Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several problems - poor connectivity, an odd glitch of scenery loading slowly and incorrectly, and today my sim wouldn’t even start at all, immediately giving an error message every time.
Today I spent a couple of hours trying to find the cause of this final error, in and out of the Cmd window etc. But each restart still gave the same error.
I was just about to give up when I tried running the sim in Administrator mode, tbh with little expectation following the previous lack of success.
But to my surprise, the sim started. And not only that but the scenery also loaded normally. And also I had no warning messages about loss of connectivity or switching to ofline, or losing Azure voices.
I’ve now done several Administrator Mode restarts, with equal success, and all the flights have gone without a hitch. I’m certainly feeling happier now than I have been for a month or two.
I can’t say this will work for anyone else (I can’t even be sure it will still be working for me tomorrow), but it might be worth trying for those having these or other problems.
The game was hanging on the loading screen for me. I re-installing the game (took a full day for the download), but still was not loading…and I ran it as administrator and everything worked fine !
now, I start the game without admin rights, and it works fine ! quite strange and the most annoying thing is that you need to make guesses as to what would fix the problem !
I’m glad it worked for you. I really don’t know why it works, but useful to know about it.
I still have to run each time with admin on - unlike yours, if I run without the admin rights I still get the error. It’s no big deal though, as long as I remember to use the extra key when I run it.
I have to run with Admin rights in order for the sim to start also.
Is there a place where we can “Fix” the MSFS Icon to automatically start with Admin privileges ?
If I right click on the FS Icon, Go to Properties, Advanced…The Run as Admin is Greyed out so cannot be changed.
Not that I know of. The quickest method I’ve found of starting with admin rights is to put the shortcut in the task bar. To run the sim, you just need to hold down Shift and Control before clicking the shortcut.
Yes, I find it all really weird. All I can think is that some computers have settings somewhere which stop a necessary background app from running unless you’re in admin mode. The developers are probably running top-of-the-range systems with admin permanently turned on, so they don’t see the problems us mere mortals have.
I use the Steam version, and I’m not seeing how to “Run as Administrator.” The MSFS icon on teh start menu that I use to launch the game points to a URL: steam://rungameid/1250410. I’m not even sure it uses FlightSimulator.exe on my local drive, but maybe it does in some round about way.
Thoughts on this? How do you all initiate the “Run as Administrator”?
I don’t think you’ll be able to run as admin with Steam.
I am certainly no expert, but, in the past, running in admin mode actually had the possibility of screwing things up due to the sandboxing MS does when you install the game in the default path, which locks down the game.
Personally, I installed at D:\MSFS2020 myself, so I could retain editing rights to files in the whole system. You get locked out when installed at the default path. So, running as admin can cause problems.
So, I’d look at other possibilities for why it’s running now. It’s possible your content.xml file was causing issues and it needed to be rebuilt.
If you’ve installed any addons, especially scenery, it’s HIGHLY, HIGHLY likely you were running into a problem here. Asobo has been becoming stricter and stricter with each release (without doing the due diligence of catching memory overwrites before a crash happens) of making sure the Virtual File System is clean. There are many, many, many scenery titles out there that have modellib.bgl and other files on non-unique paths that can cause crashes immediately on loading. Even payware developers who should no better. MSFScenerybuilders is especially egregious at doing this. I have had to fix all their sceneries I’ve purchased from them to clean up their paths to make sure the filenames remain unique on a unique path structure.
The first thing you should do if you are getting crashes is to change the name of your Community directory and create an empty one. If the crashes stop, you’ll have to sort through your addons installing them one by one until you find the offending addon(s).
I go through every scenery I download to make sure their path structure is unique so I don’t end up with conflicting files.
MSFS seems much more stable for me running as admin, but I have no idea why from a technical perspective. It would be great if somebody could shed some light on this.
Regardless of the ways it uses to get there it will always need to start the Flightsimulator.exe. In your steam folder go to steamapps/common/fs2020 (or similar) and somewhere there should be the exe. Just google the path for the steam version.
Make a right click on the exe, properties, go to the compatibility tab and select „run as administrator“, click ok. Now it will run the sim as admin every time. If you want to reset it again if you have issues, just remove the checkmark.
I install everything from admin but for no other reason than habit. I do not know but this could be useful since I have had only 3 or 5 CTD since start of FS.
The funny thing is… I‘ve never had any CTD until SU8. I‘ve always run the sim as admin. For SU8 I had to reinstall the sim from scratch, now I have CTD‘s all the time. Now after reading here I‘m almost sure that I haven‘t checked if it‘s still set to admin or not… will check as soon as I get home… if that‘s the reason my forehead will meet the wall… twice.
Although running as Admin solved the three problems I mention above, I’ve still had a CTD since doing this (while looking at the world map), so I know it’s not the panacea for all problems. The fact that every sim update published by Asobo has “Fixed some crashes” in the release notes suggests there are still more causes to be found in the basic sim.
But I’ve not had a CTD while flying, so that may be a hopeful sign. I will be very interested if it solves your crashes.
Running as admin cannot possibly be the panacea for all CTD’s. Many, many CTD’s are due to poorly written addons. Admin permission will not be able to help this because it is due to VFS trying to read from the wrong file because so many addon developers don’t know what they are doing and use default names for things, payware developers included.
After that there are other memory overwrite conditions that I’m unaware of. Again, Admin permission won’t help here either. Could be overheated memory or other chips causing problems corrupting data (definitely an issue in the past), and many other reasons.
Finally, in the past there were CTD’s due to permissions getting screwed up because of running or installing as admin since it is installed in WindowsApps by default and the software was not designed to be run or installed as admin. How much of that has been fixed since then I have no idea.
Yes, I actually said this in my post pointing out I have had a CTD in the World Map since running as admin. But, without counting my chickens, I still have not had a CTD during flight.
Agreed, though not just “poorly” written addons are the problem. There is an interface (API) between an addon and the base programme. I get the feeling Asobo sometimes change the rules in the API, so that even conscientious developers, rigidly following the “agreed” interface, can find themselves needing to make modifications following a sim update. Other developers deliberately push the boundary, as the API is limited in what they can achieve using it. This is to be applauded, as much is missing from the sim and Asobo themselves do not currently intend (or are incapable of) supplying what sim users want, but inevitably this will also cause problems.
Also, every sim update there is a line in the release notes saying Asobo have fixed some (more) causes of the CTDs. It’s absolutely certain there are still many bugs within the base sim which will only come out of the woodwork with time. The source causes of all these are currently unknown, otherwise they would have been fixed.
I really don’t understand why running in admin mode helped with at least three problems I had. (This is why I tried so many other possible solutions before trying this, really just as an afterthought,) If you understand why, please enlighten me so I can solve the root causes. If not, I’m surprised you can make such dismissive statements.
The purpose of an administrator role is to allow changes to certain aspects of your operating system that might otherwise become damaged by accident (or through malicious action) by a normal user account.