Abacus EZ Scenery program causes FS9 to crash

Hi Guys,

I've been using this fantastic program for years to enhance my airport sceneries but now suddenly, because of a selected, probably corrupt (object placement) BGL file, my FS9 crashes with a black screen and a StackHash error message. However, when re-opening my FS9, selecting and re-opening the Abacus program, my FS9 immediately crashes again without giving me the chance to select any other (object placement) BGL file. The program evidently remembers and stores the last selected BGL file somewhere, even although the BGL in question has in the meantime, been deleted. My FS9 seems to work normally but as soon as I open the Abacus program ....... BANG !!

Does any of you experts out there know where this last selected BGL file could be stored, so that I can manually change it into a non-corrupt one or how I can somehow initialize it ? An INI file somewhere maybe ? Any ideas anyone ?

Any help is most welcome.

Regards

Hans

Hi Guys,

After much trial and error messing around the solution/fix turned out to be very simple indeed but then again, if you know how to do it, then everything is simple. However, the remaining problem is that no two problems are the same and this one was definately a first of this kind for me.

It turned out that it was not the library BGL which was corrupt but the textures it was calling for. After dis-assembling the BGL in question it became possible to find out which texture names were being called for and after simply deleting these, my problem and that of the Abacus program was solved.

I had a go at trying to find out what was wrong with the corrupted textures but they seemed perfectly normal mipped DXT3s with alpha channels.

The library BGL file, now without it's related corrupt textures, has been deleted as well.

Problem solved !!

Hans

Next time you have this problem, try using DXTBmp or Imagetool to re-save the problem textures - that sometimes fixes the corruption.

The other possibility is that these are very small textures (less than 64 x 64 pixels) in DXT format, which causes crashes on some computers. The cure there is to save them in 256 color format.

Hope this helps,

Thanks Tom for your much appreciated reaction but to cut a long post shorter I did not describe any details about what I had tried afterwards and out of pure inquisitivenes only. I had in fact used DXTBmp to change the texture formats, delete/re-instate alpha channels, mipmaps, etc. but was not able to find anything technically wrong as per your suggestions. It was most probably just one of those unexplainable quirks hiding somewhere within the textures concerned. Anyway, my standard solution to such issues remains my trusty DELETE key.

Cheers.

Hans