I’m going to add this as well…Whoever at Asobo/MS thought it was a good idea to pull an inventory of all assets in the sim upon launch didn’t clearly think this through. These problems presented themselves back in the FSX days. It was getting so bad, Lockheed-Martin addressed it in P3D by putting the flight window up front in the sim. This resulted in loading only the aircraft you chose and your route, bypassing all your other files unless they were needed for the flight. Everything else wasn’t loaded. Apparently Asobo/MS didn’t get the memo for whatever reason.
I’m not logging into this sim to go to the market place every time I load the sim. I load the sim to fly. If I want to check for updates to content, I should be able to choose when. Not be forced to sit here while my sim loads on a 7950X 32GB of RAM and a PCIe 4.0 nvme drive and takes 5-7 minutes to load. And that’s with most add-ons turned off in add-on linker. MS screwed up big time here. Big time. The sim is fast approaching the shelf by force it appears.
Incidentally, I must have run the sim 15 times with this failure. Then, I rebooted my PC without changing anything in my Community folder and the sim booted. This is a core issue and not at all related to how many mods you have. And I will bet dollars to donuts that is the quicker load times they were trying to achieve. More than likely was tested bare bones at Asobo with nothing in the Community folder. Dunno, but seems that way since they never fixed it before release.
I had this problem one week ago. The game did not start. I have deleted the game and reinstalled it.
IT worked for 4 days. Now the problem is back. The game does not start on xboxseries x.
Having the same problem since the SU12 update : MSFS gets stuck on “checking for updates”
I tried :
deleting and reinstalling MSFS : no difference
limiting the data transfer rate to 40 Mbps : worked once
limiting the amount of add-ons in the community map : it’s either hit but mostly miss
PS :
I’m using a self build desktop : 7950X3D, RTX 4090, 64GB DDR5 6000Mhz RAM.
MSFS is installed on a 2TB PCIE SSD and the community add-ons are placed on a 4TB PCIE SSD.
After I installed only 180 add-ons, the startup worked for a few days. However then I started installing 1-2 additional add-ons a day. This time it stopped working, when I hit 190. I have gone through deleting the „Reserved Space“, after which it works, and installing the add-ons again in steps a few times now. I varied the order and it broke around 210, 202 and now 190 add-ons. The total size of my reserved space is less than 300 GB. I still have 120 GB available on the internal disc. I cannot say, what the „limit“ is, that I am hitting, that break the startup of the sim and the content manager, once you get into the sim using tricks like disconnection the network cable. The number of add-ons varies. And the last installed add-ons that broke the startup were different ones every time, so I don‘t think it is any specific add-on causing problems.
Now the good news. I know from experience, that uninstalling an add-on in cloud gaming, will uninstall it on XBox as well. Normally I find this quite annoying, but this time I used it to uninstall some add-ons in the cloud and it worked, afterwards the sim started up agan on XBox. I didn‘t have to start from scratch. Now I am back down to 184 installed add-ons.
Thats a really cool finding!
And respect for the continued massive testing!
I did a series of tests on the reserved space and artificially inflated it by oversizing the MSFS rolling cache file.
The reserved space can have a maximum size of 1024,00 Gigabytes. This is probably a limit of the xbox file system. The disk was not full.
This did not trigger the stuck on update bug. (But it did mess up the restored space once i tried to delete the 8-900gb sized rolling cache file. After a hard reboot the entire reserved space was deleted, including addons)
So the size of the reserved space has no obvious influence on the bug.
That leaves things like the total amount of files (which users can’t see on the xbox) in the addons , or the total amount of addon data as remaining potential candidates.
One interesting test would be to install only the biggest addons (10-1gb) available and avoiding any smaller ones (mb) to see if the bug appears “later” at a higher total addon data. But havnt felt like trying it yet with my limited bandwith.
When exaclty does the update/ContMan stop working for you?
A) After restarting the sim?
B) After soft rebooting the xbox (“restart”)?
C) After hard rebooting the xbox (leave off for a minute or pulling power cord, so that the Xbox-logo appears when booting up again)?
While writing this reply, I am getting the message, that „This topic has been solved“. I am not quite comfortable with this system here. What does „solved“ mean? Is there a solution? Where can I find it?
Anyway the problem might not be in the software on XBox or PC at all. Maybe somebody else has already said that, but I didn‘t find anything. Of course I can only guess, but here are my thoughts based on my observations.
The startup time got optimized for SU12. I assume the „Are there updates?“ query is a single request (now with SU12?) to the server. The size of that request would vary depending on the number of add-ons. It also varies depending on the number of separate „packages“ in add-ons, since those can be updated separately. That would explain, why the „breaking point“ varies depending on which add-ons are installed. For me it has varied between 190 and 210 add-ons. The number was higher when I installed the world updates last.
When startup gets stuck on „Checking for updates“ you can get past that point by disconnecting the network cable. That would suggest, that a blocking call was made, sending a request to the server. Breaking the connection causes an exception and the call returns, the startup process continues. This suggest the sim is stuck waiting for an response from the server, that doesn‘t come because the request was too large. On a PHP server, for instance, you can set a limit for the size of a POST request. If a request is larger, you lose the rest of the request. The server code might then get stuck on an invalid request and never reply. The client just keeps waiting. I have no idea how MSFS is implemented, but with my limited knowledge, that seems like a plausible scenario.
It might not even be a problem with the server code for the update check. It could also be just a configuration issue on the server. In that case there might be servers that work and others that don‘t. If you just look at the source code or test with different systems, that is something you might not immediately find. If that is the case, then really, everything is fine on our systems.
At least on XBox I don‘t see how we could do much more testing. I would really love to know what the problem was, once it gets fixed. Until then I will do a bush trip and have fun with the reduced number of add-ons installed.
I’m surprised I have not been hit by this yet. I typically load in with just over 1800 addons. I am past the limit allowed for content manager to work correctly (It shows blank with the spinning circle) and have been going in on Thursdays with renamed community folder in case of updates. I do use addon linker, but also have a pile of market place addons. I do have stuff in my community folder but less than 100 actual addons, the rest being hyperlinks from addon linker, orbx direct, and aerosoft one. I used to keep my addons just under the limit allowed by content manager, but found I could push past this with everything working except content manager. Mind you, I do often have trouble getting back to main menu after a flight with all addons in. It will hang and I have to exit the game using task manager to end msfs process.Thank goodness it does still log my flights.
You suffer just a portion of the issue only but you still have it on your setup. The update check is performed at initial game launch and anytime before loading main menu. Reason for being able to pass the initial update loop in your case may be that total amount of manifest files is still below the limit even if real total amount of addons is above. This could happen if you grouped several addons into batches with addon linker so that they just share one manifest file. Symlinks created by ORBX or Aerosoft still count as regular addons (they just point to the real location where the files are installed).
I have a lot of add ons, both from the market place and in the Community folder.
Running through some trouble shooting this problem “checking for updates” being stuck will manifest itself at around 250 folders and higher in the Community folder. However approximately 10% - 20% of the time I can start up MSFS and it does not get stuck.
A workaround is to disable my Internet connectivity before starting MSFS and then enabling that and data services after being presented with the main MSFS menu screen. This does however disable the market place and content manager.
EDIT: Same workaround result is obtained with Online Functionality turned off for startup.
For every one having to deal with the “Checking for updates” : try this.
Disconnect all your controllers (joystick, throttle, rudder pedals, collective, control panels) , restart your desktop and them start MSFS.
After MSFS is running, connect your controllers (joystick etc) again.
No promises that THIS wil work for everyone.
It worked for me (for some reason MSFS isn’t happy with my Virpil stuff and TotalControls panel after the SU12 update)
[edit]
Okay, ignore this post : it used to work.
Even with all the controllers dis connected I’m back to the lovely “checking for updates” loop.
Both actions are the same thing indeed as game loads in offline mode, allowing client to bypass the update loop check with server at launch when you have multiple addons installed.
Is this problem solved or does it still exist? My sim runs fine without 4 world updates. Can I Install the other 4 world updates or isn’t this problem solved?
Now I am back down to 184 installed add-ons.
