Today's infuriating MSFS experience - CTD since SU5

I hadn’t touched MSFS until today since SU5 as I knew there were major issues.

I took almost 2 months off MSFS, and today thought it was time to come back and give it a try.
WELL, this program has regressed to a state that is almost unusable.

The menus and world map are a complete mess, I mean they can’t even get the cursor to work as it should when typing.
There are visual bugs still present in the world map after 2 hotfixes…
I loaded a flight in the Caravan and ATC is still broken, tells me to climb above my FP altitude.
Then I realise that the autopilot is not following the flight plan. After some troubleshooting I see that the Working Title G1000 NXi has issues with flight plans loading from the world map. Ok, so I remove that from my content manager and revert back to base game G1000.
I load up the flight again and check flight plan is all loaded correctly in the MFD, great.
Taxi out for takeoff, and bang. CTD. AI traffic is off, I have no mods installed. No overclocks, everything is stock standard.
I am just speechless at the poor state MSFS is in after SU5, completely unstable and not fit for release.
Previously I had only experienced CTD’s with AI and external programs that use simconnect, the fix for me was either turn AI off or stop using the app that uses simconnect.
I managed to play for months (literally 100’s of hours) without a CTD.
I did a round the world trip in the King Air with one CTD (which was caused by a scenery addon).

To me, my experience today of a CTD with settings that I’ve never experienced at CTD before shows that since SU5 it really has regressed to an Alpha-like state which is not acceptable for a title like this.

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It is recommended that you newly install msfs2020

Screw that, I’m not wasting 8-12 hours of my time when “re-installing” the sim rarely fixes the issue.

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Just to confirm, you can do different things in these 8-12hrs.
You don’t need to continuously monitor the re-install progress :wink:

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Not really, since I’ve got the game on Steam I can’t use any others. I could put it on overnight but I just find that an issue for me has never been solved from reinstalling anything. Just personal experience.

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To rephrase your “workaround”: one has to disable one promised CORE element of the game, to get it somehow working.

I feel you. I had nice hours and fun, was blown away. But the CTDs kill it totally.

Since release im waiting for working AI Traffic but right now its broken, like the rest of the game.

Every patch puts the user in a “try and error” situation. So many good ideas in this community but they dont listen.

Where is the crash logger so we can help ourselves to solve CTDs?

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Exactly, it gets worse and worse, more unstable with every sim update. I just can’t play MSFS in its current state, I have been involved in flight sims for over 15 years and never had these kind of issues with other titles. This is just a very sad situation for the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise.

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I’ve been simming for 30 years and have had endless issues with all sims, mainly due to tweaking etc.

MSFS is very stable in my opinion. Yes there are some issues, but it’s a very complex bit of software. It’s amazing.

I’ve had 2 or three CTDs in hundreds of hours of flying.

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I’ve not had a single CTD, while in flight, since SU5 was released. My sim isn’t overloaded with addons. Just a few planes, GPS mods, Navigraph data, and that’s about it.

I’ve had my own fair share of them in the past, and through experimentation, and Asobos efforts, my sim is quite stable now.

I feel for those that don’t, and my only advice to those having issues is don’t give up. Also if you post for help, be honest about what you are running. If you using tons of addons, just say.

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I have had exactly 1 CTD since SU5 released, most issues come from addons left in the community folder, another chunck from people not wanting to do a clean install (like the OP) and the rest are real issues with memory leaks or hardware incompatibility.

I recommend you leave for a year to ease your frustration, and then come back with a clean install. Or not, whatever you want.

EDIT:

I have 270Gb in addons and I experience no crashes, but of course, every month you have to take the time to update them and troubleshot them after every update to ensure they are not causing crashes. A lot of people want the mods but do not want to invest the time to keep them up to date.

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I totally sympathize but this also shows the massive range of experiences because everyone’s PC hardware is so different.

I am kind of an outlier - I run the game on a 13.10 year old PC I got in late 2008. First generation i7 920 @ 3.5Ghz/12GB DDR3/GTX1060 6GB.

I have never had a CTD. Not one. I had just one BSOD while playing and that was in May when I bought the game. I found out it hates overclocked CPUs so I dropped it down from 3.8 to 3.5Ghz and have never hard a single issue. All updates smooth as silk, not a single CTD - even with 65 mods in the Community folder.

So its very hard to troubleshoot different systems. How is your hard drive health? Download free Crystal Disk Info tool.

If you have absolutely exhausted every avenue then what I will suggest is this. I know you wont like it as it takes some time:

  1. Backup all your data using software like Macrium Reflect. It will image entire drives.
  2. Download Win10.iso Media Creation Tool and do a factory fresh install of Windows 10
  3. Once installed update it until you have all updates
  4. Connect your external drive, virtually mount it within Macrium (it appears in File Explorer) and copy your important data (documents , pics etc)
  5. Now download MSFS - do this just before you go to bed. You will wake up to a fresh install.

If after all this you STILL have problems you will at least know you tried everything. I will however be surprised if you do still have issues.

This takes some time but its worth it. Its like a nice spring clean to the entire system. Clean slate start. Good luck.

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I did say in my first post that I have no mods installed what so ever. My community folder is empty.
Only core content, World Updates and that G1000 NXi (that actually was deleted when MSFS CTD earlier) which I don’t really classify as an addon because its installed via the content manager and not the community folder.

Basically, when it comes down to it I flew for hundreds of hours with no CTD’s using the same settings that I’m currently using. But now I’m experiencing CTD’s. The ONLY change? SU5. (and the hotfixes)

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You’ve surely had Windows updates? GPU driver updates? They could be a cause for CTDs as well, I’m not defending MSFS in any way as I’m personally convinced the convoluted installation of the program itself is cause for some issues.

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This sim is so weird… I haven‘t had a single CTD that was not caused by an addon since release. I have had problems to start the sim and to update it though. And I totally agree with thibgs like the state of the UI, when you click on the field to type in a departure airport it just opens a dropdown, no cursor and after you‘ve set the cursor and typed the airport, clicked on the airport, the dropdown doesn‘t close. It‘s the first thing one does and it‘s broken, great state, it‘s so typical. And this experience continues, let‘s pick an aircraft. I flew a Lufthansa A320 with a N-tailnumber for some reason so I went back and quickly gave it the reg that was on the livery, D-A***. Now every fu**ing aircraft in my list has this tail number, even though there is none visible in the menu. If I want to fly with a realistic tail number I have to give one every… single… time. Broken since release.

The experience continues, you losd the flight and the first thing you need to do is check your CG, there are situations that are yet to describe when the CG is out of limits. And so on and so forth.

The sim is beautiful to fly in, very stable for me and my older hardware. But to get there is an adventure.

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It really is sad what they did to this sim, functionally and graphically.

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Ya; It seems quite different from what I had August of 2020. Only time will tell if things start to shape up. I think they need to get on it though. I cant see even the most patient and dedicated of simmers sticking with it if this next year is similar to its first. I feel the worse for new simmers/xbox guys who have no frame of reference to past sims. They have to be feeling a bit confused at this point.

Its a leap forward for graphics especially for VFR but if that’s all ya got there may be some problems with people sticking with it for the long term especially when each new update seems to degrade those graphics in some way.

Kind of like a trophy wife at this point. Looks great but her looks start fading and you figure out she’s kind of dumb too.

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By any chance, do you have Capture One installed? I also had CTD recently, there’s workaround for fixing this.

Works great. Don’t know what you’re talking about. The game is as good as never.

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Nope, no Capture One.

Happens to me since the SU5 / WU6 hot-“fix”. Before the hot-“fix”, it was stable. (But yeah, major A/P issues that are new since SU5.)

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