After each major update I decide to give this another go. Setup a flight and at some point maybe 30 - 90 minutes in the game will just dump be back to desktop. No warning, no error message, apparently no logging, nothing! I did manage one flight from takeoff to landing yesterday, but within 5 minutes of the next flight - back to desktop.
I mean I would like to have at least some clue as to why this is happening, or even something to give back to MS for developers to investigate, whether it’s hardware or software/driver related?
I have already stability checked my system by using Prime95 to thoroughly test CPU & Memory and the 3DMark stress test to pass my graphics card & drivers, and also both Prime95 + Heaven benchmark at the same time, so I am pretty confident it’s not my system bugging out.
Please add some kind of trapping for these issues.
Well, seeing that it works for many thousands of other people, it seems probable that there is something wrong in your setup…
What I suggest you do is to get a spare hard disk, install a default version of Windows, then install msfs with no extras or options, and see how that works.
My point is though that no application should just dump you back to desktop without catching the error and recording/displaying/logging the information that can be used to diagnose locally or by developers.
If your solution works then I end up going through re-installing Windows and everything still without knowing the cause, and will probably end up back where I started. If it doesn’t work I am still no closer to knowing why, but i’ve wasted hours of time in realising that.
On further investigation Windows Event Logging did this time record the fact that the FlightSimulator.exe crashed but with pretty vague information that is useless to anyone, It pretty much just say that it crashed somewhere.
I agree with @HectorJunk. Good code practice requires error checking and catching errors before a CTD happens. That’s his point. It’s basic guys and shows the priorities. Crashing code is understandable in such a complex game but CTD’s should never be acceptable. We didn’t need 5 new planes.
So what, the entire art department, audio department, aircraft systems department etc should just stand by idly while the rest of the team diagnose crash reports? Totally nonsensical.
At a minimum, some type of logging should be done when the app detects a failure, and I don’t mean a simple Event Viewer entry that we have memorized by now. What we really need is logging similar to “that other flight sim”.
I mean, the vast majority of users don’t experience CTD’s. CTD’s have been and continue to be addressed in every major update for users that do experience them.
Consider filing detailed bug reports instead of simply saying “make the coding good”.
Obviously they receive crash reports from users, or are you suggesting that MSFS silently emails back crash info/stack traces etc. to Asobo? If so it could at least tell us this with a simple pre CTD popup (Much in the same way a simple splash screen when you start the game tells you that something is happening and you did in fact click the icon)
Oh, and my GPU is actually slightly underclocked, but my memory is slightly overclocked which is the reason I run afformentioned stability checks. I don’t get these CTD’s in other equally CPU/GPU intensive games.
Yes. I want to say it was the September Dev Q&A where they mentioned that they receive automatic crash reports from the game anytime a user experiences a crash. Not 100% it was the September Q&A but this link should show a summary of the most recent Q&A’s if you care to search through it and find the exact quote.
I do agree that that information should also be viewable by the user though and it’s kind of silly that it isn’t already.
There is an item on the Wish List that addresses this topic that you may wish to vote for.
In the lead up to developer Q&A streams, you can submit questions to the forum below and users will vote on what questions they wish to be answered. They also take some questions from the chat during the stream so if you are looking to get an answer from one of the developers themselves, these might be options you want to explore.
If you have a crash that is reproducible, send a detailed bug report via Zendesk and create a topic for it in the Bugs and Issues category. If you are experiencing crashes that prevent you from playing the game, I would contact support after exhausting all of the suggested fixes on the Zendesk article related to CTD’s.
If we want something done, it’s important that we use the appropriate channels to let them know what we want and why we want it. Otherwise we are just ■■■■■■■ in the wind.
Here’s the reason I think this is really important. I fly in VR and I have an AMD graphics card that I purchased in February. As soon as I got it I started having CTD’s in VR. It started slowly at first but continued to increase in frequency. I don’t want to write a long rant so I’ll just say that I spent hundreds of hours trying to fix the problem. Every avenue was investigated and the major issue was you don’t know what is the culprit. Is it the game? Is it some hardware issue. Do I have a software conflict. The possibilites are endless.
Then suddenly SU5 was released and my CTD’s went away. That’s the release for the Xbox which coincidentally has an AMD graphics system.
Asobo never revealed the AMD conflict. They kept it hidden all those months. So please give users the ability to troubleshoot on their own because Asobo is not looking out for you.
TLDR: CTD fixed, dodgy video card, glad to hear error details/telemetry sent back to Asobo but it would have been nice if the sim had made me aware of that.
NTLDR:
Ok I have to hold my hand up and admit I made a bad assumption. I was sure my stability checking was good enough. It turns out it wasn’t. Lesson learned.
I was assuming that the 3DMark DirectX12 Stress Test would push my graphics card harder than anything else. Turns out MSFS which we already know is one of the most demanding games/sims graphically pushes the card harder in DX11 than the 3DM DX 12 stress test. Which at first was a suprise but when I though about it it sort of make sense that MSFS is probably utilising all of the DX11 API whereas 3DM may not be fully utilising DX12, or maybe DX12 doing things more efficiently on the GPU = less heat. Plus a benchmark ain’t gonna be thrashing CPU and memory as much either. Gotta compare apples with apples.
It also turns out that my EVGA 1080ti does not like being pushed beyond 72’ (degrees C), which I found by running the DX11 Heaven benchmark and started to notice odd flickering followed by a crash at this temp. Once I had forcibly set the throttling limit to 72’ instead of the default 84’ I have been able to do 2 or 3 flights from 1 to 2 hours back to back without CTD (or noticable FPS drop).
So I will be changing my stability testing methods in future.
And to all those who would say ‘I told you so’ or ‘you should have done that in the first place’ - well done, pat yourself on the back etc etc, back to smug airlines for you
Over and out.
Most modern complex applications do that.