11 minutes ago, PilotPete99 said:

I had this happen twice in a row. I then disabled my freeware airports with the addon linker tool and the flight started right up. There must be a conflict now with one of those freeware airports. All of my payware airports are installed directly in the community folder so it had to be a freeware item causing the issue.

Cheers, Pete

Pete, my two airports so far are both payware - NZAA Auckland is a freeware modification of the default and causes no problems, and i have noticed that on more than one occasion, several payware airports load without airbridges - thought this had been addressed? So I am not certain what is causing this yet from my end.

14 minutes ago, PilotPete99 said:

I had this happen twice in a row. I then disabled my freeware airports with the addon linker tool and the flight started right up. There must be a conflict now with one of those freeware airports. All of my payware airports are installed directly in the community folder so it had to be a freeware item causing the issue.

Cheers, Pete

That is interesting. Do you mind sharing which payware airport(s) work? I have a bunch from Orbx/LVFR that get stuck it seems. 

6 minutes ago, liamp51 said:

That is interesting. Do you mind sharing which payware airport(s) work? I have a bunch from Orbx/LVFR that get stuck it seems. 

Actually, I now re-linked all of the freeware airports too, and no issues anymore. The two airports that originally didn’t start were FSDT KORD and the BMW LIPZ. Everything seems to work now.

Cheers, Pete

9 minutes ago, ray hughes said:

Pete, my two airports so far are both payware - NZAA Auckland is a freeware modification of the default and causes no problems, and i have noticed that on more than one occasion, several payware airports load without airbridges - thought this had been addressed? So I am not certain what is causing this yet from my end.

It seems as if once I unlinked my freeware airports and started MSFS the problems were gone. I then re-linked the freeware items and the issue is gone. Not sure why this happened to begin with. I didn’t notice any airbridge issues but I only went to three airports to check.

Cheers, Pete

liamp51, you asked in the other thread if we have the same issue... I'm not sure if you read the follow-up post to my post you quoted in the other thread, so I put that here (sorry, lots of text):

  

12 hours ago, Captain Nuts said:

Well it wasn't the servers after all - unfortunately, because that would've been easy.  I was early on to download the update yesterday and flew out of Sim-Wings' EDDH (jay) to JustSim's EDDV (boo) and back to check the TBM's AP and all with a short flight plan.  After the servers came back on this morning I spawned at EDDH several times, flew patterns, all just as always.  Not surprising that I was thinking it's the servers again when FS stopped loading EDDH, it starts loading, then the download drops down to a trickle with the CPU still under 80% load and then it never finishes - completely out of the blue and repeatable all the time.  It didn't load the live weather on the flight config screen either, so it looked even more like a server issue.

So I just spawned on a Danish airport not too far away, sim loaded fine. I went back to the main menu and spawned again at EDDH -> success.  This is some elusive issue that has been reported a few times on the forums, maybe a close relative to the "Sim freezes when I load <airport>" with the difference that the sim does not really freeze, it just slows down to almost a halt (so no "not responding" tag in Task Manager).

I was investigating this kind of crud after SU5/WU6 and apparently that's still around after SU6 (not surprised because this might be impossible to replicate, particularly on a different computer, for example in Bordeaux).

In short, "failing to load an airport that worked just an hour ago, with the sim not freezing but slowing down to a halt" is supposedly the same issue.  However this is not new, I'm observing posts like this in the forum for months now, and occasionally I had that phenomenon already post WU5, pre SU5.

This problem has a (seemingly, until recently) more ubiquitous brother, that's when the sim really freezes ("not responding" error in Task Manager) when you load a specific airport.  However, there is some (possibly meaningful) difference, that is this problem happens very consistently with specific airports or areas with airports, the hotspot seems to be the UK for some and the SF Bay Area for others.  If you have in the Bay Area, the UK seems to be fine and vice versa.  People often report that they have 3rd-party airports there but I could make that happen without.

A few weeks ago I met what's apparently the sister of that issue, and that seemed to shed some light on the issue:  I was flying out of Renton up north towards Orcas Island (Orbx).  I very occasionally met the "brother" issue in that area before but not anymore after WU5. Until that day: The more the flight advanced, the more the scenery (everything, photogrammetry, objects, orthophotos, networks, mesh, runways) stopped loading, everything blurred out badly and the sim got slower and slower and finally came to a complete halt. This is yet another issue I had read about in the forums before.  I restarted FS and tried that again and could replicate that issue!  Playing around with that was kind of baffling:

There were 3 things not plain stock in that scenario:

1. I had installed the latest G1000NXi at that time

2. I had Orbx' KORS installed

3. I had GAIST v2 installed

I flew in that region before to spot some of the new GAIST ships but I moved the community folder content out, there was only GAIST V2 in there anyway and the problem went away.  Since that used to work before, I knew there is another component - right, this was the first time I flew there with a G1000-equipped plane.  Putting GAIST back in and taking the steam gauge C172 - problem went away.  So I removed the Orbx airport for the umpteenth time and flew there again with the G1000-Bonanza and GAIST enabled - the problem didn't come up.  Of course, when the NXi was updated and the hotfixes were installed the problem went away entirely.

So in summary, there were 3 components needed to trigger the issue, taking any one out of these 3 out of the equation kept the issue from showing up.  But actually even more conditions had to be met to trigger this:  4. the location (I was flying G1000 planes to 3rd-party airports while GAIST was active a lot...elsewhere), the second SU5 hotfix removed this issue, so 5. the sim code is (duh!) a factor too and there may be more, like 6. "time of day", because I could replicate the "brother" (freezing) issue only when it was dark here in Europe and afternoon in the Bay Area (playing "Live") and I since the issue goes away under known circumstances (spawning at a nearby, working airport first, then at the "problem" airport) and doesn't always return right away, there is probably at least one more condition to be met.

Unfortunately this is a true troubleshooting and debugging nightmare and I have no recipe to address this other than "randomly changing random things to make it behave again for a while".  So what can we learn from all this drivel:

- It appears the same underlying problem manifests itself in different but seemingly related variations, common to a number of users and not only one individual machine. I know that my FS computer is not a tweaked-to-death gaming computer impostor bought off eBay, then stuffed with all Flightsim.to has to offer, so this might not be the typical "some people always have trouble with their stuff because they're dumb" issue either.  Well, I may be dumb but I take every opportunity to keep my FS machine clean, which for example means not using any snake oil "cleaners" and "doctor" apps.

- The mechanism to trigger this seems to be insanely complex, which partly explains why so many people are not encountering this.  This complexity of instability issues is often overseen when the usual apologists show up and blame the user/their computers.  

- A theory from observation could be that some shifting around in the memory mapping through add-ons or a hotfix/update probably does not really fix the issue, it just shifts it to a different region. It all points a little to a pointer dangling around, something poking in memory regions that are none of its business, aka non-threadsafe behavior, which can lurk on a machine for ages until it becomes evident for the first time. 

That's why it goes away for some with such a change and rears its head for others at the same time, and that's also why blaming Orbx airports, replacement textures and whatnot are all red herrings.  Unfortunately again, making this happen on a developer machine with a debugger running appears almost hopeless, it would at least require a lot of effort and I have currently no high hopes that this can be replicated and then fixed there. Without that, we can't even know for sure what code component (Asobo, old FSX, 3rd-party developer...) is responsible for that, to whom the bug report should be sent. 😞

 

 

Edited October 21, 20214 yr by Captain Nuts

Hey guys, does deleting Content.XML fix the issue for you?

Hey everybody - I have some good news (fingers crossed)!

Last night I went through deleted ALL of my payware scenery through Orbx Central, Contrail and Aerosoft One (as you might imagine this took a while). After doing this, I deleted my old Content.xml file and ran a registry cleaner (which was filled with errors). I then went through an reinstalled a few products that I confirmed did not load before. Well after reinstalling they all loaded in perfectly (with some exceptions) and very quickly. I'm having issues with some airports not having any ground textures, they just have the satellite image overlay (not sure if these particular airports need to be updated for SU6 or now, but I've dropped LVFR and a couple other devs some messages). 

It is with noting that just before SU6 dropped, I got a new NVME drive and put MSFS on it all by itself (this drive is reserved for MSFS and DCS ONLY). I think it's possible that because of this, there were registry issues or something with these payware sceneries as they are supposed to automatically drop symbolic links into the Community folder after installing the actual files on a separate storage drive, at least this is the way I have my installations setup. 

I haven't reinstalled all my payware yet as I have a LOT, so we will see. I have also not linked a lot of my freeware back in yet either. For those that had this same issue: delete all your payware, delete your old Content.xml file, run a registry cleaner (I recommend CC Cleaner), create new scenery libraries for anything installed via Orbx Central, Contrail or Aerosoft One, run a registry cleaner again, restart your PC and say a prayer. 

I will keep this thread updated as I experiment more! 

I meant to ask you to report if the problem comes back despite all your efforts, but you already did that in the other thread.  I'm sorry that this didn't work for you, also because that means the last resort clean wipe thing isn't an option then.

The Config.XML turned out to be another red herring, it worked for the afternoon and then the problem was back. In the same way everything else failed to permanently shift the problem to some other place where I never fly, except...

- Turning off online functionality before loading a flight, then turning it back on seems to work if you really want to take of from an affected airport.

- The old trick of loading a nearby airport first, then exiting that flight right in the cinematic sequence in order to load the "problem location" seems to work more often than not, but it's possible that it's not always the same "alternate startup" point that works.  All a little tedious but at least we can get in the air from there.

Edited October 22, 20214 yr by Captain Nuts

54 minutes ago, Captain Nuts said:

I meant to ask you to report if the problem comes back despite all your efforts, but you already did that in the other thread.  I'm sorry that this didn't work for you, also because that means the last resort clean wipe thing isn't an option then.

The Config.XML turned out to be another red herring, it worked for the afternoon and then the problem was back. In the same way everything else failed to permanently shift the problem to some other place where I never fly, except...

- Turning off online functionality before loading a flight, then turning it back on seems to work if you really want to take of from an affected airport.

- The old trick of loading a nearby airport first, then exiting that flight right in the cinematic sequence in order to load the "problem location" seems to work more often than not, but it's possible that it's not always the same "alternate startup" point that works.  All a little tedious but at least we can get in the air from there.

Yes I meant to update this thread but I've been at work! I just kinda said "Screw it" and reinstalled everything. I think it is possible that it's a bad livery or something because a few other people had a very similar issue that was being caused by outdated liveries. At this point I'll just reload the sim or something until it figures itself out. There are millions of moving "pieces" involved so I don't think we'll ever truly isolate the issue. It could also very well just be a random server issue that'll unkink itself eventually. 

bump

I had this happen today loading into a stock KSAV. Took 25 minutes to load after launching from the World Map menu. Was flying the Bell 47G and figured at first that it was setting it up again (like it does when you first install it). After 10 minutes I thought this is longer than when I did initially install it. Just left it going and after 25 minutes it finally launched to the fly screen and I was able to fly as normal.

I see there's a thread over at https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/forever-loading-issue-after-sim-update-6/464695/98  with not much more for solutions other than to set graphics and lod to low, launch the flight and then set them back.

45 minutes ago, Phantoms said:

I had this happen today loading into a stock KSAV. Took 25 minutes to load after launching from the World Map menu. Was flying the Bell 47G and figured at first that it was setting it up again (like it does when you first install it). After 10 minutes I thought this is longer than when I did initially install it. Just left it going and after 25 minutes it finally launched to the fly screen and I was able to fly as normal.

I see there's a thread over at https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/forever-loading-issue-after-sim-update-6/464695/98  with not much more for solutions other than to set graphics and lod to low, launch the flight and then set them back.

Setting LOD to low doesn't seem to work for me. I'll try deleting the .Dat files though.

A long shot but try running a system file check under admin rights in command prompt.

sfc /scannow

13 minutes ago, udidwht said:

A long shot but try running a system file check under admin rights in command prompt.

sfc /scannow

I tried that last night to no avail. It did fix some corrupted files but that was about it. It seems like setting Terrain LOD to 10 and deleting the scenery index(s) does the trick. I will keep testing but this is promising.

Since disabling online functionality helps I wanted to know what part of it might be the culprit, so I started with my first suspect - Mulltiplayer - and tadaa, it was loading.  Of course, this could be yet another red herring as well but if that's the problem it would explain why some have never encountered this because on top of the super-erratic place-dependency they don't use multiplayer.

Edit: In the other thread a lot more funny workarounds with usually only temporary effect has washed ashore. If someone would report that he has hit his computer with a hammer to make it work, I'd believe that.

Edited October 23, 20214 yr by Captain Nuts