After completing as flight, I'm at the arrival gate and ready to shut down MSFS, it takes a good 90 seconds or so after selecting to return to the Main Menu, then to Desktop, to get to the point I can turn off the computer.  Does anyone routinely kill MSFS while at the gate to shut it down instantly, and if so, any bad effects from doing this?

Edited July 11, 20241 yr by Noel

No Problem doing that for me!

But wouldn't the next startup go through the "Safe Mode" dialog? Also might this not impact things like the logbook? 

I kill the sim all the time when I complete my flight; In fact, I think I rarely go back to the Main Menu unless I am going to do another flight right away. It has never caused a problem for me; the next time I launch the sim it proceeds normally.

I do hope 2024 addresses the exceptionally long loading and shut-down times, it is a bit of a weakness in the current sim.

Edited July 11, 20241 yr by Cognita

45 minutes ago, jrw4 said:

But wouldn't the next startup go through the "Safe Mode" dialog?

That's maybe if you kill it using the Task Manager, or after getting a CTD. I guess Noel meant pressing Alt+F4 at the gate.

And to Noel, yes I do that every time. No issues so far.

If I kill the sim in any way other than the Main Menu shutdown routine, I get the Safe Mode prompt on startup.  So usually go via main menu, walk away and come back when I'm ready

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Does anyone routinely kill MSFS while at the gate to shut it down instantly, and if so, any bad effects from doing this?

No one can give you a definitive answer on this. Maybe not even the developers of MSFS can give you a definitive answer on this, depending  on how complex the code for MSFS is. And anybody that tells you it's safe is likely not a software developer.

It really depends on how MSFS is designed and what state(s) it recalls and is able to load, even if the data for the state it loads, is corrupted.  The reason why Windows tells you not to turn off your computer during a Windows Update is because if you turn your computer off during a Windows Update, and the data is corrupted, Windows may not be able to resume the state it was in before you turned your computer off.  Or worse, Windows does resume the state it was in before you turned your computer off, but it is using corrupted data and it doesn't even know the data is corrupted.

As a general rule of thumb for any software you use, try to exit that software normally.  This is what the developers of that software have likely tested, and they expect users to exit their software that way.  What software developers don't test as much for, is "abnormal" situations. You shutting down MSFS at the gateway is an example of an "abnormal" situation. The developers may or may not have tested it. And if they didn't test it, and the software becomes corrupted (likely because the data was corrupted and when you boot the software again, it loads the corrupted data), well, I guess you are out of luck.

Software today is already, very, very complex. And something like MSFS is very complex.  And with complex software, not every permutation has been tested, because it's so complex. Even if Microsoft had infinite money and increased the MSFS testing team to 10 times its current size, that newly sized MSFS testing team would still miss out on a log of bugs, because of how complex MSFS is. There are simply too many permutations to test.  So when you do one of these "abnormal" situations, you are really hoping that it was tested before, and/or the software developers designed their code well enough, to accommodate these abnormal situations. But I can tell you, no modern software of enough complexity can accommodate every abnormal situation, not even software where failure rates are infinitely more stricter than MSFS: https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

I just shut it down almost every time, never have an issue or startup in safe mode.

Just close it out whenever you want, I have used the X pretty much every single time I've closed it since day one and have never had any issues. Just be sure that if you were going to restart it fairly quickly after closing it which I tend to do for testing various things, that you give it a good minute to end all the associated processes even though it looks closed.

1 minute ago, Dave_YVR said:

give it a good minute to end all the associated processes even though it looks closed

task manager knows precisely and shows when a program has been fully shut down.

1 hour ago, jrw4 said:

But wouldn't the next startup go through the "Safe Mode" dialog? Also might this not impact things like the logbook? 

Nope!

2 hours ago, Noel said:

After completing as flight, I'm at the arrival gate and ready to shut down MSFS, it takes a good 90 seconds or so after selecting to return to the Main Menu, then to Desktop, to get to the point I can turn off the computer.  Does anyone routinely kill MSFS while at the gate to shut it down instantly, and if so, any bad effects from doing this?

I think it does.  I don't have empirical evidence but I had repeated Safe Mode starts and it seems that if I go out to the Main Menu and close from there, it doesn't happen.  Yes, it takes longer to do it that way but it's better than suffering a Safe Mode when you're all geared up for a flight.

I don't understand. When I click return to main menu, it takes roughly 20 to 30 seconds. This was true 3 years ago, today, and all the times in between. Except once in a great while when some weirdness was going on. I never see times like 90 seconds . By the way it takes about 7 minutes for MSFS to load for me which is slow. But going back to main menu is a snap.

I think the difference for me in times, is that I don't have things like Navigraph also running.

1 hour ago, abrams_tank said:

No one can give you a definitive answer on this. Maybe not even the developers of MSFS can give you a definitive answer on this, depending  on how complex the code for MSFS is. And anybody that tells you it's safe is likely not a software developer.

It really depends on how MSFS is designed and what state(s) it recalls and is able to load, even if the data for the state it loads, is corrupted.  The reason why Windows tells you not to turn off your computer during a Windows Update is because if you turn your computer off during a Windows Update, and the data is corrupted, Windows may not be able to resume the state it was in before you turned your computer off.  Or worse, Windows does resume the state it was in before you turned your computer off, but it is using corrupted data and it doesn't even know the data is corrupted.

As a general rule of thumb for any software you use, try to exit that software normally.  This is what the developers of that software have likely tested, and they expect users to exit their software that way.  What software developers don't test as much for, is "abnormal" situations. You shutting down MSFS at the gateway is an example of an "abnormal" situation. The developers may or may not have tested it. And if they didn't test it, and the software becomes corrupted (likely because the data was corrupted and when you boot the software again, it loads the corrupted data), well, I guess you are out of luck.

Software today is already, very, very complex. And something like MSFS is very complex.  And with complex software, not every permutation has been tested, because it's so complex. Even if Microsoft had infinite money and increased the MSFS testing team to 10 times its current size, that newly sized MSFS testing team would still miss out on a log of bugs, because of how complex MSFS is. There are simply too many permutations to test.  So when you do one of these "abnormal" situations, you are really hoping that it was tested before, and/or the software developers designed their code well enough, to accommodate these abnormal situations. But I can tell you, no modern software of enough complexity can accommodate every abnormal situation, not even software where failure rates are infinitely more stricter than MSFS: https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

I already appreciated ideas in your post which is why I made a point to bold this text because if anyone routinely, operative word routinely, does this and gets away with it we have an empirical test to go on versus theory or basic best practices to avoid problems, "Does anyone routinely kill MSFS while at the gate to shut it down instantly"

I put my old sim PC parts into my digital piano VST that runs on Windows now and FWIW I always kill it by simulating a power outage--I turn its power strip off to shut down everything including screen, all audio and midi devices, etc.  Never have a problem with this and presumably that is because nothing is happening in terms of disk write operations or what have you, it's just a couple of open applications not doing anything, so no real surprises there.  If MSFS is in a static place at the arrival gate, with engines off, GSX all done doing it's deboarding and so forth, it's possible it's in a fairly static state, or not depending as you say w/ its fundamental architecture.  With power outages that definitely happen, have you have ever had something become irretrievably corrupted?  I haven't, and it's happened many times over the decades.