What appears to matter is the amount of items in OneStore + Community. If that total amount is above the limit it triggers the issue always and below it makes game load well also everytime. However even above the limit sim can still load in very few cases and that´s what got worse with SU12 as in SU11 it was much easier to pass the loop after several attempts. For instance I have managed to load it now with almost 2000 items but it’s just the 4th time I could play game since patch. All other times it failed to load with the same addons set.
There’s clearly some randomness in the chance to pass the update loop in just a few seconds (as it does in any other regular loading) once you are stuck on it and that may be where client-server comms hide either another bug or just the answer to solve this issue.
I don’t think there’s any limitation on Windows file system or it’s caused by addons as devs said because if that was the real reason game would never load or it would directly crash as it does with faulty addons. I still think this is something working wrong on the game updating process. Once you pass the updating loop all addons are indeed loaded fine and they work well when game has terminated the loading process.
With the exception of this…Not only do I have issues with the “Checking for Updates” loop, when I try to leave the sim gracefully, the sim quite often fails to close out, forcing an ungraceful closing of the sim by killing the FlightSimulator.exe process in task manager. This, IMO, is a comms issue. I don’t have over the suggested limit of items in my Community folder, and I get the Update loop quite often. Usually, after three tries, I get into the sim. From that perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation to a limited quota of items in the Community folder. And because of that, it certainly cannot be the issue. It may be contributory, but not the root cause.
I second this. Removed and reinstalled completely. Worked great with just the store content (998 top level folders in the onestore) but once I added in 3rd party store content exact same issue (endless checking for updates). I emptied my community folder and it worked again. I started checking for the corrupt addons in community, but discovered accidentally that I could make a “corrupt” addon work if I deleted any other one, as long as my total top level folders in the community folder was under a threshold (59 in my case) - so it’s apparently not addon corruption, it’s total folders or some similar numeric threshold (total folders, total file size, not sure) across onestore and community casuing it for me. Never an issue for me in SU11 with all the same addons live, so it got introduced in SU12 in my case.
Seems like the “optimization” of checking for updates mentioned in the release notes might be misnamed for those of us with a lot of addons Hope a fix comes soon, there should be a more elegant solution than swapping addons in and out to meet an arbitrary (and apparently somewhat moving target) number…
I’m still trying to figure this out. I have 1209 items right now in the Official Folder and my sim is loading, so I don’t think there is an item limitation. I’m wondering now if there is a corrupt or outdated added that is corrupting the file verification process. Also the corruption may not even be local, but on the server side. Perhaps that’s why the content manager and Market place are effected also.
But I think I may be on to one thing. And I need help from some of you to prove it. If you are experiencing this issue still and have any items from DC Scenery (dcscenery), remove them from the official/onestore folder and try loading the sim.
I have made several attempts at moving these addons in and out of the folder and each time I can replicate the issue and fix it.
I have 2000 items in OneStore + Community and the sim also loads, but 1 every 20 attemps or so. Therefore having DC Scenery or any other addons does not block it from loading. I have also tried moving those (I have some addons from that creator too) but sim still does not load. This issue may be also related to the other bug (content manager hanging forever) although I have not experienced that one myself, which seems a bit bizarre as I have the loading loop hanging forever basically everyday.
The chance to load the sim while being still above the “magic number” is low but appears to be random (maybe if connection to server temporary fails or so during the update loop) because sim can still load. So it looks also an error related to the online checking itself, not only related to the local content, even if amount of local content triggers it. However being below that limit never prevents sim from loading.
Those two bugs are critical limitations in SU12 and shall be fixed asap in my opinion via a hotfix. Nobody told us ever that there was going to be any limitation to use addons and game was not advertised to have it either. Facing such limitation so early after release is not healthy at all for the future of official content itself, as nowadays we are quite close to that limit with just the standard + premium/deluxe + WUs content together.
Unfortunately because there is no way to tell what the true error is, there is no way to definitively know what is causing it. I watched Edson from Parallel 42 spend the better part of the week doing very exhaustive troubleshooting and I think the following statements are true:
Something in the ‘optimize startup’ features added to SU12 will cause the sim to get caught in the ‘update search’ loop when a large number of add-ons are in the Community and/or store folders.
The cause of this, as I indicated, cannot be definitively determined without much more granular logging. However some of the errors I’ve seen lead me to my best guess being, this error is happening at the server level during communication with the client. It also appears the area of the software that can’t load is the Content Manager.
A server error like this could be either wrong/incorrect/ill-formated data, or some timeout that occurs because a response is not received after a call is made to the server. Timeouts can be because of network issues (the server tries to communicate back but hits a slow network) or a configured limit is being reached, and the server never responds back or sends an error that tells the client to stop waiting. (hence the looping when trying to start)
If there is a limit, we can’t tell what the limit is. Something to do with the number of add-ons, but we can’t tell if it is, the number of add-ons (Edson did a LOT of testing, the hard number doesn’t appear to be the factor), or something else. The sim needs to load the add-on info to start- it needs aircraft name/stats/picture locations for the Hangar, and it needs scenery names and location data for the World map. So now it could be - the subfolders, the config files being read, etc.
(My best guess is, it is taking all the names from the folders and putting them in one call back to the server. Since the Content Manager is HTML, there is a limit to the number of characters that can be in a call like that, and will error out at the server based on HTML rules. Hence the more add-ons, the more characters. And some titles will be longer than others, that’s why it seems one person can load ‘x’ number of add-ons, but then someone else can’t load that same number.
That could be part of the ‘optimized start up’, where before they could have sent them one at a time)
At this point from a practical matter, all us users can do is drop back the number of add-ons in the Comm folder until it can load. That’s the only real work around.
This can also be accomplished using a utility like Add-On Linker, which I recommend in general. This allows me to only load the add-ons I need and not have so much loaded at once.
But lastly, if there is some limit, it needs to be stated. From a practical pov, if the sim won’t load with every add-on sold in the store at any time, this needs to be communicated somehow, and a mechanism provided during launch to pick which add-ons the user wants to load.
The string lenght, or number or characters if addons manifest files contents are parsed together to be sent to sever as an update checking request for instance, is something I also thought some time ago. However this does not yet explain why the same set of addons (so the same string lenght) can be still loaded in very few of the loading attempts when the error is to be reproducing. If the limitation was on the string lenght that set of addons would never load in 100% of the loading attempts.
As the set of addons and the rest of local files (SceneryIndexes, SimObjects, and all those files which are rebuild automatically by game) are unchanged the only thing whose status is able to suffer modifications during the different loading attempts is the client to server communication. There is where I presume as well as you that the failure is hidding. But it´s clear that a high amount of addons (whatever the top limit is) is triggering the issue and when you are below that limit the issue is not triggered.
So that example of the same add-ons loading then failing I have not witnessed, as I saw Edson testing and the results seemed consistent. But yes, if that is happening, I would think there is a timeout response limit set on the server and the client says ‘hey server gonna send you the add-on info now’, and then it takes so long to package whatever that info is and send it, it’s past the time limit and the server stops listening (we saw a error like that in Fiddler).
So the limit is, however many it takes to cause that amount of time to parse/package/send over the network at that time. So many variables.
So Yesterday, the same problem, stuck on Loadingscreen, i put 5 Addons out of my Official Folder, Sim is starting fast.
I had 5 Updates in my Filemanager, update and end the Flightsimulator, than i put the 5 Addons back in the official Folder and the sim is running.
This stuck for Searching for Updates seems to be a result, how many Updates and Addons the same Time, you have in the Filemanager, maybe a Marketplace Update cause this issue too.
This issue is a comms issue, period. You can see the graphic for the “Checking for Updates” spinner pauses for a split-second if you watch it, then it will continue to spin. THAT is when the payload is supposed to be sent to the server. the server never responds to the payload sent.
Secondly, sometimes I get a failed to connect to profile issue and am forced to start in Offline mode. Another comms issue.
Thirdly, when I am forced to run the sim in Offline mode, I cannot gracefully exit the sim. Click exit sim and it hangs. The server never closes the connection and the final sim state payload is never communicated back to the client. Another comms issue.
This is a really, really, big problem. I was going to submit a ticket, but I’m not going to waste my time with MS. Looks like they are sending replies back telling you to empty your Community folder and try again. Been there done that. I do too much troubleshooting with MS support at work to want to deal with their terrible support on my time off. This one will just bake until they finally wake up and realize they broke the sim…AGAIN!
Yeap the error stays on the client to server communication for sure. When launching game in offline mode the client is not hanging during loading so it can clearly handle the addons perfectly and indeed they are active and working well afterwards.
Same problem here on Xbox series x. Game hangs while checking for updates. When I go to the homescreen and back to the game, it bypasses it. But then at 60-70% the game crashes to the homescreen.
Problem exists since wednesday. I downloaded the update tuesday and could play the game nicely. The next day all of my content was gone and I had to redownload all of it. Now the problem exists.
Hope a fix comes soon, there should be a more elegant solution than swapping addons in and out to meet an arbitrary (and apparently somewhat moving target) number…
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