FSX-SE: KCLT & KMEM CTD's upon exit of FSX. Unable clean shutdown.

[viperxbr]

Greetings,

I've been having a reoccurring problem, consistently, with just KCLT & KMEM.  The short story is when I shutdown FSX at either one of these airports, I end up with the following CTD:

Faulting application name: fsx.exe, version: 10.0.62615.0, time stamp: 0x559f9a9a
Faulting module name: API.DLL, version: 10.0.62615.0, time stamp: 0x559f9ab5
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00100c53
Faulting process id: 0x1bb4
Faulting application start time: 0x01d2e9570dbe38cc
Faulting application path: C:\Apps\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\fsx.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Apps\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\API.DLL
Report Id: 397c8aa9-554b-11e7-bdad-bcaec574c2bb

I want to stress it is only these two airports that I've observed this issue.  I've tried other FSDT airports, FlightBeam, FlyTampa, etc and they all play nicely.  KCLT and KMEM not so much.

When I run FSX, I disable all other third party scenery other than the departure and arrival airport.  There should be no conflict there.

Absolutely no VAS issue.  When this happens, I have over 2.3GB of VAS free.

All I have to do to is spawn at either of them with the kite, give it a few minutes to load/cache the scenery then quit FSX.  Takes about twice as long as usual to quit.  Monitoring the Task Manager Processes, I notice that Coualt does stop before the FSX process.  About 10-15 secs later the "FSX has stopped responding message" pops up.

I've just tried to start with a newly generated fsx.cfg file but couatl panic'd and would not restart.  I had very few tweaks in my original one anyways but wanted to rule it out completely.  Error message:

couatl v3.2 (build 3827)
panic log started on Mon Jun 19 20:27:23 2017

problem raised by engine or unspecified addon
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_AA_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_AA_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_AA_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_AA_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_Static'
{'Airport': 'KCLT', 'User Pos': (35.222518486971246, -80.93136841987203, 229.895 m, 1.90518 m, 228.45587703636744)}
Error: exception CREATE_OBJECT_FAILED in call AICreateSimulatedObject param #1 'FSDT_KCLT_JW2_Static'


So I don't know where to look next.  The new config file just made things worse.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Todd.

[virtuali]

I've just tried to start with a newly generated fsx.cfg file but couatl panic'd and would not restart.

This is normal, because by restoring the fsx.cfg to default, you lost the line that adds the Simobject paths to the FSDT folder. You must run one of the installers again, so it will be restored, and try again, using the otherwise "clean" FSX.CFG.

[viperxbr]

I've just tried to start with a newly generated fsx.cfg file but couatl panic'd and would not restart.

This is normal, because by restoring the fsx.cfg to default, you lost the line that adds the Simobject paths to the FSDT folder. You must run one of the installers again, so it will be restored, and try again, using the otherwise "clean" FSX.CFG.

I was able to restore the Simobject paths and the scenery loaded but it still did not resolve the CTD upon exiting the sim.  I didn't think it would, as I said, I didn't have many tweaks in the first place.  Also tried disabling Chaseplane (no EZdok here) but same result.

[virtuali]

I was able to restore the Simobject paths and the scenery loaded but it still did not resolve the CTD upon exiting the sim.

I'm sorry, but I still unable to reproduce this crash, following your own description of the problem (loading KCLT and stay for a couple of minutes on ground, then exiting) so it can only be caused by some kind of conflict we don't know of.

Try to disable EVERY other 3rd party addon.

[viperxbr]

So I tried disabling all non-relevant modules in both the exe.xml and dll.xml files and it still CTD'd at both airports.  I also went as far as uninstalling FSL's A320 because I know that is one of the most complex add-ons out there and could be an issue but alas same issue exists.

I do know that this all started happening with KMEM after the latest major update to Couatl/Addon Manager.  Before that, KMEM was working fine.

Also another thing I've observed with KCLT is when I do spawn at the airport, it literally takes like almost 2mins for the scenery to actually load-up.  I initially see big triangles everywhere during the loading time.  It's quite a lengthy time compared to other sceneries and the sim is unresponsive during this load process.  I definitely don't have a slouch of a machine to cause this.

Sim PC: Intel i7 2600k OC 4.9GHz, XSPC RayStorm D5 EX240 Cooling, Sabertooth P67 MB, 16GB DDR3-1600 RAM, ASUS Strix GTX 1070 OC 8GB, 2xSamsung EVO 840 1TB SSD, 1TB WD Black HD, Corsair 1200AX PS.

I'm thinking maybe an incompatibility with a video driver version or a Visual C++ Redistributable package?

Not sure....

Thanks,
Todd.

[virtuali]

Also another thing I've observed with KCLT is when I do spawn at the airport, it literally takes like almost 2mins for the scenery to actually load-up.  I initially see big triangles everywhere during the loading time.  It's quite a lengthy time compared to other sceneries and the sim is unresponsive during this load process.  I definitely don't have a slouch of a machine to cause this.[/quote+

On FSX, is entirely normal. I have that too, but I cannot see any crash. With the latest update, we reduced traffic over Simconnect a lot, which might help when there are many addon running together over it, and since API.DLL is Simconnect, they might be related. However, this fix works only with P3D V4, because we use the PD3 V4 native API to bypass Simconnect, which is not available on FSX.

Do you see any difference if you disable the "compensate object altitude" option in the KCLT menu ?

[viperxbr]

Well I finally had some time to do a full flight last night.  Flew into KCLT. The "compensate object altitude" was already disabled so I tried re-enabling it for this flight.  Unfortunately, the CTD still happened when exiting the sim.

One thing I did notice as I did the approach were the many 1-3 sec pauses, I'm assuming, when the scenery loads as I get closer.  I had the pop-up value set to 5 but it looks like that wasn't enough?  When I landed, I had around 1GB of free VAS(was flying the NGX).  What is this pop-up setting for and if I start increasing it, how/why does it consume more VAS?  Just trying to understand it's function.

Thanks!

[virtuali]

One thing I did notice as I did the approach were the many 1-3 sec pauses, I'm assuming, when the scenery loads as I get closer.  I had the pop-up value set to 5 but it looks like that wasn't enough?  When I landed, I had around 1GB of free VAS(was flying the NGX).  What is this pop-up setting for and if I start increasing it, how/why does it consume more VAS?  Just trying to understand it's function.

If a scenery is not managed by the Addon Manager/Couatl, it will load everything either when you start a flight there (during the load progress bar), or it will load it a very large range, very slowly, so you won't have any pauses, but the whole scenery would probably already entirely in memory when you are from 60-100 NM out. This means, if you are short on VAS, the sim will crash, and you cannot do anything to do to prevent it, other than lowering your settings, trying to free so VAS, or use less memory-hungry airplanes.

If a scenery is managed by the Addon Manager/Couatl, instead, each and every objects has it's own loading range, which we designed (larger for large objects, shorter for smaller objects), which means that no VAS will be "wasted", for example trying to load smaller objects on a side of the airport when you are on the other side. This means the scenery will be BOTH faster (less objects loaded = more fps) AND safer, because it will take less VAS.

However, the very act of destroying/creating objects depending on their range, will introduce some stuttering so, the Anti-pop slider is there to let you decide if speed/oom prevention is more important to you than smoothness. The slider is a multiplier of the objects loading ranges as they were designed so, 5 means that every object will have a loading range 5x larger than it was originally designed.

At 30, you can be sure that everything will be loaded only once, all at the same time, when the whole airport will enter in range (usually from 10 to 16 NM out, depending on the scenery), so there will be no other loading during the final approach, so the flight will be smoother, but more VAS will be taken, and fps might be lower.

Just try to measure your free VAS with the Anti-pop at 1 and 30, and see the difference. If you are still within safe VAS limits at 30, just keep it there.

Of course, this is entirely redundant with 64 bit, which is why, the default Anti-popup value for P3D V4 it's 30.

[garymcginnis]

FSX

Also unable to get a clean shutdown since installing KCLT/KMEM and running the latest Live Updates. For me the faulting path is always Wow64/NTDLL.DLL. I refuse to uninstall everything previous to my install of KCLT/KMEM (as was suggested) as this issue arose after installing KCLT/KMEM and those are the last add-ons installed.

As you can see from my three thred bumps, I have spent more time trouble shooting FSX after installing these two airports then actually getting to fly. My days off are precious and I (and others as well it seems) expect more from a top scenery developer. I don't sign up for hours of trouble-shooting after buying an airport, especially from a company of FSDT's stature. However the last two airports (KMEM and KCLT) have proved that theory wrong. Which is a shame because installing/managing/using previous FSDT products was just like every other company (e.g. easy).   

[garymcginnis]

I've trouble shot this back to the following FSX.cfg entry: SimObjectsPaths.6=C:\Program Files (x86)\Addon Manager\Simobjects\Misc which is automatically added under the [Main] section. Without this entry, FSX will close just fine and not crash. However, Couati does not load and will flag the sim with Couati/Add On Manager errors until you click OK, which obviously disables any scenery run by the Add On Manager.

During my trouble shooting so far, I see this is the new .cfg entry is made when you update to Live Updater. To put it frankly, my FSX is running like trash every since installing KCLT and attempts to roll back to previous .cfgs and add SimObjectsPaths.6=C:\Program Files (x86)\Addon Manager\Simobjects\Misc to old FSX.cfgs make it just as bad.

In a sick way I'm glad you are not developing for anything but P3Dv4 anymore. The anticipation for a product and subsequent let down are just the norm here in the past two years. I've troubleshoot KCLT for over 8 hours (and counting) since downloading before even posting to the forum and at least that much last year with KMEM before finally uninstalling.

[virtuali]

I've trouble shot this back to the following FSX.cfg entry: SimObjectsPaths.6=C:\Program Files (x86)\Addon Manager\Simobjects\Misc which is automatically added under the [Main] section. Without this entry, FSX will close just fine and not crash. However, Couati does not load and will flag the sim with Couati/Add On Manager errors until you click OK, which obviously disables any scenery run by the Add On Manager.

This line is of course required, otherwise none of our software will ever be able to find its objects, which would be either GSX or any of the sceneries.

To put it frankly, my FSX is running like trash every since installing KCLT

Nothing in the KCLT installer can have any effect your how the sim works.

and attempts to roll back to previous .cfgs and add SimObjectsPaths.6=C:\Program Files (x86)\Addon Manager\Simobjects\Misc to old FSX.cfgs make it just as bad.

Just try to REMOVE the FSX.CFG file (DO NOT take back an older version), and reinstall KCLT. Since KCLT uses SODE jetways, you'll need the SimObjectsPaths for SODE too, otherwise SODE won't work either.

The rest of the parameters should be at default (which is why I told you to *remove* the file, not restore an old version), but the only ones required are:

- The HIGHMEMFIX = 1 tweak

- The "Advanced Animations" flag in the sim Graphic settings, which is required by GSX.

Anything else, is best left at default.

[garymcginnis]

I knew you were going to say that, so that is why I tested it that way as well. No better. Without the other tweaks it was a stutter fest on top of everything else.

I finally gave up testing and went back to my fsx.cfg I had saved right before install of KCLT (learned my lesson from KMEM last year) from 6-29. The sim is back to a more normal state but still crashes on exit with the SimObjects line in the [MAIN] section.

I wish I would have backed up my fsx.cfg last year before installing KMEM. My fsx had never run more perfect and I've yet to get it back to that perfect spot since.

[virtuali]

I knew you were going to say that, so that is why I tested it that way as well. No better. Without the other tweaks it was a stutter fest on top of everything else.

Which seems to confirm you are trying to use an heavily tweaked FSX.CFG, which is most likely what is causing the crash. If with "stutter fest", you mean KCLT or KMEM, nothing in the FSX.CFG will change that because, what you call "stutter fest", is the Addon Manager and Couatl programs trying to save your skin and prevent the sim from crashing, by loading/unloading objects depending on distance, to prevent crashes caused by memory exhaustion, due to the combination of the sim being 32 bit and the memory-hungry airplanes that are out there.

If we didn't do any memory management, like any other scenery out there that doesn't use our software modules, the flight would be smoother and, if you are lucky and you didn't use a too memory-hungry plane or too high settings, it might not end up memory.

However, with the "Anti pop-up" setting in the Addon Manager, we give you the ability to CONTROL the memory management so, if you raise the slider, objects will be loaded earlier and, at the maximum setting of 30, memory management will be basically disabled, and the whole scenery will load when you enter its area, so there will be no stutters anymore. But the fps will be of course lower, and you'll risk OOMs, if your memory is already close to exhaustion due to the airplane or the settings.

So, again:

- RESET your FSX.CFG to DEFAULT, by removing it.

- Add ONLY the HIGHMEMFIX=1 tweak and the "Advanced Animations" flags and *nothing else*

- Raise the Anti pop-up value in the Addon Manager to reduce stuttering. If you can set it at 30 and the sim won't OOM, keep it there.

[garymcginnis]

Sir,

I obviously misunderstood your reply in the LagSpike but you misunderstood mine here.

I used a default fsx.cfg with only the HIGMEMFIX and AntiPop=30. The stuttering was not Add-on Manager saving my butt (the VAS was 1.0 remaining and yes I know the difference, I have two programs that track VAS within the sim) in the un-optimized fsx.cfg. The stuttering was the result of an un-optimized fsx.cfg.

However, that is not the point of this topic. With the SimObjects line in the .cfg, the sim does not close correctly for many of us (other people have made this same reports in others threads as well from my digging). So next time, let's try more then the simple Copy-Paste statement you keep making.

Thanks

[garymcginnis]

I just want to bump this by saying the following..... with the update to the PMDG777 and 737, PMDG now has a similar issue with a .dll not allowing FSX to close properly. I bring this up because they've heard their customer reports and are investigating. What about FSDT? I've seen at least 4 people (probably more) post about this SimObject crash on your forum.