So much good with MSFS - but so much wrong

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I used to play MSFS from back in 2020 when everything was unstable and it was more or less a gamble whether you could complete a flight. I switched back to XP to gap the time until this sim, which is arguably the best when it comes to visuals, is stable.

This weekend it was time to pull out the good old MSFS again.

Fresh install on a dedicated SSD. Addons up to date. CPU and GPU reverted back to stock configs (First issue: how can a sim be so painfully unstable that it can’t take some overclocking - at least that’s what everyone always suggests. I mean, sorry, NO other software is so sensitive)
Hopped into the CRJ and set everything up.

First: Custom views. Needlessly complicated. Incomprehensible difference between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ views. The camera.cfg does whatever it wants when restarting the Sim (mind you, I know my way around these cfg files and their quirks, I did my own model matching way back in 2020 with converted FSX models)
Second: Still a limitation by mainthread. Now, I understand that Sims have a huge toll on CPUs. But there is no clear indication as to how a settings impacts GPU or CPU. Impossible to tune. And every forum post I searched said something else. HAGS on or off. Gamemode on or off. Everyone has a different opinion. But the bottomline is, there should be no two opinions on simple settings (see how straightforward it is in XP)
Third: I departed out of KORD (3rd party addon) using the CRJ and AIG on Vatsim. Every single time someone tells me: turn off third party addons and see if it works. Otherwise blame it on the other devs. Sorry, by now, this cannot be an excuse anymore. MSFS is a platform upon which addons are based. Everyone (according to the forums) has issues here and there. The common denominator: this sim.
Fourth: Peripherals. I use the TCA Boeing Yoke and Quadrant. and some TM rudder pedals. The pedals stop working constantly. And when the Sim recognized them again, they are in a half brake state requiring a parking brake engagement and disengagement. The pedals work just fine in P3D and XP. Everything is calibrated with official software. Drivers are installed. Again, it is only this Sim in which I see issues.
Fifth: CTDs. I have them left and right. Fresh install, no addons, addons, process lasso, no overclock, overclock, low settings, high settings. Just everywhere. Sim Update 8 didn’t work, so I opted for the SU9 beta. Same.
Sixth: Flighttime not logged. I mean, how hard can it be?
Seventh: Spawn location: is it just me or is the Airport NEVER saved when I select the origin? I keep seeing airports in the pre-populated list in the flight menu that I have never been to. All Airports I selected before: not there. A minor inconvenience, but it adds up.
Eight: Eyecandy is nice and all, and the majority of users prbably doesn’t care on their XBoxes, I get that. But Asobo should think about hiring people with some expertise in CFD calculation and aerodynamics. A Pilot doesn’t do the trick, they fly the thing, don’t develop. Every plane I flew had deficiencies in their flight model. Some more, some less. And no, I have not flown every model IRL. But being an aeronautical engineer I have a pretty good idea how air interacts with surfaces.

I just got my third CTD and had planned a few hours of flying. I gave up, frustrated. I had some time to spare and wrote this post.

Don’t take it as a rant, I really like MSFS. Such a breeze visually compared to the others. I loved setting up the plane and taxiing. Until I got my CTD.

And for everyone arguing this Sim is rather new. It’s been out for 2 (TWO) years almost. I should be able to enjoy it without CTDs, worrying about how an addons affects stability (mind you: all are well regarded devs), or without having to set it up for hours on end to not have weird stutters or assign a few buttons (the pre-assignments for PC users are useless anyway IMO).

Specs: 5600x, RTX3080, 32GB, 4x3TB SSDs, Win 10.

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Seems like CTDs are your main issue.

Do you still experience them with an empty community folder?

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It does happen. It’s the major issue, but not the only issue.
There are so many minor bugs and inconviniences with regards to setup, custom settings, custom views that coming from another sim it is just a pain to get things going.

Just see the camera.cfgs from flightsim.to. They don’t work reliably. With XP, throw it in the Resources folder, you’re done. That’s just one thing among others

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I think you misunderstand. I read your whole post. I am trying to help you with one thing that may help debug and isolate conflicts to reduce your CTDs.

Most of your other points are valid, but I can’t do much to help you with them.

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Really appreciate it. That’s an upside of this sim, the community. But I wasn’t asking for help. I don’t want to deal with debugging and guessing, and waste your time in the process. Asobo would be well advised to introduce a log or debug file so we can stop guessing.

My point with the CTDs is that the code seems to overwhelm Asobo in a way that they are forced to publish release notes for SUs stating ‘several CTDs fixed’. If they knew what they are, they would state the circumstances in which they had occurred. That would help.

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My point with the CTD is it tends to happen with certain 3rd Party Add Ons.

I was also going to help you with another couple of your problems. Was pretty sure I could fix at least one of them.

But since that isn’t what you want… I’m not here to complain about things I can fix myself within the settings provided in sim.

Some of your issues are QUITE valid. A few may be because you are trying to do things the X-Plane way in MSFS. I hoped to quell a few for you.

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I really appreciate it, I really do. And I don’t mean to insult you not taking you up on it. But my point being is that with a ‘simple’ game, there should not be so much hassle to get everything to work. Especially on a vanilla install with high perf hardware and a system that otherwise runs everything that’s on it, including two other Sims and some other tolling games using DLSS and Raytracing.

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I am certainly not going to pretend MSFS is perfect.

But if I reach back and remember when I was new to X-Plane, many of my biggest issues stemmed from not knowing how to do things the X-Plane way, and the wonderful community helped get me in the air.

And the two sims are quite different. From menus to flight modeling. Heh. The last time I loaded X-Plane I struggled to land a Cessna because I was used to the MSFS ground effect by then! :joy:

So, once you get this off your chest, trust that something might be done to fix your rudder issue, quell your CTDs, and perhaps get your flight log working (it doesn’t log flights if you turn Dev Mode on during the flight… even for a moment). Your other issues likely need some Asobo love (we are ALL sick of the Main Thread bottlenecks!).

As for CTDs, I think after SU9 releases this week, we will get updates for the WT Garmin systems which seem to be the source of crashing for a bulk of users. Fingers crossed. Those crashes are annoying.

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I share a lot of the same concerns. And I don’t even struggle with CTDs.

The sim seems to be unusually unstable and “sensitive” at its core. Since day 1 solving CTD issues has been listed in the SU update notes, which is great but also a little worrying.
The complete lack of a public debugging tool or crash log doesnt help, and makes me wonder if its intentionally not made available.
We seem to be left to our own here on the forum to try troubleshoot every single issue that appears, from minor cosmetic issues to major CTD issues, which usually just causes more confusion than actual help.

There is this weird disconnection between the developers and the users as well.

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It seems to me that the problem with fixing non-addon generated CTD issues at this point is that the causes tend to effect relatively few users and some particular hardware or hardware combination. Asobo goes after the relatively few that affect everyone, then the ones that seem to affect many, and then try to work out the myriad of unique combinations that cause problems for some. The last a tall order, at least on the PC side since there are and almost infinite number of combinations of hardware, software addons etc.

I’ve been around since the alpha and have run the sim on 3 different computers since the beginning and have only two bouts of multiple CTD’s. The first was when I started using LittleNavMap. Some to and fro with Zendesk and we figured out I had an obsolete version of SimConnect. The second was immediately after the big update with SU5. Those issues were resolved with the hotfix. I do have the occasional CTD, but so far it’s always been related to an addon I’m trying out.

I learned my lesson from when I started x-Plane a few years ago…downloaded every jazzy add-on I came across, dutifully watched every “tweek” video on Youtube made changes to this and that, and reduced the sim to rubble.

My strategy with MSFS is that I’m very conservative with addons, I take most of the “get more FPS” videos with a grain of salt, keep Windows 11 and GPU drivers up to date. I do have a modest overclock on the CPU, but this is a profile provided by the computer manufacturer and not by me dicking around with stuff I don’t understand.

Finally, to get to the bottom of the problems that some folks have with CTD’s we have to communicate the problem effectively thru Zendesk…this is where Asobo gets it’s information whether we like the Zendesk system or not.

My thoughts, FWIW.

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It is interesting that some people have so many CTD’s while others seem to have very few while all running systems with slight variations of Vid cards, CPU’s , Ram and Storage devices.
…
I am running a low end AMD 3800X with 32G ram and I have experienced maybe TWO CTD’s since release.
What is Different ? I have NO ADDONS, Never have and intend on staying that way until I am happy that the sim is relatively stable. I am not saying that is the reason for CTD’s. I am just stating a fact of my system.

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This is why emptying the Community folder is the first step in isolating CTDs.

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You are 100% correct. But having a proper error log would help them, too. You would think working with Microsoft would give them a little know-how on how to implement them.

For me, that’s not an option whatsoever. Simming for me was always to have as accurate a sim as possible. And given what is provided by Asobo that can only be achieved with addons. Little example: current AIRAC cycles are in the community folder and therefore considered addons.

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On this topic you might want to check out the latest Dev Q&A video from a few weeks back. I don’t deny that there are some shortcomings in the flight models, but it’s going in the right direction and as an aero engineer you might find it interesting to watch what’s coming up :slightly_smiling_face:

Otherwise, it’s a pity you’re having so many issues. Other than a few silly and annoying bugs here and there, which are well-known to the community, I have had no technical issues at all. All hardware works, yoke, pedals, throttles, or HOTAS, plus TrackIR. The only CTDs I’ve ever had were when I plugged in USB devices while the sim was running. My PC has a mild overclock but is not overly powerful (i5-9600KF, 32GB, GTX1060), runs at 1440p well enough though. I hope you can find a solution for your crashes!

I don’t have a huge volumes of add-ons, just a few aircraft mods, a few UI/QoL mods, and a couple of bits of scenery. I think some crashes related to FSUIPC and other tools will be fixed in the forthcoming update, so maybe try again on Tuesday after SU9 releases. Good luck!

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Agree with you 100%. The sim is now almost 2 years old. Any other developer would be working on MSFS 2024 by now. There is absolutely NO reason why a clean vanilla install of MSFS2020 on a high-end system with NO addons should exhibit CTDs with such high frequency. None.

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Probably at least ONE reason if you are suffering from them in a vanilla state. :yum:

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I wonder how many people who have CTD’s can pass TM5 Anta777 Extreme or a similar memory test.

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I read your post and you ran a clean install and still got CTDs. What graphics settings do you run? What about your LODs and object view distances? It’s likely your game is trying to render too much at once. I’ve gone down to ground level while at cruise and it’s gonna be a guaranteed crash for me. I get you want your realism and immersion fix, i want it too. But “limited by main thread” is not necessarily a guaranteed sim issue. All it means is the CPU is maxed out in processing the game (in laymans terms, of course its more complicated than this). It could be a sim optimization problem, or it could be your CPU is not performing well enough to handle all the game throws at it. 5600x is not a junk processor and will give some intel chips a run for their money but not every game plays nice with every kind of chip. This is a fact of life.

So my advice, assuming youre running at completely maxed out graphics settings, try a vanilla run of the game and turn the graphics settings down. I know you said you can’t run the game without mods but this is how you can figure out if its the game or its a mod. If it runs great for hours and hours without mods on a lower graphics settings, crank up the graphics until you’re comfortable. Then add mods one by one until you get CTD. Then the last mod you add is the likely culprit of your crashes

Yes it’s a time consuming process. yes it’s just easier to rant on the forums and hope Asobo fixes the game completely in the next patch. But that’s not the reality we live in.

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Not knowing these benchmarks my PC can handle 3DMark and Cinebench pretty effortlessly. Even multiple runs. Everything for proper cooling :wink:

And this is exactly what I was trying to say. I am not ranting. I was pointing out the fact that it shouldn’t be so painful to run the Sim properly. And just to be clear, I use Addon Linker and only use departure and arrival airports and the plane. Nothing else. I do also understand that all other addons are loaded when in range.
As for settings: Most my settings are pretty conservative, Mostly on high, some on Ultra, LOD rendering below max, cockpit refresh rate at low. So nothing crazy. I even turned the pre-rendering option to low since I can’t seem to see a huge difference between the settings (not panning the cam like crazy)

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This video might help you with your rudder issues.

The steps to get to the settings you need begin at 9:00 but the specific USB settings are at 11:00. Just helps to watch the prior two minutes to find the menu you need.

If your USB settings are not set like this suggests, you are probably not getting all the power you need to keep your pedals connected. If they ARE set like this… well, then I am out of ideas for now.

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