Here’s just one example. I dunno, Microsoft themselves as a source?
I have zero idea what Asobo and Microsoft are doing during gameplay, and I haven’t written programs extensively since the '90’s, so I can’t provide an example of a vetted source that MSFS can do this. But, I don’t put it out of the realm of possiblity that wrong data can be written to an incorrect portion of a disk while it’s thrashing trying to find space to move memory around. They’ve even discussed memory leaks they keep killing, and back a few versions one of my airport creations succumbed to some sort of bug that with LivingWorld.cfg files that caused a crash nearly anywhere on the east coast if my airport was loaded and you started anywhere except my airport. They did fix that bug after I reported it. I know memory leaks are different from corrupting a disk, but, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a leak can overwrite an illegal area when the computer is under stress.
Granted, It’s more likely my SSD overheated; even though I’ve been using this game for 7 months and never had a single issue. I’ll admit, it’s the first time I’ve ever flown over England. And it was the first time I flew the FI Spitfire. It’ll be a while before I do that again given what happened to me and everything I’ve been reading about issues with people flying over Britain. And I gotta say, except for a slight stutter as I approached Heathrow, the flight was really, really smooth. And the issue occurred 20 to 30 miles past Heathrow, I was just coming up no Biggin Hill.
As another example of how smooth the flight was for me, even though it was my first time I’ve flown the Spit, I tried rolling her, and she just spun right on the axis of flight with no adverse characteristics. That surprised me, most planes I’ve tried to roll usually try to dive or climb during different portions of the roll, requiring a combination of rudder and aileron to keep her nose on the horizon. It usually takes me a bit of practice to get it right.
Point is, the flight was super smooth, and then my computer hit a wall and that was that (after 10 or 15 minutes of waiting for it to come back and trying various things to pause or kill the program and get focus back to me). It didn’t just CTD, my boot SSD was no longer recognized.
I just spent about 40 minutes flying over NYC and didn’t even have a single stutter, smooth as silk. And my computer is set at mostly Ultra except for clouds, which there none of in either case. And I saw “lots” of traffic and was using flight following. And the PG looked great. I can show you screen shots if you’d like.
Like I said, I’ve had two issues cause CTD’s, and, except for my purposely causing CTD’s to find the faulty file with the LW.cfg bug, only two other CTD’s related to the same thing that disappeared after the third time I tried in an attempt to reproduce the problem. MSFS has been great for me. Then I go to England, and, BAM, my computer looked like it was finished for nearly an hour. Then I fixed it with a boot USB thanks to some help I received above immediately upon posting (thank you) that repaired the install and I was good to go again. That was scary.