FS9 Crash to Desktop

[hermankreimes]

Yesterday while enjoying a flight with an Air France L749 from Paris to Nice, a strange thing happened that I never experienced before.

Over the Alps, cruising at FL190 and approximately 100nm. from Nice the FS9 program crashed to the desktop.
I repeated the flight 2 more times using the same conditions and the same route with the same results, a CTD.

I thought that perhaps the problem had some thing to do with the airplane, so I used the default Lear 45.

Again using the same altitude and route the CTD occurred at the exact geographical loaction as all the others.

Very strange and I don't really have an explanation for this. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Herman

[Tom/CalClassic]

Do you have any addon scenery for the area? If so, deactivate it in the Scenery Library, restart FS, and try again.

Hope this helps,

[chris_c]

I had something very similar happen in my Golden Wings 3 installation and the offending file turned out to be a little third-party traffic .bgl file. I understood it to be a texture related issue where FS crashes when it has to spawn the offending object and this supposedly accounts for the geographical nature of the CTD.

It was very difficult to locate the culprit although just removing the offending file from GW3 solved the problem. I ended up deactivating everything that wasn't stock GW3, testing (no crash) and then reactivating one layer at a time testing after each activation. On finding the offending layer did the same thing for the individual files, the whole process took several weeks and stuck to it more because I was too thick to cut my losses and just avoid the area West of Amarillo TX.

No doubt someone smarter than I has a better way but this worked for me.

Good Luck

Chris

Edit: I understand that textures and .bgl's are different but what I suspect happened is that the offending texture file is still there but with its associated .bgl gone it will no longer load and cause the CTD. Might have it enitrely wrong but the fix worked eventually.

[hermankreimes]

Thank you gentlemen for your response.

YES , I do have FS Global Scenery and of course Calclassic scenery and AI traffic in my system.

This being a very isolated incident I think I will just leave everything as is.

Herman

[pung]

I've also had an ai aircraft cause that problem---If it doesn't crash at a different time, it;s traffic, otherwise it's probably a scenery file.

[emfrat]

This is often called the 'duplicate bgl problem' , but that is a very misleading title, because if you try to put a second bgl of the same name into a scenery folder, you will only get the choice of keeping the previous one or overwriting it with the new one.

What can happen is that two bgls with *different* names are trying to paint the same scenery; the computer gets told to paint the lighthouse yellow by one and paint the lighthouse white by the other. Computers can't think at all, they just keep doing what they have been told, however stupid it might be, until they run out of RAM and fall over - a CTD.

The trouble is, the offending object can be anywhere within about 100nm of your position and about 60 degrees either side of your heading, when the CTD happens.

As Chris said above, the only way to find the villain is to check all the scenery folders. You can speed up the process by moving half of them to a location outside FS. If the problem disappears, bring back half the ones you moved, and if that makes it reappear, move half of those ones back out.
Similarly, if the problem is still there after the first move, move half the remaining ones, and so on. This is a lot quicker than testing one file at a time.

Hope this helps
MikeW

[Tom/CalClassic]

Hi,

Much simpler than moving folders is just unchecking half of them in the Scenery Library.

Hope this helps,

[pung]

Incidentally, although you can use flyable aircrft as ai, that is what will cause that sort of problem. If you use decicated ai (ala CalClassic), you should not have that sort of problem. Thha's why you'll see "Not for ai", in some flyable downloads. Since most every version of propliner is now available in ai, you should't have to use flyables anyway. (Mine was a P-38---drove me nuts!)

[hermankreimes]

Thank you for all your suggestions, and in time I will try to focus in on these areas.

As I mentioned, this was my first experience with this kind of a fault, and I was curious as to what might be the cause. Your explanations I am sure are correct.

Herman