msfs How to combat CTD's caused by Community addons?

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I've found that even with the most up to date Community addons, I'm still having CTD's with the latest Asobo update.

I renamed my Community folder and ran the sim and it was fine.  But that's not fine with me because addons are what makes the sim.

Aside from removing my 100+ addons and slowly restarting the sim to test...anyone found a good way to see what addons could be causing CTD's?

[Nyxx 6,993]

All I can say is none of these I find give me a CTD, but so far from release I've only had 2 with V3 Bonanza, G1000 & G3000 mod and CJ4 the only other mod that I can say is fine is Radcliffe power station.

I remove all mods before update and this is my "clean" folder. I will add back in V3 Bonanza G1000 and G3000, then Cj4 but might wait for feed back because of patch.

Hope you find the problem Ryan.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Nyxx

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I have a few of those hehe...  
Yeah at this point I'm basically dragging and dropping out of a disabled folder and an enabled one.  I have a reproducable CTD at KLGB RWY 30 with live weather.  As soon the loading screen is about to finish it CTD.  I've narrowed it down to scenery but that's a LOT of files...when MSFS takes about 4-5 minutes to startup.

[Nyxx 6,993]

I feel for you Ryan, hope you get to the bottom of it.

[ryanbatc 12,857]

I really wish Asobo made some sort of log txt file we could read.  XP does that and it's usually very helpful...you can see what's not loading or missing files etc etc.

[wthomas33065 994]

Most CTD's are due to improperly formatted xml files within the addon.  Whether it's a manifest.json file, or whatever.

Historically, this has been limited to aircraft and liveries.  Add On scenery has not been historically the culprit except in one very specific case.

So I would say, initially, disable all the aircraft/livery add ons and then keep the sceneries enabled.  Especially payware ones, as I have only one report where third party payware caused a CTD, and that was a specific pair in norway, where one scenery's satellite data, conflicted with the boundaries of another area.

If you are successful there, then add in all payware aircraft, then freeware aircraft, and finally liveries.

I know it sucks, but it's a methodology, maybe not the best, but it's one to follow.

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Yeah now I've created separate Community folders like Community.Aircraft and Community.Scenery I've also got enabled and disabled and Working etc.

I've actually found my aircraft to NOT be causing issues.  But there is some scenery causing CTD.

[sidfadc 1,344]

This won’t help with the laborious disable/test situation however if you use MS Addon Linker this makes it a doddle to disable stuff really quickly rather than moving folders back and forth.

[wim123 763]

28 minutes ago, ryanbatcund said:

Yeah now I've created separate Community folders like Community.Aircraft and Community.Scenery I've also got enabled and disabled and Working etc.

I've actually found my aircraft to NOT be causing issues.  But there is some scenery causing CTD.

to finn the culprits fast the half half method is usefull.

put in half the mods, if not ok its in here, if this works, then the issue is in the other half.

and so on and on, take a lil while yes, but in the end this is faster that adding them one by one.

also keep an eye on the forums for probable culprits.

and its not going to be easier..more and more mods are coming., use the link method for the communityfolder is way better.

[marsman2020 1,310]

The only CTDs I have ever had were when the one patch broke the VFR map.  Maybe a couple random ones otherwise.  But I only have aircraft mods, no scenery mods.

If you turn on Dev Mode there is a console window that shows errors.  I haven't used this myself.  I did see one person mention that there are 100s of errors even in the stock sim.

[RaptyrOne 1,411]

1 hour ago, ryanbatcund said:

But there is some scenery causing CTD.

Ryan, to narrow it down a little quicker, divide your suspects into two ‘batches’. Place one set in the sim and test. Then take them out and run the other half. That should narrow it down to 50%. Now do the same again with the problem half, splitting it in two. Repeat halving and you will quickly get to the culprit.

[odourboy 1,289]

11 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

Ryan, to narrow it down a little quicker, divide your suspects into two ‘batches’. Place one set in the sim and test. Then take them out and run the other half. That should narrow it down to 50%. Now do the same again with the problem half, splitting it in two. Repeat halving and you will quickly get to the culprit.

This^

I was just about to post you should do a binary search to whittle down to the offending folder with the minimum number of restarts but raptyr beat me to it. 

I'll add, this sim is pretty fragile. I had a bad line in a flight_model.cfg file which was crashing the sim on loading.

Edited November 10, 2020 by odourboy

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Thank you gentlemen...sometimes the simplest of methods escape me haha.  I have now green-lighted my "PilotEdge" sceneries (SoCal area) but there is still a large list - I will try the halving method.

 

edit: ARGH... lost track of my organization so now I've got to start over.  lol.  

Edited November 10, 2020 by ryanbatcund

[ryanbatc 12,857]

Thought I was going insane...but with one config the sim loads, with the same config, the second time - it CTD

I can't work with that!

[odourboy 1,289]

5 hours ago, ryanbatcund said:

Thought I was going insane...but with one config the sim loads, with the same config, the second time - it CTD

I can't work with that!

Maybe it's not a specific scenery, maybe it's the large number? Looks like you have a lot more than the typical user. Maybe you've hit some limit in the sim.