resolved unusual OOM in KPSP/SCA

[spesimen]

season's greetings.

 

i'm having a sort of odd OOM issue just off of KPSP when flying with SCA, using FSX-SE.

 

i am flying the CATH1 departure which takes you sort of through a u-turn inside the mountains above the airport using the majestic q400.

 

in 3 occasions now i have a repeatable crash that occurs when i reach around 10,000 feet.

 

the first time i didn't have vas monitoring on but the second and third time i watched it like a hawk. i was at 1.3-1.6gig free while i was on the ground and during the first part of the departure procedure. as soon as i crossed 10,000 feet my free VAS plummeted from 1.3gig to 500meg and then to 140meg over the course of about 4 seconds and then crashed.

 

what is strange is that i flew into this airport with the same settings on a trip from KSQL/NCA and never dropped below around 900meg free. i guess maybe i was already below 10,000 by the time i was this close to the airport, but i didn't take notes as it was working great. the settings are basically kind of light already, using sparse autogen. it seems strange that it would be loading MORE stuff above that altitude rather than less. 

 

for my next test i will try disabling the features such powerlines and/or windfarms and maybe look at removing some of the KPSP options as well, i had never had issues with eveything enabled there before. i thought i would post here in case someone else had noticed a similar issue at that location, in another thread jarrad mentioned that the windfarms should not be a particularly large VAS hit either.

 

cheers!

-andy crosby

 

relevant order numbers:

palm springs:FSS0428236
sca:FSS0441747

 

[Heronjr]

Hi,

 

Same here...

 

Best

[Jarrad Marshall]

G'day Andy, 

 

A couple of things to try:

 

1. Try the same approach again with your four FTX_NA_SCA scenery entries temporarily disabled (unchecked) in the scenery library. Monitor your VAS useage.

2. Try the same approach in another addon aircraft (with SCA enabled). It doesn't need to be a FPS-friendly aircraft - the point is to note whether the VAS fluctation is consistent with various aircraft, or more likely with the Q400. 

3. Could you please post some screenshots from your cockpit at various points where you note the VAS drops - I am interested in what direction your aircraft is pointing (ie what scenery areas are in your field of view), your location and the VAS drop. Have the co-ordinates enabled in the screenshot with shift-Z to help identify the specific location. 

 

I'd suggest trying these options first - whilst you can certainly try disabling specific items in KPSP, I suspect that the cause is something more general than that. Also, specific line items outside of the airport itself (windfarms, powerlines etc) will have negligible performance or VAS impact. 

 

Cheers,

Jarrad

 

 

[Heronjr]

Hi,

In my case, I cannot offer any screenshots because, when approaching KPSP, the FPS drop is abrupt, quickly colapsing the whole FSX system. But I can describe what happened just before:

 

Using a Caravan II F406, took off from KCRQ, maintaining 7500ft until TRM, vectored for RWY31L. As turning left from TRM, starting to descend to reach TEVUC at 4000ft in order to align with the 31L approach, things started to deteriorate badly. What happened next was not exactly an OOM neither a CTD, but a rapid FPS drop and an FSX freezing which I could manage with CTRL-ALT-DEL, Task Manager and stopping the not responding FSX.

 

The aircraft used is a non FPS aggressive type which I have been flying most ORBx regions and using its airports. After the above events, I took off from KCRQ and flew 01H42M up to KMRY (Monterey), crossing almost the full ORBx SCA, without any FPS drops.

 

Best,

[spesimen]

hi i did some further tests also

1. if i unchecked the SCA entries the problem does not occur.

 

2. i tested with the pmdg737 and had same trouble, it did not OOM but it did similar to what heron described, my sim stutters out of control with 1-5second pauses and a total fps of around 1. the VAS was 1.2 on the ground and never went below 1.0 but the sim becomes unflyable upon reaching that position. next i will try something like a default plane just to see what happens.

 

3. similarly i have done several other flights around SCA areas (KLAS-KMRY, KSQL-KPSP) without any troubles so it does seem possibly rare and specific to this location.

 

here are some screen shots .... if you look at the CATH1 chart it basically occurs when around reaching the EMRUD waypoint and on the turn back towards PSP. but i think it also seemed to kick in at around 10,000 feet rather than the lat/lon being the only factor. both the planes i tried ended up around that altitude by that point, so trying it in something less burly may prove informative.

 

 

cheers and merry christmas yall

-andy

 

[Jiri Kocman]

I get OOM short after fly over KPSP. It was my first OOM in v3 and usually i have about 1GB avail. VAS.

For me it was compatiblity problem with KTNP

[Jarrad Marshall]

G'day Andy,

 

Hope you had a nice Christmas. Just picking up this topic again after the holidays, thanks for testing those results. I've run similar tests (on different aircraft though), but can't replicate any kind of VAS hole like yourself or Heronjr, whether that be at waypoint EMCUR or transitioning through 10,000ft. 

 

A couple of new things to try;

 

1. Jiri's suggestion above may be on to something - do you have 29Palm's KTNP installed? If so, does disabling this in your library still yield the same result?

2. If this doesn't affect anything, could you run the same flight again but with AI disabled? If you use custom AI (including any of the usual payware/freeware packages), I have a suspicion this is a likely cause, as the ground AI for most of the large airports in the LA basin will load into the sim's memory somewhere in the vicinity of KPSP - this will put a tremendous single-event strain on your VAS. Others who have had similar spike issues in the past have put it down to this specific element.

3. If you use any tweaks to your FSX.cfg, try running with a clean cfg file (after backing up your own). There were a couple of users in the past who had issues that were caused by unusual tweaks. 

4. Possibly related - another user had an issue that was causing him problems a few months ago - see here. 

 

Cheers,

Jarrad

[briansommers]

I too have the same problem, but I've been on FSCLOUD when it happened, could this cause its?

[spesimen]

howdy! i had some time today to test a few more things.

 

jarrad to answer your suggestions above:

1. unfortunately i don't have any sceneries installed in the area except for KPSP. the closest ones besides that are KSEZ and KMRY. (all fabulous airports btw

2. i normally run with all sliders at 0% and use UT2 for my traffic. i disabled it and no dice, still crashes.

3. tried with a rebuilt clean fsx.cfg and still happens. this isn't too surprising as i don't think i had any tweaks in there other than an affinitymask setting that was added by ASN and a texture max of 1024

4. not sure what he did exactly - i applied and un-applied the global and hybrid settings but didn't help... in fact the issue occurs with both ftx global hybrid and with north america region set. 

 

a few more data points:

1. i repro'd it with a default aircraft (beech king air) also. in this case it started freaking out when i passed the 7.5dme from the PSP vor  (104 radial) even though i was at 8500 altitude.

 

2. since it seems mainly to happen as i am pointing southeast down the valley i took off from KTRM (jacqueline cochrane airport) which is around 20nm to the southeast. i climbed to 11,000 and then flew to the PSP vor and then on the 104 outbound radial on the vor as per the procedure. not a single stutter! in fact i was getting nice performance like 50-70fps in the default king air. i guess this implies that it is something about the transition from the airport to whatever FSX does with scenery above 10,000.

 

3. i tried with the 737, holding my altitude to 5000, flying the first part of the procdure back to the hold at PSP. then i stayed in the hold and climbed. i got one stutter when i was near the farthest point in the hold (about 6.5-7nm from PSP, with 1minute legs) but otherwise it worked fine. it seems like this narrows it down to something very specific about altitude and position, in addition to transitioning from the ground.

 

4. i ticked some of the individual layers for SCA instead of all of them and turning off the _CVX layer seems to be the magic one.

 

anyway i'm out of ideas, this is one of the stranger bugs i have seen. one of the highlights of testing it is i saw the easter egg where the water truck is spraying the js41 engine that is on fire which i had missed before that, was quite amusing  

 

cheers,

-andy crosby

 

[Jarrad Marshall]

G'day Andy,

 

Thanks very much for the detailed response - and very nicely done with the methodical testing, that helps enormously. 

 

The CVX culprit is quite interesting, and may possibly point to something that is already being changed within the KPSP file structure for the upcoming compatibility patch. 

 

Could you please try the following:

 

1. Re-enable all SCA/KPSP scenery entries in your library

2. Make sure that FTX-Central is set to North America

3. Go to your Flight Simulator X\ORBX\FTX_NA\FTX_AA_KPSP\scenery folder and temporarily remove the following files:

CVX_Westsim_KPSP_Landclass.bgl

LC_1619.bgl

LC_1619_seasons.bgl

LC_1620.bgl

LC_1620_Seasons.bgl

LC_1719.bgl

LC_1719_Seasons.bgl

LC_1720.bgl

LC_1720_Seasons.bgl

ZZ_CVX_Palm_Springs_ExcludeTraffic.bgl

 

Run some tests again in your trouble spots (and headings/directions) and see if this removes the spikes. 

 

Cheers,

Jarrad

[spesimen]

great success!

after removing those files i was able to fly the departure in both the 737 and q400 without any problems.

thanks jarrad!  when the patch is available, presumably i should put those files back before patching?

 

cheers

-andy crosby

[Jarrad Marshall]

G'day Andy,

 

Great to hear - those files were already slated to be removed for SCA compatibility for visual reasons, so good to know they were the issue.

 

Yes it will be a good idea to put everything back as it should be just before you run the KPSP patch once it's released - our installers are usually very good at cleaning up errant files like this, but to be on the safe side just place them back when the time comes. 

 

Cheers,

Jarrad

[MacKuen]

Hi Jarrad,

An indirect confirmation. I have also encountered a (mostly) replicable "freeze" of FSX when flying to the southeast of KPSP (with your KPSP and SCA both installed).

This is with (1) MilViz C310 and (2) Carenado A36. Flying at something like 2,500-4,000 feet and the pilot gawking at the great scenery. (Autogen Normal. No 29 Palms.) In both cases the VAS was well below the danger point. Thus, this was not an OOM.

The sim would be normal until all of a sudden it encountered stutters and the FPS slowed to the very low single digits and then stopped. For details of one instance, a screenshot of the exact location, a jpg is downloadable from DropBox here.

Three other instances have the same result, sometimes slightly earlier and sometimes slightly later – always as cruising down the valley toward the Salton Sea. (On another occasion, a test with the default C172 and did not have a problem.)

I have cut short my testing as it seems that you have a solution. Another test today with the C310 – this time with the designated bgl files removed from the Palm Springs installation as you suggest. And everything was fine. No stutters. No freeze.

Hope this helps.

Best of the NewYear,
Mike

 

[Heronjr]

Hi,

 

Removing the BGLs pointed by Jarrad, got success here too. All of the approach from TRM to rwy 31L touchdown in KPSP done with high FPSs. Now, looking for the path.

 

Best,

[CZZ]

Jarrad:

Is Orbx's KPSP (a Global base airport) suppose to display correctly when Central2 is set to North America?

[Jarrad Marshall]

G'day CZZ,

 

KPSP works perfectly with FTX Central v2 set to either North America or Global.

 

Cheers,

Jarrad

[MervA]

Thanks Jarrad,

 

Was doing the Cath1 Dep out of KPSP yesterday on the pilotedge network when my sim CTD, what the hay !!!

 

But coming here, I soon found the issue, and your temporary fix, thanks mate !

 

I've only taken out the Land Class files,  and all looks good

 

Cya!

Merv

[Steve Colbert]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who has encountered this (X2), I was very puzzled but I shall try this fix.

 

Flying to PSP from KSAN, KLAX or KLAS is the perfect hour or less flight in a twin like the Aztec or Navajo.

 

Great job Jarrad will watch for the patch also but will remove these files.

[Steve Colbert]

I recreated yesterday's exact flight from San Diego to Palm Springs today afer Jarrad's file omissions and not only did the sim not hang up, the freeways around KUDD are no longer grass covered!  

 

Now I'm even MORE pumped about KPSP!

[BrianV]

Hi, this topic is a bit old but I have the same problem of sudden crashes of P3D v3.3.5 when flying from 29 palms KTNP to Orbx KPSP. Everytime I reach about 10 miles from KPSP the flightsim closes abruptly. I have all of the latest updates which I checked does all of what Jarrad suggested above (those files have .off extension). Anyone else experiencing this? It may be a problem with P3D v3.3.5, but I am not sure.

 

Thanks for any advice!