ANSWERED Solutions for customers getting CTD/g3d.dll errors

[John Venema]

Consider this scenario:

You are flying over Orbx PNW, enjoying your flight - when you begin to see large black squares appearing on the terrain, and blurred ground textures. Then some stuttering and a loss of frames. You continue your flight, and the black textures disappear, but re-appear in different places. After 25 minutes of this - BANG! FSX exits suddenly to the desktop and you may even see a dialog box with a "g3d.ll error" or other similar message.

Frustrating stuff! We feel your annoyance, pain and plain anger at how this spoils FSX for you.

WHAT CAUSES THIS?

Way back in 2006 and even 12-18 months ago, CTDs were rare, if they happened at all. But something has changed over the past year and a half and we have noticed an escalation in reports from FS users all over the world, and for many different sceneries, airport, aircraft and other FS addons from many vendors. So the question is - what has changed, and why is this an issue for some users?

We don't profess to know the answer to the above, but we can offer some theories and of course, some solutions below. Firstly, let's wind back to 2007/9 when Orbx released FTX for Australia and then PNW etc. People's hardware and environments were predominately dual-core, Windows XP or Vista, and machines had modest RAM and hard drives. We also did not get any reports of CTDs, g3d.dll errors or a lot of crashes. Remember, FTX's architecture has not fundamentally changed since its first release, but it was commonly recognised (and we never shied away from) that FTX did place a lot more burden on people's hardware simply from the perspective of our much higher density of autogen and also the 3D lighting system.

Fast forward to 2010/11 and we begin to see the emergence of these CTDs. What has changed since 2006/7? Let me present a list of things which have changed for most FS enthusiasts:

- Faster hardware - CPU/GPU/HDD/SSD/RAM

- Increasingly sophisticated FS addons - complex aircraft, environment textures, HD textures, shader mods, moving cameras, higher resolution scenery imagery, 3rd party tools, DLL plugins and even aircraft with completely custom DLL-based physics and cockpit systems

- Two new Microsoft operating system releases - Vista and Windows 7 - and their countless patches and some service packs

- New Windows tuning tools, anti-virus tools, optimizer, defraggers, GUI enhancements, and countless other apps

- "Bloatware" PCs being shipped - that is, vendors like HP, Dell etc pre-installing whole suites of apps which 99% of customers don't use or are unaware of being installed, both passive and active, including Windows services

- The emergence of many "tweaks" for FSX which have only begun to become popular in the last 18 months

Think about this: after three years of coding the engine and countless hours of testing and beta reports, there's a reason ACES locked LOD to 4.5 and textures to 1024 - because the engine clearly showed signs of stress when pushed beyond those vital horizon and texture limits. FSX is not Skyrim where modders can throw 4096 textures, countless mods and upsized files at it; Skyrim's horizon rarely goes beyond 5 miles at best. (Its whole *world* is smaller in square miles than some Orbx airport photoreal areas). FSX is one of the most sophisticated far-distance 3D engines ever made, with a horizon of 70+ miles; but you need to respect that and not push it to do things even the ACES engineers knew would break it.

So now consider that since FSX SP2/Acceleration, there has been zero code changes to the FSX engine, but we now have significant amounts of horsepower pushing that engine, under new operating systems and in many cases with multiple tweaks applied and multiple layers of FS addons - all of which are vying for a slice of the FSX engine which is single-threaded and completely not designed for the layers sitting on top of it today. You have immense CPU power pushing a single-threaded engine at higher and higher clock speeds. Yes, there are benefits, but also stresses induced.

The issue is this: the FSX engine is under more stress than it even has been since it was released. It is being asked to drive higher resolutions at faster refresh rates and with multiple layers of increasingly complex addons, higher resolution textures and DLLs which it frankly, it's struggling to cope with. Today's FS users are hammering FSX very hard, in a nutshell.

So FSX is beginning to protest under this burden, and we see these CTDs manifesting as a result.

SOME SOLUTIONS

Orbx has always listened to our customers. Your feedback, bug reports and (constructive, consultative) critique is what makes our products better. We have recognised that CTDs do happen, and we have spent considerable time, money and research on trying to minimise them. We have released new libraries and recently a patch to our 3D lighting system to take stress off the FSX engine. All the while, we are continuing to implement more rigorous testing of our new products to ensure that less missing GUIDs and other possible causes of stress are no longer a factor in our addons.

This does not mean we accept that Orbx FTX addons are the cause of CTDs, but we do and have publically admitted that there were holes in our products which may have added to the stress being added to the FSX engine. So our ongoing mission is to continue to plug those holes, and we expect other vendors to be doing the same, and learning from their customer reports and feedback as well. We are never too proud or arrogant to assume our products are perfect and bug-free - but at the same time we have from day one continually offered free service packs and patches and continual improvements and new features to our entire product line.

So let me offer some possible solutions to these CTDs, which may or may not eliminate them for you, but in our team's opinion they will go a long way to reducing their occurance.

1. FSUIPC New beta 47.49d - Pete Dowson is an FS legend and was developing stuff long before Orbx was born. So when he speaks, we listen. When he tells us he's fixed something, we should all listen. In this instance a new beta build of his FSUIPC DLL seems to have been sucessful in trapping many CTDs and early reports suggest a much more stable FSX environment under stress loads. We highly recommend Pete's module!

A. If you don't have FSUIPC yet, download the full installer from Pete Dowson's web site.

B. Once you have done the setup or if you already have FSUIPC, download the new beta 47.49d - http://fsuipc.simfli...FSUIPC4749d.zip

Unzip the file and move the enclosed FSUIPC4.dll file to your fsx/modules folder and you are done. There is an ongoing discussion with Peter over at AVSIM about his current beta builds if you want to keep tabs on his debugging efforts - http://forum.avsim.n...ost__p__2175043

If you want to show your appreciation, you can purchase the full registered version.

2. The latest Orbxlibs - http://fullterrain.c...t.html#orbxlibs

At the time of this post 111014 was the latest version. These libraries contain new dummy bgl files which plug "missing GUID" errors, both in default FSX and also in our own sceneries. Whilst there is no direct link between CTDs and missing GUIDs, eliminating them just removes stress from the FSX engine, so we always recommend you install the latest Orbxlibs which is where we continue to plug those GUID holes.

3. The FTX 3D Lights "Day/Night" beta patch - http://www.orbxsyste...ouble-your-fps/

We released a beta patch a while ago, which has probably now been buried under other release announcements. We highly recommend that you download and install this simple patch if you have FPS issues on modest hardware. Long story short - it disables all our 3D light poles and attached effects with a simple icon click. In our continuing search for better performance we discovered a bug in FSX whereby light effects were being polled for and called, even during the day when they were off. So replacing the light poles and effects with a dummy buried model removes the stress from the FSX of polling for thousands of objects and their effects during the daytime, when they are not need. In some cases this simple patch has doubled people's FPS over Seattle and other problematic FTX areas.

We will be integrating this patch into FTX Central by way of some buttons at the top of the main screen.

4. Less tweaks to fsx.CFG

This is subjective, so take it as it comes - my personal opinion, and how I use FSX. Simply put, I use a vanilla fsx.CFG and don't add any tweaks at all, other than some simple lines to remove the annoying red texts that appear on-screen. I have used this approach since 2006 and I'll be honest with you - I have never encountered CTDs/g3d.dll errors - ever. This is likely due to keeping my FSX installation as vanilla as possible, not adding complex layers of DLLs and other addons, and also ensure my Windows environment is bloatware-free. So take that advice or leave it - it's not a religious argument, just my recommendation.

ONGOING DISCUSSION

So where to from here?

We will continue to find ways to improve our products always. We welcome your error and bug reports, suggestions, critique and customer feedback. As I said, it's your feedback that make our products better.

What we WON'T put up with is offensive posts and troll-like behaviour from individuals who insist on pushing CTD agendas and who have become somewhat fervent in their attempts to lay blame on particular FS addon vendors, Orbx included. Believe me, we are the first to admit our stuff is not perfect, and we're mostly thick-skinned when it comes to language barriers and certain tones in posts. But we're not stupid, and we don't suffer fools lightly, particularly those who indulge in Orbx-bashing as sport. Please show some respect to us and other vendors, and we'll return that in kind by continuing to work *with* you to make our products better and better.

As such, we will not be tolerating rants or long threads about CTDs on our forums. That will now be history. If you want to highlight possible issues or even fixes, best to post in a meaningful and helpful manner and if anyone takes you to task or tries to incite a flame war their posts will simply be deleted and the topic locked.

So there you have the official position, explanation, possible solution, and our forum discussion policy in one easy digest. This is not a topic for discussion, but our company reference point.