Map crashing FS9

I have a strange problem with the FS9 map:

Within a rectangle, roughly,

Top North 53 degrees 45 seconds

Bottom North 37 degrees 34.73 seconds

Left side West 3 degrees

Right side East 3 degrees

The above area covers most of Southern England, most of France and a portion of Eastern Spain.

Within the area if I open the map for the first time all is OK, however if I open the map for a second time the map box is black and FS9 crashes with the Windows box :

Microsoft Flight Simulator has stopped working

Microsoft is searching for a solution to the problem

followed automatically by the Windows box:

Microsoft Flight Simulator is restarting,

which it does.

When inside the area everything else including the GPS works as it should.

(out with the area above I can open the map as many times as desired; the map works correctly)

I have disabled addon sceneries within the affected area (unchecking them in the scenery priority list) but it makes no difference. Within the area the problem persists. Of course it may be an addon scenery outwith the area that may be causing the problem. I am not sure when the problem first showed up so am not sure which, if any, addon sceneries are causing it. With over 1000 addon sceneries disabeling each in turn would be time consuming.:eek:

Have others had a similar problem? Was it related to third party scenery? Or can the map get corrupted? In what file is the map data stored? How is the map data updated when scenery is added?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Hi Mike, this is a new one to me! As far as I know the FS9 Map compiles it's data from your Scenery.cfg file. If your Scenery.cfg file contains duplicates or conflicts, crashes like this will happen just by being at or nearby the conflict scenery, but I've never known a crash to be caused just by opening the Map within a certain area. Because it's happening over most of France I would suspect a scenery .bgl or group of scenery .bgl's in a French Landmarks or ANO's type scenery (anything with Chateau's or Power Stations for example dotted around the country) or a vector scenery such as roads and rivers - do you have Ultimate Terrain Europe installed? There may be scenery layer conflict with that and another add-on.

I would also recommend sceneryconfigeditorv1_0_7.zip here in the library, it's well worth the time in setting up because it highlights any errors before they can actually happen in sim. My copy actually identified 8 errors in my Scenery.cfg before I even started re-organising it.

Thanks tiger1962, I downloaded scenery config, a great utility, a BIG THANKS to Andrew and John Thornton the authors.

I was able to easily unchek all addon sceneries (all 1085 of them) as well as Addon Scenery/Scenery.

The problem persists so I will have to reverse changes made by some auto installers in fs9/Scenery sub directories. Don't you just HATE auto installers. At least the problem is narrowed down. I might have to delete Scenery.dat so it can re-build itself.

This may help it may not but worth a look:

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?73425-Fs9-crashes-in-map-weather-view

Thanks ColR1948.

The problem is finally narrowed down. When the: Flight Simulator 9\ Scenery\EURW\Scenery is replaced with a virgin set (I have a virgin installation for comparison just for these sorts of problems) the problem disappears. Now I need to find which BGL or BGLs are causing the problem. This will be easy for changes I have made manually or by well behaved installers; I and they always change the extension of the original BGLs or create a folder with the originals backed up in it. I hope I don't have any BGLs that have been swapped without the above procedure, they will be a bugger to find.

Problem now solved. None of the known changed BGLs in EURW\Scenery turned out to be the problem, so they were isolated and all EURW\Scenery files swapped for those from my virgin install. The changed BGLs then copied back in. One or more of the original BGLs must have become corrupted or swapped out by an auto installer. It remains to be seen if some other scenery will show odd changes due to having it's BGLs swapped out.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Great Mike glad you are sorted, while on the subject of the map, why not try this, it gives you a moving map with lots of accurate detail.

(Plan-G)

http://www.tasoftware.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2388.0