Just wanted to circle back and update on the zendesk ticket I submitted. I have to say, I am quite disappointed.
Despite taking the time to open a ticket with a good, detailed description of the unexpected behavior – and the steps to reproduce the crash to desktop and included a link to a video and that I validated the issue on multiple PCs – they marked the ticket as “resolved” by sending a form email.
As you can guess, the form email was a set of steps that are focused on troubleshooting your end and your PC. Very disheartening, and it appears that they are likely using bots instead of people to review/triage tickets.
Kind of felt like being on a phone call with an automated system and you just want to scream “REPRESENTATIVE!”
To be fair though, since I have been avoiding the functionality that I know will trigger a CTD, I have not had any other CTDs.
In the spirit of helping others avoid CTDs, here is what I found will trigger a CTD:
In the Cessna 172 with the G1000, using the FMC to manage procedures. Specifically, when you enter and activate an approach procedure you may notice that a USER waypoint is inserted to transition you to the IAF – instead of taking a direct route to the IAF. This is a bug in itself, because that is not how it should work. Furthermore, I have seen it where this USER waypoint and path it creates can take you 80 miles out of the way.
If you try to use the FMC to manage the waypoints in that approach, and specifically to try to delete that USER waypoint, it will delete the entire flight plan. Also, a bug and unexpected behavior.
Finally, when you try to recreate your flight plan by entering your destination airport, and then going to “procedures” and trying to pick and activate an approach, nothing happens. Likley, you will retry it a few times hoping it will decide to work. LOL.
But t won’t. However, when you back out of that you may notice the option to “Activate approach” is not greyed out, and that leads you to believe maybe it did work.
But no, when you highlight that option and click the “ENTER” button, it will CTD the sim.
This is reproducible across multiple systems for me, and I would bet for all. There are at least 3 unexpected behaviors in what I just described. Even if it didn’t lead to a CTD, it makes IFR unusable and should be a bug report worthy of action by a human being.
Just a speculation - I think there is a good chance that the above is not limited to the C172 aircraft. Probably any aircraft with the G1000 is affected. So the moral of the story is use the FMC to manage procedures with caution.
To be fair, yes I am sure that CTDs can be caused by many things, and yes I am sure that there are cases where CTD is a result of GPU driver bugs, old GPU drivers, audio middleware bugs, unstable overclock, etc.
But sometimes it is a programming error as well. I am confident that the CTD I have described above is because of programming errors.
Like they say, you can try to lead the horse to water, but you just can’t make it drink.