I have had this problem before, but ignored it as I thought it was probably a one off.

I set up a flight this morning from ESSA to LTFE in my Fenix A320. Took the aircraft to cruising altitude and then left it. When I returned about 90 minutes later, MSFS 2020 was still displayed, although 'frozen' and the sound was still working. In the middle of the screen was an application error message which read. (Just to note, although I had armed TOD, I had not yet reached that point in the flight plan.)

the instruction at 0x00007FFF9B3D7CAA referenced memory at 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. The memory could not be read

My only option was to close MSFS 2020, which I did.

I am using Windows 11 Pro 64 bit and have selected DX12 beta within MSFS 2020

My system is:-

13th Gen Intel core I9-13900K

NVidia RTX 4090

64K RAM

and I have 50.8GB of available virtual memory

 

has anyone any thoughts as to what may have caused the issue? - I have googled but not found any direct references - and/or more importantly, what can I do to prevent it reoccurring again in the future.

Not sure if this could be of any relevance, but for the last few weeks I have been flying the PMDG 737-800, almost exclusively, and on some longer flights, and have not come across this issue.

I would appreciate any guidance or thoughts.

 

Happy Flying  

Unless it happens frequently that's just complex software for you. Sometimes it breaks, a bit flips in memory and Bob's your uncle. Could have a billion possible causes, so unless it starts happening with increased frequency, don't worry about it.

MSFS is super bad at error handling, so anything you get from EventViewer is completely useless for debugging purposes, and the sim doesn't tell you anything about why it crashed, really. Your error message literally means that some part of code had a pointer to an invalid memory address and then de-referenced that pointer and tried to access non-existing data. That crashed the program. It's super non-specific, sadly.

Edited November 12, 20232 yr by psychedelic_tortilla

Thank you - good to know - and really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

4 hours ago, SquadronLeader said:

the instruction at 0x00007FFF9B3D7CAA referenced memory at 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. The memory could not be read

Well, I'm thinking that it is just a one off software error cause by a combination of conditions during that particular flight. I wouldn't knock myself out trying to troubleshoot that one too deep. Fly some more and see if something similar happens again.

Technically, that error is trying to read data from the very last bit that can be accessed in memory. Nothing can read anything from that address, because a read command starts reading at the address provided. In this case, it's trying to read starting at the end, and there's nothing to read past the end. So the most likely conclusion is that the address 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF is the result of either a routine using a bad pointer, or using a good pointer with a bad address (both of which could be SW errors), or memory corruption messing up something somewhere.

If it keeps happening, then try digging deeper.

Edited November 12, 20232 yr by MDFlier

I remember seeing a discussion on that error a few months back, where it seemed to happen with increased frequency. What I think is that this error message is just a catch-all for "we dereferenced a bad pointer/nullptr somewhere and have gone tits up. Sorry for that!"

MSFS is a towering achievement of software development, it really cannot be overstated what magic Asobo has achieved with this sim, but the user-facing error handling is so, so bad. Compared to X-Plane, it's really night and day. In MSFS, there is just no public logging of anything whatsoever. But logging is certainly implemented on the developer side, and it would be so helpful to have more insight into the state of the program at the time of the crash instead of the error handling equivalent of throwing your hands up and shrugging your shoulders. 

Edited November 12, 20232 yr by psychedelic_tortilla