Official Discussion: Upcoming Hotfix Announcement

That’s what happens when people buy $3000 computers to run a $100 game

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We may well find that by fixing some of the graphics issues the sim becomes a bit more stable and happy with less CTD for those experiencing them. Asobo seem to have suggested the low LOD and volumetric lighting issues are both bugs. People may find those same bugs cause other issues too.

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Thank you - it worked!!!

You may notice I’ve been on this forum a whole one week. I was managing to enjoy myself, yes aware of a lot of bugs but reassured they were on the list to be fixed. Sim update 5 was given a lot of hype by the developers (so they dug their own whole on this) and I expected some of the things that I mentioned to be fixed, as they said they would be.

Instead, they either broke or made worse almost everything, and fixed nothing. So while I was enjoying it, over the last week I haven’t been. And I think it worthwhile adding my voice to others k the hope this will be fixed. You may be happy with advertised parts of the game either not working or not yet even being there, but your lesser expectation of realism doesn’t mean others shouldn’t ask for it. Everything I mentioned are known bugs acknowledged by the developers, I’m not asking for anything that isn’t supposed to be there.

Now the issues have been made clear and at least acknowledged by the developers I likely won’t be here much, as you say, I have better things to do. By the way, your reply to me presents an experience, for you at least, of nothing but mindless drudgery, not a single moment of lucid enjoyment. So what on earth is the point of you being on this forum? This, right here, what you and many others are doing, is contributing nothing, it is achieving nothing :wink:

My posts at least had the purpose of raising actual bugs. The irony you think posting on a forum purely to tell people they shouldn’t post is somehow more worthy a use of time, why on earth would you come onto a forum to do that?!

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I reassigned mine to “retract spoilers” and “extend spoilers” after deleting the “toggle spoilers” assignments and they work now.

Actually - you can have two computers running identical software, with one running fine and the other suffering from CTD / crashes / etc.
One cause can be the application suffering from buffer overflows; in one system, the data written to the overflowing buffer doesn’t overwrite anything that really matters, in the other system it overwrites a stack frame which is almost guaranteed to cause a CTD etc.
Using memory that has been deallocated (free’d) is similar - again you might get lucky.
Calling OS APIs with a bad paramteter - the same is true.
Failure to initialise variables or pointers - again the same is true.

I could go on… I was a software engineer for over 40 years, and for a lot of my career I provided expertise on porting software from 32 bit to 64 bit systems, and porting software from one OS to another “compatible” OS. All of the above problems I’ve described I’ve seen multiple times…

I’m not happy that we’re getting so many crashes to desktop; I would bet that the developers and testers told management/marketing that more testing was required before releasing the latest version… perhaps next time management/marketing will listen?

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Optimist Alert :scream:

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They released FS2020 on the XBOX without fully testing the code first. I’m having at least 1 or 2 CTDs each night. Unfortunate. When the simulator closes at the end of a long flight it’s really frustrating.

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Normally a hardware failure will result in a system shutdown or reboot and not a CTD. Over on the Xbox forums, CTDs are being report also. Yet some aren’t affected. My theory is the strain on the servers once an update is released provides more chances of corrupt data. myself, I hate updating files. Normally the day before an update, i will perform a fresh windows install. Extreme, yes. I want a clean slate to install to. Also I wait a few days before installing MSFS (server strain). I have been doing this since SU 2, except for this last time. Bam…CTDs. Fresh windows install wait a few days and install MSFS…haven’t had a CTD since. don’t know why this works for me, but it does.

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Not too much, I admit. A little more from the SU5, for sure, but not too much. I make sure to keep the PC up to date, but especially the addons which are most of the time the cause. Be patient and check the addons and their updates one by one. But it could be something more complex on your PC and not in the Sim, it’s impossible to know.

I think there’s got to be room for a little optimism here occasionally. Though I must admit I’m stretched when it comes the VR situation. I wish I could be more optimistic there…

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when you say you have tried lots of things I assume this includes running the sim with an empty Community folder? If not, try that.

its certainly true that msfs still contains some FSX legacy code (32 bit?) that Asobo had to take ownership of. I believe that the SU5 was infact partly about rewriting some of that stuff.
So I know that there is much in what you say.

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Thank you. You are a treasure. A true treasure.

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Hopefully the landing light bug will be fixed as well.

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Same for this issue with prop planes

Hey, if you think flight simming is expensive, try actually flying. It makes simming look like lost change from your couch.

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Or maybe that’s what happens when you hire a $100 team to make a multi-million dollar product. Your logic cuts both ways.

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I think it is a little unfair to blame this entirely on sloppy programming. I think it is more likely to do with source control/branching and merging issues. This has to be one extremely complicated mess of code, and even if the code base is arranged perfectly I would hate to be on the build team for it. And if there were any flaws in their initial code organization and branching strategies I could easily see these kinds of issues happening on a major update like this.

I’ve mentioned in the past how with all of the apparent regression bugs that get reintroduced on each update that they probably have a mess of branches that they are trying to contend with.

If this is the case, then sure, someone or some people on the dev team might have made some mistakes in creating the mess, but in my opinion to call this sloppy programming puts too much blame on the individual coders, who I think have overall done an excellent job in building the pieces of such a complex product. I think any blame would have to go higher up the chain, but in reality they are probably paying the price right now for not having been precognitive when deciding on how to organize their code and branching strategy in the first place. And it is extremely difficult and risky to fix something like that when you’re this far into the project.

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Agreed. MSFS is more than the sum of its parts. The developers have effectively taken a handful of separate products, smashed them together, and created one of the most innovative flight simulators ever. Sure, there’s some jank here, and there but I think that was inevitable.

I know I would rather be flying the version we have today, rather than the one I downloaded last August, that’s for sure.

We aren’t even a year in since release, imagine where we’ll be a year from now.

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