resolved 2.7.0.4625 Open Beta crash at second mission load

[wernst]

49 minutes ago, Flia said:

Surprisingly your solution still works well. At least for me. I done multiple misson loads. Restarts of mission with Shift+R. Quiting and edits in ME then flying mission from ME. And i have still no crash at all. I dont delete FXOs and i have no compatibilty mode on. Im flying only Single player missions.

 

 

ok. before I go a little crazy I wonder what happened that a normal procedure that I've been doing almost forever is now called a "solution".

Start a new mission, choose a map, choose an aircraft that, for the sake of simplicity, starts from the RWY. Save the mission. Don't leave the ME,

fly around, abort the mission and close the ME. Have a coffee break and then restart the just newly created mission from "my missions".

No crash?? What did we discuss here for weeks? Now, no 2nd mission load crash??

Not here!   

Edited May 24, 2021 by wernst

[Ironhand]

39 minutes ago, wernst said:

 

ok. before I go a little crazy I wonder what happened that a normal procedure that I've been doing almost forever is now called a "solution".

Start a new mission, choose a map, choose an aircraft that, for the sake of simplicity, starts from the RWY. Save the mission. Don't leave the ME,

fly around, abort the mission and close the ME. Have a coffee break and then restart the just newly created mission from "my missions".

No crash?? What did we discuss here for weeks? Now, no 2nd mission load crash??

Not here!   

 

 

Even crazier than that. My "non-solution solution" is to start an empty mission. No aircraft to fly, nothing but the map itself. When you start the mission you're looking at an airfield. Quit the mission.

[wernst]

15 minutes ago, Ironhand said:

 

Even crazier than that. My "non-solution solution" is to start an empty mission. No aircraft to fly, nothing but the map itself. When you start the mission you're looking at an airfield. Quit the mission.

 

I'm gradually realizing how crazy your "solution" is but at the same time how effective it might be.

I am not a native speaker of English. But now I do understand what an "empty mission" really means. Starting a mission truly empty. Full stop. 

I'm not asking if this makes any sense, but I'll give it a try . . . really? Is this seriously regarded as a solution?

 

But, after I successfully tried the Win8 compatibility mode, an "empty mission" solution is no crazier either.

 

Why do I think just now back again to the garlic ring around neck solution in this context . . .

[Ironhand]

4 hours ago, Flappie said:

We need to understand what happens in DCS when one does this. I'll ask Miguel21 to try this using FoldersChange.

 

Actually I was just experimenting to see at what point the mission broke. Crashes that had occurred roughly every other day were now a daily feature occurring with distressing regularity.

 

So I started with an empty mission. No crash. Next added a static unit. No crash when, based on my past week’s experience, I should have had one. Next added an AI flight. Still no crash. At this point I felt sure that turning the AI flight into a human flight would produce a crash. But, no. And none since. About a day and a half now which used to be my old standard. So it could be serendipity. But I figured I’d mention it and see what others experienced, if they tried it. Unless, of course, it’s the entire sequence that’s the key...

 

This crash is driving me to distraction. I love a good challenge  but I feel like a blind man working a 2000 non-interlocking piece puzzle.

 

 

2 hours ago, wernst said:

Why do I think just now back again to the garlic ring around neck solution in this context

 

I wouldn’t throw that garlic away just yet.

 

I had a professor once that wore garlic around his neck to ward off colds. It worked. No one wanted to be anywhere near him. What an experience sitting in his classroom on a cold winter day, windows closed and radiators turned up full.

Edited May 24, 2021 by Ironhand

[hornblower793]

On 5/23/2021 at 9:32 AM, Bog9y said:

Are you guys on VR or 2D?  Just wondering if my crashes are related to SteamVR. 

I have experienced using both my Oculus Rift S and pancake with the VR disabled

[II.JG1_Vonrd]

6 hours ago, Ironhand said:

This is going to be a strange suggestion but I'm going to toss this out. I figure, what the hell, we're trying everything including throwing salt over our left shoulder while facing the cardinal directions...

 

Create an empty mission in the ME. Just select a map and save the result. "Fly" it. Close out the mission. Since doing that, I haven't had a single crash with all my normal settings. I did that yesterday as part of a test and the crashes which were happening frequently have stopped. I was going to wait a few days to see if things held. But I figure several people trying that would provide the answer sooner.

This does seem to work with ME missions but what about plain vanilla missions / quick missions? I still get the 2nd mission crash (but closing 1st mission, clicking settings then "OK" does seem to work). It's an annoying bug but not worthy of seppuku IMHO. A garlic necklace doesn't seem like a bad idea though.

Edited May 24, 2021 by II.JG1_Vonrd

[Ironhand]

7 minutes ago, II.JG1_Vonrd said:

...what about plain vanilla missions / quick missions...

 

Yes. Old missions, new missions, quick missions—all are working for now without a crash which was why I decided to post today instead of waiting longer to see if things changed for the worse on my end. The more people who tried this, the sooner we’d have an answer.

[boapiu]

4 minutes ago, Ironhand said:

 

Yes. Old missions, new missions, quick missions—all are working for now without a crash which was why I decided to post today instead of waiting longer to see if things changed for the worse on my end. The more people who tried this, the sooner we’d have an answer.

Does not work for me. Crash as soon as I try to load the first instant action mission after trying the fix.

[Ironhand]

Just now, boapiu said:

Does not work for me. Crash as soon as I try to load the first instant action mission after trying the fix.

 

Well...so much for that. Just another non-solution solution.

[hawk4me]

This is certainly a file issue that is left over from removal of Windows 7 support. It also maybe due to locking the lua files that ED has done. 2.7 changed a lot of stuff and right now it seems like trying to load a mission twice inside the mission editor is a guaranteed crash especially if you have any mods. If you have any aircraft mods no solution really works to keep it from crashing sadly. There has to be a compiling problem from 2.7 that is causing this to happen to so many people. People making individual changes on there pc's and sometime's it works for a short period then crashes again or doesn't work for other's at all is pretty much a dead give away there is something in the code causing this problem.

[Smokey43]

     This may help others to troubleshoot.... My DCS was working flawlessly and never experienced any crash at all, until...... On the most recent sale I purchased the F18C and Supercarrier. It was then only after install did I experience these unusual Crashes. I believe that since I changed nothing that somewhere within the install of these two modules that something went awry. 

[Tanuki44]

3 hours ago, Hiob said:

I strongly believe that it is a memory handling issue and that the root of the problem lays in windows 10 or a dcs.exe issue regarding win 10.

 

I modified my page file from this post :

 

 and CTD were more difficult to obtain... hazard ????

 

How could we test differents memory management? 

 

 

 

 

[wernst]

20 hours ago, Ironhand said:

Create an empty mission in the ME. Just select a map and save the result. "Fly" it. 

 

Sorry, I'm a little slow at understanding.

I knew how to create and save an empty mission map. But how am I supposed to "Fly" this mission then?

Don't I have to bring in any plane into this empty mission via ME later? 

 

It would help if I could follow this "solution" step by step.

I have the feeling that every single step, no matter how small, is decisive. The devil is in the details.

[Lange_666]

14 minutes ago, wernst said:

Don't I have to bring in any plane into this empty mission via ME later?

Nope, there will be nothing to fly since you don't place anything flyable on the map.

It will give you F11 view when you hit the fly button and that's all you can do, view with F11 and the F10 map view.

But you still need to hit the "Fly" button to get there.

[Ironhand]

CRASH!

 

So it goes. Noticed something interesting, though.

 

@Flappie  When you close out the sim, the current BIN files are replaced with those having a previous date/time stamp...until the crash.

 

This is from last night's crash. The most recent bin files are from the time of the crash. Toward the bottom is the bin file from Saturday morning that was appearing after I closed out the sim. The sim had been opened and closed multiple times since the 5/22 @ 7:18 timestamp but that was the file that always appeared after the sim was closed. So where was it kept? Now, this morning, the 5/24 @ 11:34 bin file is what is left behind each time I close out the sim. Have no idea what the correct behavior should be or even if the bin file behavior is significant.

 

 

 

Edited May 25, 2021 by Ironhand

[wernst]

1 hour ago, Lange_666 said:

Nope, there will be nothing to fly since you don't place anything flyable on the map.

It will give you F11 view when you hit the fly button and that's all you can do, view with F11 and the F10 map view.

But you still need to hit the "Fly" button to get there.

 

ok. got it. "Fly" is the button to open the just created empty mission. But what is the point of this "empty mission" procedure step?
Does that mean I can load all missions crash free afterwards?

[wowbagger]

52 minutes ago, Ironhand said:

... Have no idea what the correct behavior should be or even if the bin file behavior is significant.

 

 

 

When it isn't crashing, the game should delete all the bin, txt, and ~ files upon exit. Any of those that are hanging around in the TEMP folder are there from a previous crash.

[Ironhand]

4 hours ago, wowbagger said:

 

 

When it isn't crashing, the game should delete all the bin, txt, and ~ files upon exit. Any of those that are hanging around in the TEMP folder are there from a previous crash.

 

Well, in that screenshot I posted above, only the most recent BIN file is the result of a crash. The one toward the bottom was from when I was testing starting with an empty mission and there were no crashes until last night. And you don't see the one from below that which was from the first startup after deleting that folder completely on Friday. What's really interesting is that the one from 5/22 in the AM kept getting rewritten with that date and time whenever I closed out the sim. While flying, the bin files always carried the current timestamp. When I exited the sim the bin I saw was the one from Saturday.

 

@wowbagger  You're right. I checked it against Release. Everything is the same except that, upon exiting the sim, all those extraneous files are deleted in Release. The BIN files I'm seeing must have been the result of a crash mild enough to allow the sim to continue.

Edited May 25, 2021 by Ironhand

[Bog9y]

2 hours ago, Ironhand said:

 

Well, in that screenshot I posted above, only the most recent BIN file is the result of a crash. The one toward the bottom was from when I was testing starting with an empty mission and there were no crashes until last night. And you don't see the one from below that which was from the first startup after deleting that folder completely on Friday. What's really interesting is that the one from 5/22 in the AM kept getting rewritten with that date and time whenever I closed out the sim. While flying, the bin files always carried the current timestamp. When I exited the sim the bin I saw was the one from Saturday.

Can i ask, what GPU have you got and what are your DCS TEXTURE and TERRAIN TEXTURE set to?    I have a 2080 Super with a Reverb G1 and 2nd mission loads would sometimes crash and when they didn't crash the performance would be crap. So here is what I've done and so far it works really well:

 

1) STEAMVR and WMR4SteamVR change from BETA to STABLE or LKG

2) Remove any overclock on GPU/CPU

3) Change textures to MEDIUM (from HIGH) and TERRAIN TEXTURES to LOW (from HIGH) , delete FXO & Metashaders folders

 

I get good performance now on 2nd mission loading and no crashes so far. I think the crashes/performance issue was related to VRAM somehow. No idea what or how though. 

[-Hammer-]

I upgraded my Nvidia Drivers to 466.55 (came out today) and my 2nd mission crashes are gone

[Ironhand]

8 minutes ago, Bog9y said:

Can i ask, what GPU have you got and what are your DCS TEXTURE and TERRAIN TEXTURE set to?    I have a 2080 Super with a Reverb G1 and 2nd mission loads would sometimes crash and when they didn't crash the performance would be crap. So here is what I've done and so far it works really well:

 

1) STEAMVR and WMR4SteamVR change from BETA to STABLE or LKG

2) Remove any overclock on GPU/CPU

3) Change textures to MEDIUM (from HIGH) and TERRAIN TEXTURES to LOW (from HIGH) , delete FXO & Metashaders folders

 

I get good performance now on 2nd mission loading and no crashes so far. I think the crashes/performance issue was related to VRAM somehow. No idea what or how though. 

 

My system specs are in my sig. As for the rest, it depends on whether I'm using my normal logon or the one I created to try to troubleshoot this bug. Right now, I'm using my normal logon and, so, Textures and Terrain Textures are both set to High. Under the other logon, they are both set to Low because I simply accepted the defaults. Didn't even port over my peripheral settings.

[RogSimu]

1 hour ago, -Hammer- said:

I upgraded my Nvidia Drivers to 466.55 (came out today) and my 2nd mission crashes are gone

Driver updated Nvidia 466.55 WHQL beta, still crash, damage .....

[Blinde]

1 hour ago, -Hammer- said:

I upgraded my Nvidia Drivers to 466.55 (came out today) and my 2nd mission crashes are gone

Did this too, deleted the fxo and metashaders2 folders and boom. The game hasn't crashed for now after several attemps. Works just fine with reloading older missions.

[Noluck]

[ UPDATE 05.26.21 ] Second mission load crash has solidly returned after setting page file size. It worked for a while.

 

Gang,

 

Got mine working, for now anyway.

 

Trying just about all fixes here, a complete DCS cleanup, waiting 10 seconds to exit missions and all of that. Well today it was crashing SOLID on a second mission start, did not matter if it was Instant Action SP or Multiplayer MP, it would crash on that second time loading a mission. A day ago, the crash was intermittent, now its solid and repeatable today anyway.

 

Then I seen setting the page file size. I just installed fresh Win 10 Pro 20H2 from ISO and installed/setup DCS. I never tried Win 8 compatibility mode. I forgot about setting that page file in this new Win install, so all I did was set it to 32,768, re-booted and behold...

 

I then ran 6 IA SP missions in a row, ran 6 MP missions in a row and no more crashes!, I meant not one issue. Load times are faster also.

Thought I would post this, maybe, just maybe it might be the 'fix', for me anyway. At least for now. Will chime back in if the crashes start. For now I'm a happy camper! System spec's in my signature.

 

Cheers

 

---

Edited May 26, 2021 by Noluck
Status update

[Tanuki44]

It would be nice to have other feedback on  page file settings,

 

Today again, no crash after several mission changes....