P3D crashes during startup **SOLVED**

[aurel]

Hello,

when I try to run P3D v3.4 (with Hotfix 2 or 3) with your products installed (using what I assume is the latest Standalone Addon Manager available from your site, which I downloaded yesterday), it crashes while the P3D splash screen is still open.

Please advise.

Thanks,
Marc

Background:

I fly in VR (using FlyInside), mostly GA, and mostly VFR, and while I've got a halfway decent machine (4790K, GTX1080, 32GB, SSD), I have to put some work into getting decent framerates — in this context, "decent" means better than 45 fps for most of the time, while drops to 30 fps are acceptable; below 25 fps, the experience in VR becomes seriously unpleasant — and keep the VAS usage within healthy limits (those extra large views needed for supersampled VR take their toll). I use Aerosoft's "SIMstarter NG" to switch between profiles with different configs depending on how demanding the scenery is.

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a handful of products from you: GSX, XPOI, Honolulu and the Hawaiian Airports packs.

I installed all products and found that I couldn't use XPOI at all because it had a huge impact on performance in VR (even when only showing a tiny number of POI markers), so I got rid of this first. I'm not complaining, because, after comparing with P3D "flat" (ie. without VR), it seemed obvious to me that it's a problem caused by an interaction of XPOI and VR, which will probably be resolved at some point as FlyInside receives further optimizations.

Then I played around with GSX for a bit ("Uh, nice, I can call a Follow-me instead of turning on the ugly yellow arrows!") but I found that, while the performance impact appeared affordable at first, my P3D started to crash a lot. A LOT.

I visited the premium platform for flight sim support (ie. Twitch) and found that quite a few streamers (and viewers) were experiencing stability issues at this time, while your products received updates at an unusually high frequency. My conclusion was that there were issues that you were currently working on and that I should just deactivate the products (by disabling bglman and couatl in dll.xml/exe.xml, I left SODE alone) and revisit them at a later time. I was told that turning off bglman would also render your DRM system inoperable, so I should expect the airports I purchased to have missing buildings.

Last night, I landed at Hilo, which was devoid of buildings, so I tried to enable bglman again. I did not enable couatl at this point, because of performance considerations. I found that, with bglman enabled, P3D would always crash during startup, ie. while the splash screen was visible, before the scenario window even opened. I looked for updates and from your FAQ I gathered that I should download the "Standalone Addon Manager" from http://www.fsdreamteam.com/products_addonmanager.html.

It ran once giving a few errors and asked me to reboot. I assumed that some files might have still been "in use" after P3D crashed, so I re-ran the Addon Manager after rebooting. This time around it did not show any errors.

Still, P3D crashed during startup. I tested with "flat" P3D (ie. by starting P3D with a default prepar3d.cfg and without FlyInside) to make sure it wasn't an issue caused by FlyInside. It also crashed during startup.

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this support request, because the issue appears to be with the Addon Manager and not with a single product, and I don't really care much about GSX any more — flying mostly GA, I find it of limited benefit, and I don't really like the idea of running a Python interpreter inside my sim only to be able to open and close a few hangar doors, so if possible, I'd rather just pass on couatl. I'd just like to be able to see buildings at the airports I purchased. If I lose animations or moving service vehicles without couatl, so be it.

I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to debug or even solve this issue.

(It feels as if, whenever I make an exception from the "don't purchase products with intrusive DRM" rule, I end up paying way more than expected in the form of lost quality time.)

[virtuali]

when I try to run P3D v3.4 (with Hotfix 2 or 3) with your products installed (using what I assume is the latest Standalone Addon Manager available from your site, which I downloaded yesterday), it crashes while the P3D splash screen is still open.

Do you have FSUIPC installed ? If yes, your problem doesn't have ANYTHING to do with GSX, and it's caused by FSUIPC not being compatible with Hotfix 3 yet.

None of our software uses FSUIPC, so the problem it's totally unrelated to us, you only noticed it when installing GSX, because we released the update the same day the Hotfix 3 was released so, your crash was caused by updating to the Hotfix 3 with FSUIPC installed, not installing GSX.

and I don't really like the idea of running a Python interpreter inside my sim

No interpreter runs "inside your sim". It's exactly the opposite. It's because it runs ENTIRELY OUTSIDE your sim, that we can do several things that would cost precious VAS otherwise.

In fact, one of its advantages, is that you don't have to use that cumbersome "Simstarter", which changes the scenery library at each start, because even our most demanding sceneries, are ENTIRELY discarded from memory when your fly outside their area, while the "other" sceneries made just with .BGL, and entirely in the hands of the bugged memory management system of the sim, which is known for not being able to discard unused scenery areas, even hundreds of miles outside their normal range. That's ONE thing that Couatl is doing from you, without requiring to change the Scenery Library at each startup, with the included aggravation of the associated scenery cache rebuild.

I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to debug or even solve this issue.

First, try to disable FSUIPC.

[aurel]

when I try to run P3D v3.4 (with Hotfix 2 or 3) with your products installed (using what I assume is the latest Standalone Addon Manager available from your site, which I downloaded yesterday), it crashes while the P3D splash screen is still open.

Do you have FSUIPC installed ? If yes, your problem doesn't have ANYTHING to do with GSX, and it's caused by FSUIPC not being compatible with Hotfix 3 yet.

Uh, that's a bit counter-intuitive, because using FSUIPC with bglman disabled does not seem to cause any issues for me. Since I depend on FSUIPC for my controller configuration, I'll keep bglman disabled for now and will revisit it when FSUIPC has received an update.

No interpreter runs "inside your sim". It's exactly the opposite. It's because it runs ENTIRELY OUTSIDE your sim, that we can do several things that would cost precious VAS otherwise.

Oh, I see, so the couatl module I load in the sim is just an "interface" that the actual engine talks to?

I appreciate you took the time to clear up this misunderstanding. I'm not sure what could've caused my poor experience (ie. the high number of crashes) with your products in a previous P3D version then, I assumed (yeah, sorry) it was the extra strain on VAS. (I was not using SIMstarter yet at the time, but I was using FSUIPC).

Thank you for your advice and the explanations,
Marc

[aurel]

First, try to disable FSUIPC.

Confirmed:

FSUIPC only – P3D starts, no problems
FSUIPC + bglman – P3D crashes during startup
bglman only – P3D starts and repeatedly displays "The addon <unknown> is causing the Couatl Scripting Engine to restart" (until I chose not to restart Couatl)

I'll check the forum for that message.

[aurel]

More confirmation:

FSUIPC+bglman – not crashing any longer after upgrading FSUIPC to 4.962 (which was just released, it seems)

To be more precise:

loading up at KSTS – <unknown> causing Couatl restart
loading up at TQPF – <unknown> causing Couatl restart
loading up at PHTO – P3D opens its main window and then exits

The log complained about… uhm… "module has no attribute gsx" or something like that. Can't look into this further right now, but later I'll try running the Addon Manager again and starting P3D without SIMstarter interfering to make sure SIMstarter doesn't mess with the configuration in some unintended way.

[virtuali]

FSUIPC+bglman – not crashing any longer after upgrading FSUIPC to 4.962 (which was just released, it seems)

This clearly confirmed the CRASH problem was always FSUIPC. Updated FSUIPC, problem solved.

bglman only – P3D starts and repeatedly displays "The addon <unknown> is causing the Couatl Scripting Engine to restart" (until I chose not to restart Couatl)

This is an entirely different issue, could you please post the exact error log ?

[aurel]

This clearly confirmed the CRASH problem was always FSUIPC. Updated FSUIPC, problem solved.

I agree and I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that bglman was to blame. But you can see how I came to that assumption.

This is an entirely different issue, could you please post the exact error log ?

Certainly:

Code: [Select]

couatl v3.1 (build 3625)
panic log started on Wed Feb 08 15:21:04 2017

problem raised by addon <unknown>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "couatl\common\fsm.py", line 73, in executeDoFuncToCompletion
  File "couatl\GSX\assistanceServices\__init__.py", line 825, in do
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'gsx'
The only other information I can offer at this point is that I looked at GSX in the Addon Manager and it said it was active and the "reinstall" button was greyed out.

Probably unrelated, I have 6529 occurrences of "Warning: airport XXXX described in multiple BGL files without proper DeleteAirport record" in the log file. Do I need to worry or can I ignore them? Looking at a selection of the affected airports, they could have in common that they're OrbX products or that they were updated by "fsAerodata" (a service to import Navigraph cycles into the sim).

Thanks for your help,
Marc

[aurel]

Update: Re-running gsx_fsx_setup.exe seems to have resolved the issue that caused the Couatl restart. P3D still exits after loading when I try to load an existing save file at Hilo. Next, I'll re-run all the Hawaiian setup files and I'll start a fresh scenario instead of loading an existing one.

[aurel]

Last update (hopefully): those steps resolved the remaining problems. No more crashes or errors during startup and Hilo has buildings.