FS9 Crash due to AI

FS9 gets stuck when I load up a flight in LAX. It definetely has to do with the AI. Though it only happens at LAX, with or without addon scenery. I start the flight and once it loads it does not load all textures in the scenery and gets stuck, it closes after a few minutes of this. Tried the same on a bunch of other locations and never had any issues. I removed all AI bgl's and had no problem then. I ofcourse want to keep the AI so I started placing them back in in small batches to find the faulty one. But quite a few caused the error, even files that used to work fine in the past. A few work and load aircraft but most make the sim crash. Any suggestions?

This can often be due to a corrupt texture on an AI aircraft. Did you change any AI aircraft recently, or update their textures?

This can often be due to a corrupt texture on an AI aircraft. Did you change any AI aircraft recently, or update their textures?

 

Most of my crash problems have been due to AI textures, including one Aeromexico 737 (I forget which) that I think had a corrupted alpha channel. If the crashes only happen at dawn/dusk/night then the problem may be in the lightmap, which can be minimised by having a generic lightmap as a fallback and only having repaint-specific lightmaps where they are necessary - saves the graphics from displaying several identical BMPs, and a bunch of HDD space too.

 

Sometimes new sceneries may have similar problems (freeware more likely than payware for obvious reasons).

 

As you said above, the only option is to go back through changes that were made to the sim (new airlines installed etc). New livery folders will have recent dates.

Load your aircraft at a remote parking spot/runway so that no ai a/c can be seen, and go to spot view. Angle the view so that you are looking down on the aircraft, and zoom in. The idea is now to cycle through the ai a/c using shift-W. A faulty texture should show up by the ai being a grey aircraft for a milisecond before the sim crashes. At least this way you should be able to determine the aircraft type, then you can begin to trouble shoot which texture.

The idea is now to cycle through the ai a/c using shift-W. A faulty texture should show up by the ai being a grey aircraft for a milisecond before the sim crashes.

 

That can get a bit hit & miss, though, with long-haul AI and the way FS routes these longer flights quite strangely at times. Also, if like me you have the sim paused during the testing (in case the offender flies out of the AI zone while you're looking for it, which can waste a lot of time) you can end up with a number of planes stacked one above the other at the spawning points, which clouds the issue. I gave up doing it eventually and just went to the brute-force "binary chop" approach of moving a bunch of flightplans into a holding pen, restarting the sim and seeing if the problem was still there (I'd save the crash flight so that I could guarantee getting back the same situation each time - e.g. time-of-day and precise location).

 

First off I would switch off AI and see whether the sim ran (to eliminate scenery as a problem and also to save the flight for testing purposes).

 

I'd then move half of the FP away to a holding area (e.g. creating a desktop folder), reactivate AI and see whether it crashed using ctrl-W. If it did, I'd move half the active FP back out and see whether it still crashed, and keep removing half until it stopped crashing. Then I'd copy every FP back in except for the last ones I'd swapped back out (the ones I removed just before it stopped crashing). If it started crashing again the implication is that more than one texture is at fault, so I'd move out the "known to be good" plans and the binary chop gets done again on the rest. I'd end up with a small bunch of suspect plans and then drop these back in one at a time, waiting for the sim to crash.

 

It's very laborious but the only methodical way, and in a complex setup with loads of AI, "methodical" is pretty much mandatory.

Hi mage

 

Yes it can be a frustrating excercise to find the culprit texture. The reason I use my method of spot view cycling first is that all my ai flightplans are in one compiled .bgl so i cannot remove individual plans. It often takes a few goes but eventually I will see the grey untextured aircraft for a split second before the sim crashes and I can identify the type. Then it is a case of removing texture folders in your binary-chop fashion. Knowing what airlines fly to the airport in question helps narrowing the culprit down quickly.

 

Most of the time I have remedied the faulty texture simply by opening it in imagetool.exe and simply saving it without having to edit it at all. In fact I now make that part of my routine whenever I add a new texture to my ai fleet.

Hi to all,

 

I had the very same problem after installing tons of AI-aircraft. At several locations the sim got stuck after not showing all the textures. It gave me quite a bit of grey hair but I found the solution how to sort it out in reasonable time.

 

You can do quite a quick scan of your AI-aircraft by turning them into 'normal' aircraft and opening them via the aircraft-menu. Open each AI-aircraft's air-file using the tiny program air-ed. It's here in the file library. Change the value 105 aircraft type from 2 to 0. Save the file and you will now be able to see it in the aircraft menu.

 

I found that any aircraft that gives problems will also do so if you watch it in the menu. I found that there were some bad textures that simply didn't show up, there were mistakes in the aircraft-file (maybe wrong number for texture folder and stuff like that) and also badly done aircraft or textures that simply caused a crash to desktop.

 

Good thing about it: you see exactly which aircraft gives you trouble and you can remove it without guessing and trying 100 times inside the sim. Just go for better textures, a different model or correct the entry in the aircraft.cfg. I found that about 5% of my AI aircraft caused any kind of trouble. It was not necessarily because of my mistake but because there are quite often mistakes in the aircraft.cfg. I also found a handful of planes that simply made the sim crash.

 

Do that procedure for every AI-aircraft and you will sort all the problems out. After finishing you can change the aircraft-type back to '2' using air ed. AI aircraft will disappear from the menu and your sim should run fine now.

 

Good luck!