Recent CTD my personal assesement and the solution that work

[earthdog 842]

One thing that i have learned good enough all these years with Flight simulators is to keep them stable as much as i can and focus on how fluid it runs and not the FPS.

My setup is far from being top notch. (i7-8700k, 16GB RAM, 1070 8GB).I am from the “lucky” ones that did not experience CTD since the very first install of MSFS.

Not until recently, with the last World Update. I started experiencing CTDs.

I have spent the last days trying to figure out and eliminate the single (or not) cause of my CTDs. I have been reading the experience of other people with varying setups and varying cases where they got their CTDs. Tried all of the solutions around and checked many combinations.

Until one week ago i had 650+ mods installed, including everything: Aircrafts,Sceneries,Liveries (not many of them),Utils. And everything worked ok.

I concentrated to my cases and tried standard debugging procedures to eliminate and narrow down the cases and pinpoint the root cause(s). It would be rather tiring to outline all the different combinations that i tried , but here are my assessment of the situation currently, and what i am doing to have a CTD free experience:

I couldn’t find one or more mods that create the issue! And that led me to another way of thinking for the solution.

MS/Asobo are trying REALLY hard to make things better and create a state of the art Simulation and i am extremely happy about it… BUT the current situation shows that they rushed to publish the product. What happens during the last updates are signs that they are moving to the right direction as the are finding bugs and mistakes in the implementation.

They do NOT choose to let things as they are and create yet another buggy flight sim. They are dropping or substantially changing implementations and adding features. Of course this big rate of changes , may affect backwards compatibility to the MSFS that it used to be one month before.

On the other hand the rushed release is backfiring for many reasons. First because it is not finished. Second, there are much more people that discovered Flight Simulation and the community grow daily.

Development tools are somewhat easier now than what they are for P3D/FSx etc and many people can jump and start developing… or “developing”…

I will stick to “developing”. Lack or change of standards in every update , are not protecting the novice and new developers and i am afraid that the result is that we are full of free and payware mods that may look beautiful and give us what we need, but they are not well-behaved from developing standards point of view.

Take a look for example in the common “modellib” issue. There are still well known payware sceneries that do not adhere to the naming standard!

Microsoft / Asobo and the Community Developers are going forward in dark waters and that is something that will continue. That was eventually my assessment and here is what i am doing to be able to fly with MSFS.

First of all , i am using exclusively MSFS Addons Linker program to organize my mods.

I have directories in multiple drives with at least the following folders of mods: AIRCRAFTS, LIVERIES, BASIC_MODS. I haven’t categorize the sceneries and i will explain why.

First of all i categorized AIRCRAFTS and LIVERIES in order to be able to enable / disable them easily. I foresee that there are going to be conflicts in these areas as we progress to the perfect MSFS, so i must be able to enable the ones i need to fly.

BASIC_MODS contain the mods that are common and don’t create problems. Like Season Trees mod e.t.c

What i do when i want to fly? I simply enable all AIRCRAFTS, LIVERIES, BASIC_MODS + ONLY the airports that i will need for my current flight.

This has worked for me for the last days and i am happy being able to fly.

[SierraDelta 1,334]

9 minutes ago, earthdog said:

Until one week ago i had 650+ mods installed

In a nutshell - as you have discovered - that is what I believe a lot of people suffering from CTDs should also look at.

At the moment of writing this I have 5 subdirs in my Community folder, FBW A32NX, 2 liveries for that one, Navigraph data and the WT G1000, that's it! There's nothing wrong at all with having plenty more MODs, but I have chosen as just stated.

[Bobsk8 12,493]

I have kept any mods to a bare minimum. Three aircraft including one Helicopter, the 530 mod. and one scenery. To me, any mods are just inviting problems. 

[earthdog 842]

@Bobsk8, @SierraDelta I agree. But what about sceneries for airports? I do have also <10 aircrafts and basic mods. But you cant stay at that number with airports.

[Jean-Paul 167]

You can have as many addons as you wish as long as you use a program such as MSFS Addons Linker and only activate what you need for your flight. 

[Car147 2,276]

16 minutes ago, Jean-Paul said:

You can have as many addons as you wish as long as you use a program such as MSFS Addons Linker and only activate what you need for your flight. 

This exactly...

[united001 126]

I continue to gawk at and marvel at those who have hundreds of mods, closing in on upwards of 1000 some. How do you guys do it? I don't have the time and I have been flying MSFS since release months and month ago and have logged 540 hours, most if it in the fabulous FBW A320.
I have 40 or so mods, ok maybe 50 but that's it. I fly in N.America only, so I didn't even D/L the recent French lands update offering because I never fly there. I don't wish to mention CTDs because I am very superstitious about such things, so to mention them is to invite them, 'nuf said.
So at 50 mods, it is hardly worth utilizing a mod manager, but I if I had 650, I probably would. I will strongly disagree however that MSFS was released prematurely. I empathize with the frustrations of those who say the opposite, that the sim should have been "finished" before release to the general MSFS sim flying public. It is frustrating with each update solving one problem or three and then creating a few more, it's the nature of programming. On the other hand I am envious of console gamers who when a title is released, it is pretty much finished and that's the nature of console gaming. If MSFS/Asobo had waited to release until "finished", it would still not be released until 2022, 23? 24+? Or maybe I'm being unnecessarily skeptical. At any rate, they released and we dance the dance of flying this sim with all of its flaws and problems and frustrations. It's still better than XPlane and the others. Happy flying everyone!

United001 

Edited April 25, 2021 by united001

[cryptomaniac 4]

I, too, have only recently started having CTD's. Owned FS2020 since it first came out, have no addons other than the World Updates & the helicopter, and just started having CTD's in the last 2 weeks  (several of them).

My hardware isn't new (I7-7700k, GTX 1070's in SLI, 32G ram, SSD's, etc.) but this just all started recently, I assume a buggy update.

[SierraDelta 1,334]

1 hour ago, earthdog said:

@Bobsk8, @SierraDelta ... But you cant stay at that number with airports.

All depends what you need. I only have 2, FlyTampa EKCH and Justsim EBBR, both bought through the Marketplace. If someone (SimWings?) did a proper EGLL I'd probably get that. I stay away from free stuff for the reasons you listed above - you never know if the author will keep updating it - as and/or when necessary.