'HELL'-enic Intrigue

[BaiterOne]

Hi,

I installed the Hellenic Helicopters Package into my FS2004 over the weekend and discovered a Greek hornets' nest.

When I created a flight to see the new hardware in Megara, FS stopped working!! It had worked perfectly earlier on in Weston, Ireland.

After lots of experimentation I found that I could reliably create the flight into Megara if I removed all the traffic bgls - a bit drastic - but it worked!

If I then introduced a traffic bgl in to the scenery folder, for instance, the Scottish Air Ambulance, with 1 King Air B200 and flying into 15 airports, all in the UK, it caused the flight into Megara to bring FS2004 down again.

Then I put a bgl with my traffic for Weston back in, removed the Ambulance bgl - and the flight worked.

Then I put the Ambulance back in on its own and the flight worked!!

And I tried the flight again and it failed!!!

All flights created for the same aircraft, same time and same weather scenario.

How can a single traffic file involving airports in the UK have such an influence on the area around Megara?

I know it is not the new package - it is something inside in my current FS2004 around the Megara region, with or without the new MAIW Megara airport.

LGSV Stefanovikion works just fine under all conditions.

Any ever experienced gremlins like this?

For the moment I have reloaded all my traffic files and am flying happily around Ireland

Thanks

Walter

[Victory103]

Tested in FSX while flying a beta model with some mods, got a several long (>2 min) pauses as if FSX was loading AI or scenery. The model worked fine in other locations, so I need to see what is going on in Greece. I'm running all MAIW area packages and some non-MAIW rotary AI, AIG airliners in the area with stock scenery outside of AFDs for the airbases.

[JohnTenn]

Walter

In your folder for your HTAI king Airs, do you have paints that are that are not in DXT3 format?

I have experienced crashes with the AI from the flightdeck packages because they are in a different format, DXT1 in this case.

When I go to Megara the textures load slowly, I assume because some of the scenery textures are in DXT3 format.

Remove the HTAI King air folder from your sim and try to load at Megara.

Last question, do you have HSP Greece installed. Some of the files may be conflicting.

John

[VulcanDriver]

Walter

Last question, do you have HSP Greece installed. Some of the files may be conflicting.

John

Just been to Megara and all is well on my set up and I am using HSP Greece. AH-64s CH-47s and B200s (as in the package) all present.

[JohnTenn]

John

Thanks. I also have HSP Greece installed. I have had issues with other airports conflicting after I had made changes relating to flattens etc. For this one I removed most of the afcad related files and the coastline from the new package.

I would then be inclined to check the textures of the aircraft possibly linked to the crash.

John

[BaiterOne]

Hi,

I am almost 100% certain that my problem has nothing to do with the Hellenic Helicopter package. The problem most likely existed before in my FS2004 and was waiting for me to visit Megara.

Anyway, if I don't have AI Traffic in, I can get to see the new Megara - a very toothless and vulnerable airbase without the CH47 and AH64 fleet to guard it. (I have never seen an aircraft in Megara - how sad ).

I have tried unsuccessfully loading with various single traffic bgls on their own, with aircraft that do not crash the sim at their own airports.

Accidentally today I went to Mikonos instead (LGMK instead of LGMG) and the sim crashed.

Obviously I have a problem with my sim - I cannot see myself going back to square one to reload everything so I will just have to avoid that part of Greece in my flying expeditions.

Thanks for your help and suggestions...

Walter

[BaiterOne]

So, a couple of hours ago, this morning, I put all my AI traffic back in to FS2004, including the the Hellenic Helicopters, and enabled all of the HSP scenery I had disabled, and went for a flight around my home airport, Weston EIWT. Thoroughly enjoyable!

Feeling so joyous, I decided to create a flight to go to Megara. Lo and behold, it loaded perfectly! I took a quick tour of the place - slewed around, did some pirouettes, examined the parked aircraft, saw a CH47 take off, had a good look at the church on the hill and got out. No problems. Fantastic!!

I remembered then that I hadn't seen any King Airs on the field so I went back in to Megara again - once more it loaded up perfectly. Did my previous trick until I found a King Air on an apron down towards the end of 26L. Then went to look at an AH64 up close - slewed around... and the sim dropped out and stopped working! Left it in disgust.

Tried again a few minutes ago and couldn't get the sim to fail no matter where I went on the field or how many pirouettes I did.

Took out the spikes and the church and went back in - no problem at all. Visited Mikonos, which had previously brought the sim down, and everything went beautifully.

So now, not having done any changes to the sim, it no longer fails where it had yesterday!

I will not look a gift horse in the mouth and will just have to accept that I have either a temperamental FS2004 or a temperamental PC.

Thanks

Walter

[Firebird]

Is your PC overclocked by any chance? I used to have a problem with an old PC where it would crash every time that I took a flight from Brize Norton to Northolt. Turned out that whilst it would mostly work there were some occasions that the memory speed would not work. I also crashed a lot whilst flying online.

If it is overclocked try dialling it down a touch. If it is not or you don't know how then do not touch it. Only bad things can happen if you don't know what to do or you don't have a simple to use tool.

[BaiterOne]

Firebird,

Thanks for your interest.

I receive hand-me-down PC desktops from my son who is big into gaming. He gave me this one about a month ago, just in time for me to upgrade it to Win 10.

He tells me that he has overclocked the i5-3570K as per the manufacturers recommendations at set-up, so he doesn't reckon there should be any great problem there. Anyway, he was playing some of the most up-to-date shooters at high rates on it, and all he complained about was that he couldn't max out the setting on some of the games. He doesn't think FS2004 would exactly tax it.

He rants about my monitor being from before the ice-age .

My specs (taken from Belarc mainly) are:

Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1511 (build 10586.545)

3.40 gigahertz Intel Core i5-3570K
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Board: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8Z77-V LX Rev X.0x
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
UEFI: American Megatrends Inc.

8148 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory (2X4096 DDR3 SDRAM)

KINGSTON SH103S3120G SSD (120.03 GB) (System Disk)
INTEL SSDSC2CW120A3 SSD (120.03 GB) (FS2004)
ST2000DM001-9YN164 [Hard drive] (2000.40 GB)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2048 MB GDDR5 SDRAM
DELL E190S Monitor

SB Audigy (5+1)

Thanks

Walter

[Firebird]

If I were you, I would ask him to reset the overclock to the default settings.
By all means have him note down the current settings so that he can return them if no problem is found but like I said on one overclocked system I had the ONLY thing that blew up was FS9. My guess would be that it is something to do with the age of the program.

I didn't believe that was the issue either at the time.

[John Young]

My current PC had exactly the same problem when it was delivered over-clocked a few years ago. My supplier told me that some old games just don't like over-clocking, as Steve is suggesting. They gave me the settings and the process for reverting the BIOS to an un-clocked state and having done that, the problem went away.

John

[VulcanDriver]

I overclocked mine a few months ago for a test FS9 crashed a lot so I reset it to the factory default.