Hello All,

I've just purchased ChasePlane, for use with P3D 5.1, however after installation I get the error message:

'It looks like something unexpected occured. A log file has been saved on yout Desktop'

The main feature of the log file is:

Exception:
Could not load file or assembly 'SlimDX.dll' or one of its dependencies.  is not a valid Win32 application. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800700C1)

I contacted Parallel 42 support and they sent a link to install 'SlimDX Runtime .NET 4.0 x86 (January 2012)' which I have done but unfortunately didn't resolve the issue.

Before I go too far down the road of dismantling my otherwise well functioning P3D setup, just wondered if anyone else had experienced the same and found a solution?

Graphics card drivers (AMD RX 5700XT) are all uptodate, windows 10 at latest version, etc.

Thanks!

That's an odd error message. Is that the complete log entry?

SlimDX is a .NET library that simplifies access to DirectX APIs. You can tell it's talking about a .NET library because it talks about 'file or assembly'; assembly is a .NET code construct. But then you have what looks like an incomplete message which would have said '<application name> is not a valid Win32 application'. But SlimDX is .NET, not Win32, so I don't know why those two message parts are together here. Like I say, odd. Did you by any chance shorten the message? If so, what's the full message?

At any rate, the first part of the error is what happens when the .NET runtime is unable to load an assembly that was requested, which would usually be in a .DLL file. Normally, for a deployed application, this DLL would be in the same folder as the executable file. Check your ChasePlane folder, where the .exe is, and see - is slimdx.dll there? If it is, then it might be a versioning issue; when you load an assembly in .NET, you can specify a specific version to load and if this version is not found, even if another version of the DLL is there, you'll get this error. But you would usually get the version information supplied in the error message, and you'd need that to check.

Have a look in the Windows Event Viewer in the Windows/Application log, and see if there's an entry there at the time this crash occurred (or make it happen again, and check directly). If an unhandled exception resulted in the program terminating, it will be logged in the Application event log and you'll get more information including a stack trace, and that would help me diagnose this better.

Interesting that they're looking for the x86 build of SlimDX, which would indicate that ChasePlane is still a 32-bit app. How quaint, as Scotty would say 🙂. You might not have the full x86 .NET Framework installed. You could download and install the x86 version of .NET Framework 4.8 here, and see if it helps at all:

https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2088631

This will actually re-install both x86 and x64 versions of the framework. I know the error says '.NET 4.0' but unless the executable has a manifest specifying that it must load .NET Framework 4.0 only, it'll default to the latest minor version; and installing that package will give you 4.0 support anyway.

Otherwise, I'd completely uninstall and reinstall ChasePlane before changing anything else. 

(BTW, SlimDX has been deprecated for a long time (last code change was 2013). It was succeeded by SharpDX, but that project was retired in 2019. The modern equivalents would be Vortice or Stride. Having a dependency on a very old unsupported library will make your code brittle on up-level versions of Windows. To Parallel 42 I would say, 'get with the program and port over to .NET 5.0 and modern DirectX support!'.)

 

SlimDX.dll is extracted into your temp folder. Chaseplane may have issues with it extracting to the temp folder.

Hi Neil,

Thanks for the detailed/interesting response!

Here's the rest of the message from the log file:

Exception:
Could not load file or assembly 'SlimDX.dll' or one of its dependencies.  is not a valid Win32 application. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800700C1)

Action Stack:

StackTrace:
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeAssembly.nLoadFile(String path, Evidence evidence)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFile(String path)
   at A.X.A(String , String )
   at a.ab.A(Object , StartupEventArgs )
   at System.Windows.Application.OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Application.<.ctor>b__1_0(Object unused)
   at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.InternalRealCall(Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs)
   at System.Windows.Threading.ExceptionWrapper.TryCatchWhen(Object source, Delegate callback, Object args, Int32 numArgs, Delegate catchHandler)

• After installing the application, and installing the standalone SlimDX.dll package, if I search for SlimDX.dll it's still nowhere to be found on my computer.
• I tried the .NET reinstall, but it exits saying that everything is already installed.
• Checked the logs in event viewer but there's nothing relevant generated when the application runs/exits.

5 hours ago, arwasairl said:

SlimDX.dll is extracted into your temp folder. Chaseplane may have issues with it extracting to the temp folder.

Unfortunately the application installs via ORBX so it's not easy to see exactly what's going on.

It creates a temp folder which contains 'Immerisive_Updater_CP_1.exe' and a log file which just says that the updater ran successfully - nothing else.

Assuming that you have it running successfully - whereabouts on your machine is the slimdx.dll file located?

Thanks all for your help!

@arwasairl is correct, the DLL is only installed in a temp folder. No idea why, it seems very odd. On my PC, the location is:

C:\Users\Neil Hewitt\AppData\Local\Temp\4e2f844d-613a-4e12-ae91-805483af6972

But the GUID might well be different for you, so search under AppData\Local\Temp to find it. The only other copies of that DLL on my system are in the P3D SDK folders, but that would only be relevant if you had the SDK installed.

I really don't get why they aren't copying the DLL to the install folder (which will be c:\program files\parallel 42\chaseplane).

I think you may need to 'verify files' from Orbx Central and see what it does. Otherwise, uninstall Chaseplane completely and start again, I'm afraid...

• I found the temp directory - but again no SlimDX.dll
• I downloaded and installed the SDK pack to get my hands on a copy of the dll and then copied it to the various directories that ChasePlane creates - still no joy.
• Repeated all the combinations of the above with combinations of reinstalls and verify files and still no joy.

Time to give up and see if I can get a refund I think... Thanks @neilhewitt & @arwasairl for your help - much more useful than Parallel 42 support! 😃