Having spent half an hour trying to get FS to start i think Asobo really need to take a look at how the sim reacts if it comes across scenery add-ons it doesnt like.
In XP if a scenery add-on is corrupt or would create instability, the sim identifies it and either refuses to load it, flags up warnings that the scenery may not display properly and then starts, or posts an error in a log.txt file which at least tells the user what is going wrong. FS just hangs instead and we have to try and work it out for ourselves.
The sim needs to be far more robust when dealing with add-ons and if it runs into scenery or add-ons that it cannot just bypass and it is bad enough that it prevents the sim loading, some sort of built in debugging file should be generated that tells us where the problem lies. The event viewer files are next to useless, only saying that the application hung, not what caused it.
I now have my sim running again but it was a lot of trial, error and guesswork to get there.
Yes, I agree. And that would save the store and the user the data transfer and time for those trying to re-download the full copy to correct something that would be simple for the user to correct had he/she been able to see through the maze.
Its not always obvious what causes the issues. I am working on some scenery this morning for example, built it in the SDK then left the sim, re-stared it and it hung. So logically I just removed the modified scenery I had added to the community folder expecting it to start but again it hung. So I re-booted the PC and tried again and it hung. I then tried renaming the Community folder and creating a new empty community folder, still it hung. I then removed the old community folder which was by now named communityold, updated Windows 10, restarted the PC and this time it ran.
You can see the issue. Which one of these numerous changes actually got the sim running again and what was it that the sim didn’t like? Very hard to say because my scenery that was the only thing that changed since I started the sim this morning, it was removed from the community folder and still FS would not start.
A log would have been invaluable and I have submitted a request to see if Asobo would consider adding such a feature.
That is the beauty of X-Plane. It is contained in its own folder and not embedded into the Operating System. I always keep a copy of the X-Plane folder to use when something completely unexplainable happens. They also use their update program to search for problems.