Today's infuriating MSFS experience - CTD since SU5

Don’t developers program to a common set of APIs? There are only two main choices, AMD or Intel. I don’t understand the “millions of different setups” argument.

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That right there exactly. There are many, as evidenced by these very forums, that are PC savvy and know how to maintain a tidy machine and ensure that our discreet components all work together nicely, who started experiencing CTD for the first time ONLY after SU5.

On the user’s hardware side of things, The most common culprits are mismatched RAM and under powered PSU’s. This mainly is due to ‘upgrading’ by the user.

Something was introduced in SU5 that played havoc with otherwise solid setups. How can I say this? Because in EVERY update to date, there has been something broken with said update and many changes made that were not disclosed in the release notes until the community discovered them and were later admitted to.

Bottom line is, they created this flurry of CTD with SU5.

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No infuriating MSFS experience for me today.
I have found the way to totally eliminate them.
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Do not open MSFS … QED

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I feel your frustration and can only say that If you want to use MSFS again than you really must do a complete re-install. Personally that is what I did and I did not put on any add-ons. I know it is better with some of these add ons but I just kept my sim totally “vanilla” without any additions and it runs good. In the past if any issues came up I would report it to Zendesk and usually in a couple of days they corrected the issue. I know having different liveries and Orbx airports etc make it a more realistic experience, for me leaving it alone and running it has made a sim that runs .

Drivers, windows, gaming services, xbox app all updated?
Are you using any apps for various things. Example being sound control (it comes with motherboard, like asus sonic studio). Crapware like project lasso, ram cleaner, cpu cores, etc. third party overlays like afterburner.
Third party antivirus or firewall? Disable them.
All addons removed? Including the ones from marketplace.

I will put my experience here.

I have only had one CTD. Don’t have any addons. Downloaded SU5 and started flying - all good and no problems. Then decided to enable rolling cache (always had it off before) and put 8 as it’s size. Once it created the cache I started flying. Sim got very choppy and eventually crashed straight to the desktop on the first flight. I then researched on the web what size to make the cache and found out 8 is considered very small so bumped it to 32. After that sim worked great again.

It might have been coincidence, but if you are using the cache be sure your number is high enough. Perhaps a low number is causing the sim to thrash.

We have to remember the immense amount of data( aircraft, scenery, weather, and all that’s been involved in putting this together isn’t going to be perfect out of the box or even in a year. With all the things this sim is meant to do, there’s a lot of trial and error involved. This includes the possibility that some working things might get broken that were working. It’s a flip flop situation where the developers create new stuff and have to also go back and work the bugs out. Every issue is not going to get fixed over night. There’s a lot of things to deal with here. I feel your frustration, but I’ve learned that if you want a good thing, you just have to be patient and do the best with what you have. Remember, this is a work in progress.

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The Caravan and the G1000Nxi have been working fine for me once I understood how the G100Nxi works compared to the G1000 and others. The G1000Nxi implements a different flight planning engine. What may look like issues might be new features. Or the issues might be issues because it is still in beta. But loading MSFS World Map flight plans is not an issue for me.

ATC certainly has its issues. I think many of the issues are due to misunderstandings about flight planning. One of my flight plans has my cruising altitude set to 12,647 ft. ATC will NEVER give me climb instructions to 12,247 ft. Does this mean ATC is broken? Of course because it assigns an altitude above my flight plan cruising altitude. Or is ATC correct? There are specific altitudes for VFR and IFR aircraft based on the direction of flight. ATC should correct my invalid cruising altitude whether I like it or not.

This explanation is simple … Regardless of the Software its designed for it still runs on hardware of varying quality and quality of hardware components is just as important as the software aspect.

A typical example of this is the fact that many do not recommend running the sim on overclocked systems. While quite a few of us … myself included run the sim on a highly overclocked system with no issues whatsoever.

Thus the conundrum of addressing these CTD’s because one cannot really discern if it is due to hardware, an addon not playing nice or some other essential windows component like C++ redistributible not being properly installed, bad or missing drivers or some third party program that has nothing to do with the sim causing the sim to crash or not start (nahimic 3)…

I think a more comprehensive crash report is needed thats a bit easier for the end user to understand and get at least give a rough idea where to start looking for the offending item. (Windows event viewer doesnt really count)

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Really, I find that very difficult to believe … can you give a couple of examples ?

Hi @Beechc23,

I actually tossed around a few topic names and decided on that because that was my experience. There are so many threads with CTD or crash in the topic I just didn’t want to add to them.
I have submitted so many Zendesk tickets back in the earlier days of this sim when I was getting regular CTDs, mainly with the idea that the more reports/info the devs get the better they will be able to solve the issues. But to be honest, any Zendesk report I have made come back with some copy/paste generic answer. Or no answer at all. Some more recent bug reports (not CTD related) I have sent in I have NEVER got a reply to.

To other posters asking about addons and updates and external software:
Everything is updated, my community folder is empty, I don’t run any third party software for MSFS (because I have found in the past they cause CTD)
My PC is a very clean system, specifically built for MSFS just over 12 months ago with only a few games and the usual regular apps you would find on most PCs around the world: Word, Excel, Chrome etc etc
No “crapware” as @RemisLT put it :rofl:
Anti-virus is Kaspersky, if I have any more issues I will disable it.

I managed to complete a 2 hour flight in the Caravan late last night (Aus time) with no issues, can’t fly today so i’ll be back into it tomorrow to see how it goes :crossed_fingers:

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For example, Avionics in my sr-22 and Icon5 were dark even after I powered up and they remained dark throughout the flight, iI sent in a report approx 1 month ago and they fixed it…My CRJ left engine would not engage it would only go up to 25% I sent in a report and they fixed it. …ATC did not recognize that my power was on so I could not communicate with them, sent in a report and they fixed it. My point is that if you send in a report and allow them to examine the problem, the will find a solution. I have sent in over 20 reports and they have solved each one of them. It takes patience to send in a report and wait for an answer but it comes in about 2-3 days.

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Then MSFS must be one of the only AAA games so sensitive to overclocking and hardware+software configurations that it crashes. The code seems to have very little error checking, even Xbox crashes frequently.

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Yes I have seen quite a few videos of CTD’s and crashes on Xbox. I understand having CTD’s on PC as yes, there are so many hardware configurations and settings, but on console the program should be stable. This screams to me inherent instability in the coding of MSFS. Or the data streaming of scenery and integration into the sim.

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You’re right. It’s a good way to install new systems and games

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At this point, what I think needs to happen is for Microsoft to pull this development effort from Asobo and find another team to do this work.

That is a painful conclusion in a way, because Asobo have done a lot of great things to enable this game.

But the quality is so horribly bad it is just not acceptable. By quality I mean the extent to which the implemented features actually work.

While I am typing this, the game is loading. For the fourth time tonight. The first three times resulted in CTDs on “Go Fly”. I have hardly any mods or third-party content; the only thing that even applies to this flight is the WT G3000. And WT are supposedly a "first party’ developer.

That is absolutely not acceptable. Of all the games I am using (and it is a few), MSFS has the worst stability of all of them. Crashing is just completely unacceptable.

Hearing Q&A and status updates saying “we fix crashes every day” just shows how completely unacceptable this is. You cannot have crash bugs in a game that you release to paying customers. Period.

I wish Asobo could get their quality problems fixed, it is certainly possible. But one year after release, if this is the state of the game, there is only one conclusion: They don’t care. Maybe they care to the point where, if questioned, they would say “yeah of course we care”. But actions is what matters, words are irrelevant, and they have not done what it would take to produce a stable product.

We have a saying around here: ■■■■, ■■■■, or get off the pot. It is time to get off the pot and hand this over to a team that actually cares about quality.

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Defiantly worth repeating :

but on console the program should be stable

If it were stable on the Console, then one could blame the PC Platform,( different hardware, different software installs, addons etc…) but they “excuse” falls down when there are equally CTDs on the X-Box Console.

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Oh wow I just don’t get this sim sometimes
I have just completed two of the most PERFECT flights I’ve ever done in MSFS. So smooth, 70-80 FPS during the first flight (previous to SU5 I averaged 30-40, with stuttering). I’ve now limited the FPS to 60 in my Nvidia Control Panel, you just don’t need any more than that in my opinion.
It wasn’t all rosy however, while loading the second flight the sim stopped responding and I had to end it in task manager (something that has never happened to MSFS on this system before)
So I am still convinced the devs have introduced more instability with SU5, but I will press on for now with fingers crossed I can complete full flights with no CTDs. :crossed_fingers: :grimacing:

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I was going to ask if you had CaptureOne (C1) as well. I had CTDs on almost every single flight since SU5 until I discovered the thread about the CaptureOne DLL conflict. After renaming the C1 dll as instructed in the thread I have not had a single CTD in weeks.

Point is this, check that thread and see if you have a CODEC that MSFS might be loading that it shouldn’t. This was a pretty groundbreaking finding as it’s not just hardware/configuration that can conflict and result in CTDs but also completely unrelated software installed on your system.

The thread shows how to see what dlls the MSFS process is loading. There very well may be other software MSFS is conflicting with. Note there were no problems with MSFS and C1 before SU5.

Best of luck.

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Ok thanks @Anarchae1 I’ll have a look into it :+1:

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