes. Sometimes pressing the PTT key seems to help. Sometimes pressing NumLock twice helps. But mostly the problem reoccurs after a short time in the affected sessions.

In these sessions affected by the problem also exiting and restarting MCE only helps temporarily and mostly the problem reoccurs shortly after restarting MCE.

 

This is on the FSL A320.

 

As I stated at the beginning, in most sessions this does not happen at all, but in some sessions it does.

 

Any idea what might be causing this?

 

 

 

Edited by RALF9636

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On ‎1‎/‎5‎/‎2019 at 11:38 PM, RALF9636 said:

For me 90 % of the time MCE works perfectly fine in every respect.

 

But sometimes during a session MCE starts to "hang" somehow:

Working a script takes awfully long. Sometimes there are 30 seconds between the execution of each line where it is 1.5 seconds normally.

Also the voice recognition rate drops significantly, from maybe 95 % where it is normally for me to less than 30 %.

Strangely the FO still responds to PF3 ATC without any lag during these events.

Also the checklist speed itself (next checklist item after reply to the previous item) is not decreasing, but checklist working suffers from the reduced voice recognition (where normally there are no problems at all).

And the sim is running normally while MCE hangs, no drop in FPS, I'm steadily reaching my target frame rate.

 

Sometimes MCE seems to repair itself and all is back to normal after a few minutes. Sometimes pressing the PTT key seems to help. Sometimes pressing NumLock twice helps. But mostly the problem reoccurs after a short time in the affected sessions.

In these sessions affected by the problem also exiting and restarting MCE only helps temporarily and mostly the problem reoccurs shortly after restarting MCE.

 

This is on the FSL A320.

 

As I stated at the beginning, in most sessions this does not happen at all, but in some sessions it does.

 

Any idea what might be causing this?

 

 

 

To isolate the issue, suggest you use recorded voices.

TTS voices have a synthesizer engine which needs processing time to output audio.

FSL A320 is heavy on all cores, and perhaps if you try a different aircraft....

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23 hours ago, FS++ said:

To isolate the issue, suggest you use recorded voices.

TTS voices have a synthesizer engine which needs processing time to output audio.

FSL A320 is heavy on all cores, and perhaps if you try a different aircraft....

 

It also happened with the Majestic Q400 sometimes, but a lot less frequent than with the FSL A320.

I will try to see if it happens with recorded voices also.

It will be a time consuming testing because I haven't found a way to easily reproduce the issue. It just happens now and then.

 

It seems that to have several voxkey commands inside a script contributes to the issue. I'm not yet sure about that, but I mention it in case it gives you a hint.

 

Does it make any sense to experiment with MCE settings like "enable optimizations"? Or with affinity masks or priorities (via Simstarter)?

 

And btw: Is there a way to reset the speech engine without restarting the computer? Sometimes it feels like the speech engine itself hangs, when suddenly MCE seems not to be able to recognize anything anymore which was fine moments ago. For example normally my "gear up" command is understood without problems. But sometimes MCE repeatedly makes "gear off" out of it (according to the red text). No matter how often I repeat, it is always "gear off" (and no action is taken by the FO). It is like MCE / the speech engine has kind of forgotten the phrase "gear up".

 

Edited by RALF9636

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1 hour ago, RALF9636 said:

 

It also happened with the Majestic Q400 sometimes, but a lot less frequent than with the FSL A320.

I will try to see if it happens with recorded voices also.

It will be a time consuming testing because I haven't found a way to easily reproduce the issue. It just happens now and then.

 

It seems that to have several voxkey commands inside a script contributes to the issue. I'm not yet sure about that, but I mention it in case it gives you a hint.

 

Does it make any sense to experiment with MCE settings like "enable optimizations"? Or with affinity masks or priorities (via Simstarter)?

 

And btw: Is there a way to reset the speech engine without restarting the computer? Sometimes it feels like the speech engine itself hangs, when suddenly MCE seems not to be able to recognize anything anymore which was fine moments ago. For example normally my "gear up" command is understood without problems. But sometimes MCE repeatedly makes "gear off" out of it (according to the red text). No matter how often I repeat, it is always "gear off" (and no action is taken by the FO). It is like MCE / the speech engine has kind of forgotten the phrase "gear up".

 

There is absolutely no need to restart PC.

MCE runs the speech engine as an in-process instance inside "mce.exe".

Once that process is closed or killed, there are no remnants of the speech engine.

Could be some issue with headset connection reliability or something.

This is also why MCE is deliberately run outside the simulator process. Something like that would cripple your flight and make voice recognition for FS or X-Plane a pain..

We do not recommend running affinity masks. Best to let Windows manage everything.

With a complex setup (simulator, external add-ons, voices that have speech servers that need to steel a bit of CPU at the right time), it's impossible to say with certainty, that assigning core 1 or core 2 to exe1 or exe2 will guarantee smooth operation.

It applies to MCE optimizations.

In early days (single core or dual core cpus and limited memory), we thought it was a good idea. Not sure it's the case these days. So feel free to turn that option off.

The unusual thing about Q400 and FSL A320 is that they have a bunch of background threads sucking CPU power (to do things outside FSX/Prepar3D). which you rarely see with other aircraft. That's why it's best to let Windows manage resources.

It always has some reserve CPU power to assign to a task, unless it was told not to run that task on core X, in which case it won't

I even managed to get fsx.exe and X-Plane.exe (XP 11) to run on the same quad-core CPU, at the same time, at more or less the same FPS, when run separately.

 

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