OOM Error. How is this possible?

[Christopher Low 63]

FS(ORB)X? I am not sure whether that's a good thing or not.....

[allardjd 1,853]

@ britfrog - We're in complete agreement on X-Plane. They had a glimmer of a chance but blew it.

 

I have a great respect for your knowledge and experience but despite that, I can't agree on the rest.

 

It sounds as if you have some insider information, however, my view of things is that it's going to be nearly impossible for anyone to create a new PC based flight simulator from scratch that can meet the needs and desires of the current FS community without building on the framework that already exists in MSFS. The only people who can legally or practically do that are MS themselves, if they have a serious change of heart (possible but not likely), P3D who have licensed the MS code including the legal purview to modify and enhance it, or anyone else who may in the future obatin a license from MS to use what MS owns. Being able to use the hooks in MS software to make a payware AC do realistic things is not the same as using MS code or methods similar to their code to market a simulator - the MS copyright attorneys will be on that like stink on a skunk.

 

As far as I know the exact details of the MS-LM license agreement are not really known outside the two companies, though you may know something the rest of us do not about the license and L-M's intentions. It is also legally possible for the license agreement to be amended (or cancelled) in the future.

 

I guess the crux of my argument is that anyone who is not MS or who is not able to use MS code has a HUGE undertaking on their hands to baseline what we have now. It's not impossible, but it's implausibly expensive. The private flight sim market is simply not large enough to justify the development costs for anyone who doesn't already have much of it in their corporate can of assets.

 

The commercial training operations are not in a position to offer what we have. Their software isn't up to it. All high end flight simulators that I know of model a single specific airplane or at best a series of very closely related ones. They have a real cockpit full of real dials, switches, gauges other cockpit accoutrements. They are a good physical simulation of the cockpit of the aircraft they model, but are not very adaptable – the attributes of that aircraft, including the flight dynamics, are pretty much hard-coded or hard-wired. They are high-dollar affairs that only make economic sense if they are useful to the operators of the even higher dollar aircraft for crew training.

 

I've "flown" a number of them, including the Navy's Seahawk helicopter sim in Mayport FL, a full-motion Cessna Citation CJ-10 (that cost upwards of $20M) and several high-end static sims at a commercial training facility which charges upwards of $1,000 per day for the use of their toys (no, I wasn't paying). None of them hold a candle to some of the things we demand and get in our PC-based flight simulation. They are very sophisticated cockpit procedures trainers, “emergency generators” and flight trainers for specific aircraft – no more. That's not really what the typical flight simmer hobbyist wants.

 

One had graphics that were roughly equal in quality to about FS98. Another was a twilight-only sim because they didn't have the ability to model the ground environment in sufficient detail. Instead, they stuck it in perpetual near-darkness, with just a faint band of orange sunset along the horizon, which perstisted for over an hour while shooting approaches to the same airport – the sun literally stood still. The airports were mostly just lights.

 

All required a highly-trained, highly-paid human to operate the sim independent of the pilot and to mimic ATC which is not modelled at all. I've rarely ever seen traffic in any of them, and then only one or two AC at a time. I've seen the instructor station screens on a couple of them and in at least one case have gotten glimpses of FSX screens in part of the setup.

 

All of them that I've had a chance to play with have 4 to 10 airports available for shooting approaches, etc. The sim must be reset to move from one to another. You cannot fly any of them from one of their modeled airports to another.

 

To contrast that, here's a rough list of what we get NOW, at fairly good levels of realism (some better than others) from FSX and the available add-ons...

 

• - The ability to model most any aircraft that has ever been built or imagined, including the panels.
• - Internal and external views while in flight
• - The entire world to fly in, seamlessly
• - World-wide navaids
• - Realistic ground environment, both mesh and surface detail, both on and off airport
• - Traffic
• - Missions
• - ATC
• - Real world or user-defined WX
• - Multi-player capability, either in separate aircraft or with cockpit sharing.
• - Flight recording and playback including flying with yourself as AI
• - Open-ended capability to customize most of the above by the user, including repaints, aircraft.cfg tweaking, airport editing, scenery building, mission building, panel building and add-ons and tools for a dozen other purposes.

 

It's hard for me to visualize anyone having deep enough pockets to build an all-new sim that would allow half of that, much less expect to be able to make enough money to cover the development costs unless they already own most of the basic architecture that it all builds upon.

 

If you know an outfit that feels they can do that profitably I'd really like to know who they are so I can assure than none of my retirement IRA funds are invested in their stock. They're going to lose their shirts because current flight simmers are not going to buy into anything that doesn't deliver at least as good as we've got now in all those categories.

 

I sincerely hope P3D doesn't let us down because I believe everyone else are the darkest of horses.

 

John

[britfrog 180]

I hear what you are saying John, I have had sim checks every 6 months for the last 7 years and they are nowhere near as good graphically as fsx which is why I suggest that maybe ftx would be able to carry forward the hobbyist side of FSX which P3D legally cannot, especially as they already have a close tie with M.S. for the scenery side.

 

Dont get me wrong If P3D does go 64 bit or DX11 I will be first in the queue however their silence over version 2 is starting to look a bit ominous.

 

As far as the info over new sims this has been confirmed to me by the last two companies that I have written reviews for , as they are in communication with these companies to ensure their products are compatible.

It may well be that although they are not in possession of the M.S. machine code they may well be able to reverse engineer it, I dont know how all that works I am/was a simple pilot

[jaydor 345]

Texture fix utility.

 

Steve, Use this linc and kiss your problems goodbye..

 

http://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?/topic/2493-fslabs-texture-fix-utility-v11/

[britfrog 180]

I think the docs i sent Steve cover all this however a thing that I did overlook was this little gem

dxtfixerx.zip

available free from your favorite source

it certainly helped make some of my scenery smoother

here is their readme file

 

DxtFixerX for FS9 and FSX - neumanix 2012
-----------------------------------------

This tool fixes the stutters in FS9/FSX caused by dxt3 and dxt5 textures without an active alpha channel.

To just search for bad files without making any changes, check the box that says "Just report bad files".
To fix all faulty files, just leave the box unchecked.

Then click the "Select root folder" button to tell the program from where to start the search.
It will search all the subfolders from there on.
If you select your FS9/FSX root folder, then all your textures will be searched.

After the search is done, the program closes automatically.

Now go read the "log.txt" file that was generated. It contains a report of the faulty files that were found/fixed.

It's perfectly safe to use, as only dxt3 and dxt5 compressed bitmaps will be searched and modified. And they should ALWAYS
have an alpha channel, so you can't do anything to mess up your sim.

Enjoy!

Regards,
Peter Nyman (neumanix)
neumanix@gmail.com




Installation:
-------------
Just unzip to any location you like. A folder will be automatically created, called DxtFixerX.
 

[Mistwalker 3]

Thanks for yet more useful tips, guys. I've implemented both of those tools you mentioned above and I'll see how they do over the coming days.

 

One other thing. I've started getting an annoying split second flashing from some ground textures. It's only for a split second but it can be quite distracting. The problem is I've done so much tweaking over the last couple of weeks that I'm not sure which tweak i've over tweaked to cause this post tweaking flashing. Any ideas which over tweaked tweak I need to de tweak  in order to end this post tweaking flashing... In a tweaking sort of way?

 

Which all begs the question, "How many tweaks could a tweak tweaker tweak if a tweak tweaker could tweak tweaks"?

[brett 2,314]

Tweaks x infinity?

[jaydor 345]

Steve, have you succeeded in the OOM issues?

[britfrog 180]

he's too busy flying !!

From our email interactions it seems he has

[Christopher Low 63]

I suffered an OOM today flying from Scotflight Prestwick to ES Isle of Man. They are a fact of life when running everything at maximum detail levels (and ES Isle of Man is one super detailed addon), so I need to be more careful!

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

> "They are a fact of life...."

 

But are they (and should they be)? (Assuming that you haven't pushed all the sliders all the way to the right, of course).     

 

I ask these questions because in my experience many people have had good results from applying all four of these simple suggestions, so maybe it might be worth spending a few moments in checking that you have them all implemented?

 

•Are you sure you have HIGHMEMFIX=1 in the [GRAPHICS] section of your fsx.cfg?
•Are you sure you have the Vista version of uiautomationcore.dll copied into your fsx directory (but not registered, regardless of what some well-meaning but mistaken folks suggest)?
•Have you set up a fixed ("custom") size paging file on a disk that doesn't have your fsx installation?
•Have you applied the Desktop Heap Limitation registry patch?

 

All I'm saying is that applying all four suggestions have been found to be a help in banishing the problem. Maybe (hopefully) they might help you?

 

Just my 2¢.....  

 

Cheers,

 

Brian

 

[mutley 4,497]

Arrgh .. I can't take it anymore!

 

Tweak this.. tweak that, I quit!!

 

Nurse... to the pub...er..hospital.... 

 

 

 

[brett 2,314]

Don't worry, take your medicine and you'll feel better in the morning.

[britfrog 180]

I am afraid I disagree oom 's are not a fact of life , far from it, I have never, ever had an oom until last week when making some changes to my cfg file, and that is in over 20years yes i have had the odd ctd when flying the ngx in ftx scenery and using an lod higher than 6.5 but all of that is now in the past using dx10.

can you see my halo?

[Christopher Low 63]

I get the feeling that different PCs are affected in different ways with OOMs in FSX, even if the config files and settings are identical.

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

> "I get the feeling that different PCs are affected in different ways...."

 

D'uh.....

 

Say not so....

 

(Sorry for the following rant, but this is an old old argument for me across the years, and it's one that can be frustrating for everyone concerned, so please be understanding).

 

Even given the same hardware (RAM, graphics card allocation, O/S, number of background programs running with fsx, etc etc) things are not mysterious or variable or vague (thank you, britfrog, I'm with you      Although I have to say that your halo's a bit misty from here; simply in view of the fact that (inter alia), for me, the jury's still out on DX10 since I never have OOMs or CTDs in fs9 even at Heathrow with 100% AI, but that's a different discussion    (Later....).  Anyway.....

 

I spent a quarter of a century as a "Senior Principal Consultant " (yeah I know, but it was an American company), both in the UK and overseas, troubleshooting and performance tuning Very Large Databases (VLDBs) — think, high Gigabytes through to Petabytes — for numerous government and commercial organisations, so I have rather a lot of theoretical knowledge and hard experience in that infinitely more complex, loaded, and very focused environment that combine to tell me that even leaving aside seemingly significant variables such as Operating Systems (yes, including something as relatively simple as Windoze) and hardware configurations, there are very cold, hard, and identifiable reasons why problems occur — and these can almost invariably (there are occasional exceptions to every rule) be quantified, analysed, and eliminated.

 

FSX has its in-built problems, it's true, but believe me — it must succumb to the universal rules when it comes to problem fixing (or anything else). Thanks to many talented and dedicated people (Bojote, a few former "Aces", Kosta, excerpts from NickN on his better days, and many others) we are now very much more aware of what those problems are than was the case previously — and, of course, of how to overcome them.

 

OOMs are not a "fact of life". Neither are "CTDs". There are reasons why such things happen. The only (!?) <sigh> problem is gathering enough data to pinpoint what the reason is. (Have you seen the majority of posts asking for help (Aaaargh!) — "It crashes, what do I do?" — with no information as to O/S, hardware, context, or anything else? How can anyone possibly start to help — so of course their pleas for help justifiably remain unanswered).

 

As my wife often says, "Could you just...."(usually when the "just" means something that's inherently humungously difficult....).   

 

Cheers,

 

Brian

 

P.S. Joe — what's it worth not to tell them what's been added to your intravenous drip?   

 

[britfrog 180]

I have installed fsx in win 8  so effectively had a " virgin"  fsx.cfg i did the usual mods of him mem etc etc which Joe and I are in general agreement over,,, keep it simple  however whilst hovering around stapleford with fsx england  it became obvious that my fps were low , so i control z 'ed and i was only getting around 16fps, now remember i havent yet limited theis to 30fps as i have on my main drive, so to see what would happen i copied over my cfg from my main drive which has been quite highly altered , and immediately got 30fps in all scenarios.

What gave me the boost? i will have to find that out by trial and error but it is quite apparent that a slightly modified virgin cfg is not the solution if you want high fps

[J G 927]

Hi James.

 

I just came across this post and have followed your settings advice.  BIG improvement for my system, so thanks for this!