FA-18E (Fighter Jet) Issue

[jgf]

My knowledge of programming is prehistoric - TS Basic, COBOL, and Fortran - if those are familiar, you also remember acoustic couplers and paper tape. I'm a morse code guy in a cell phone world.

[b3burner]

Wow, and the fact that I'm using flight sim on a pentium chip laptop, ought to tell you how deep my knowledge of computer programming goes. All this is fascinating to me, but I just get so lost when CTD's occur in what seems like such randomness from my untrained perspective.

Often if I can fix things by bypassing them or eliminating them, that's usually the path best chosen for me. I am able to see most of the "important" gauges on the F/18 panel... including the HUD. So whatever I'm missing by bypassing the original 'dsd_xml_sound' file... apparently isn't anything too important (or noticeable).

Of course... when in doubt, hit the "W" key, and I get to fly my F/18 with Cessna gauges along the bottom! LOL (How special is that?)

Actually, one last thing that's interesting to note in all this (that I failed to mention earlier), is that when I first posted this thread the problem was intermittent, and I'd often have to fly for 3 minutes or more before the CTD occurred. It wasn't until I started isolating the troubled files by taking JGF's advice and placing "//" 's in front of the gauge lines in the panel.cfg file one at a time and honing in on the problem, that I would get instant CTD's when I loaded the plane. Actually, forget loading the F-18. It had reached the point that if the naming conditions of the files I had described earlier were met, it would crash trying to load the simulator with ANY plane! So the fact that as I experimented w/ it the CTD seemed to evolve into something different, was a strange occurrence in and of itself.

[old_wombat]

Having started my computer career in May 1973, I can certainly remember all those, and even more primitive . The bad news for you is that in the context of this error, the C programming concept of interest has no equivalent in those languages.

Steve from Mudgee.

[jgf]

Wow, and the fact that I'm using flight sim on a pentium chip laptop, ought to tell you how deep my knowledge of computer programming goes. All this is fascinating to me, but I just get so lost when CTD's occur in what seems like such randomness from my untrained perspective.

My remaining knowledge is quite shallow; I had little interest in programming but four quarters were required by the engineering curriculum. And computers are so capricious their problems often stump the "experts". I once had a game that ran fine with 32meg of RAM (that should tell how long ago this was) but would refuse to load when presented with 64meg, claiming "insufficient memory". Two weeks of communication with the actual programmers via CompuServe, during which they even resorted to building a computer identical to mine, produced an unusual solution ...they gave me a free copy of the W95 version of the game.

.... So whatever I'm missing by bypassing the original 'dsd_xml_sound' file... apparently isn't anything too important (or noticeable)....

Most likely custom sounds whose absence would only be noticed if you'd ever heard them initially. For example, the Digital Aviation Do-27 has barely audible creaks when the rudder pedals move and a more pronounced squeak when the trim wheel rotates; I don't notice the lack of such sounds in other aircraft but have flown this little plane so much I would immediately notice if there were no "squeak-squeak-squeak" when I adjusted the trim. (More humorously, the first few times I flew it I was looking around my desk for the source of the squeak.)

Having started my computer career in May 1973, I can certainly remember all those, and even more primitive . The bad news for you is that in the context of this error, the C programming concept of interest has no equivalent in those languages.

Steve from Mudgee.

Ah, no bad news for me, I did not like programming at all. Basic and Fortran were easy enough, just not interesting, but a more turgid mess than COBOL would be hard to imagine. Sporadically over the years I've dabbled with other languages, but I'm so pathetic I can't even get a grip on html or Java, much less something powerful. (fwiw, I went into R&D, specializing in wideband analog circuitry and linear power systems.) You have me by a couple of years; excepting a brief dalliance with a quirky Sinclair my love/hate with computers began in 1975 (would have been earlier but for a three year span between high school and college devoted to the proverbial "sex, drugs, rock and roll").