DEVELOPMENT ISSUE #4,976 - ACARS: Resume Flight = Disaster |
Reported by |
Tyler Devereaux (DVA3220)
on 09/15/2017 21:37 ET |
Assigned To |
Luke Kolin (DVA043) |
Issue Status |
Won't Fix on 11/03/2017 10:33 ET |
Issue Priority |
Medium |
Airlines |
Air France Virtual, Delta Virtual Airlines |
Security |
Public |
Area |
ACARS |
Issue Type |
Bug |
Issue Description |
So, I just tried to use ACARS's "resume flight" feature. I had to restart my sim due to a glitch. My SIM restart went fine: I used my FSUIPC auto-save and was back up and running in no time. ACARS, however, was a complete disaster. After I restarted P3D, ACARS kept spamming "Unable to read position data" every few seconds (very annoying, by the way... the first 60 messages were sufficient). My first thought was to restart ACARS; however, I found that I couldn't close ACARS without cancelling the flight. So, I force-terminated the process and restarted ACARS. As expected, when I restarted ACARS, I was prompted to resume my flight.
What I expected from that point: ACARS would continue recording my flight and everything would be fine.
What happened: ACARS took over the sim to reload (presumably to relocate my aircraft) in the middle of an event, without warning, crashed my sim, and ruined my flight.
This was after I'd already upset the controllers by reconnecting the first time. I just finish apologizing and getting resequenced, only to have ACARS reload the sim and try to place me right back in the middle of where ATC didn't want me. And then, in the middle of forcing P3D & the NGX to load on top of it self, the sim crashed, which meant I needed to log in a 3rd time to an already upset controller.
The third time I loaded up P3D, ACARS was completely out of whack. The splash screen was still displaying, randomly alternating from full opacity to the semi-transparent state. The main window was yet again spamming the same error message (about 3/sec) "Error detecting aircraft type" with a few errors pertaining to my .air file (couldn't read due to the spam of the first error). The splash screen just remained on "Restoring Lockheed-Martin Prepar3D/64" indefinitely.
Out of consideration for the hard working controllers, I just gave up on my flight rather than log in a 3rd time.
This is a mess. The ACARS ruined my flight. At a minimum, there should be a very prominent warning, with flashing text, bells and alarms, when the application prompts the user to take an action that will result in the sim reloading/relocating the aircraft. I had no idea that this was about to happen. I try to be considerate online and, among other things, not teleport around during busy events.
In the process of writing this ticket, since I'd already decided to give up on my flight, I terminated ACARS and restarted it again, to give it a second chance to properly resume my flight. It again forced P3D into a "Loading" state, followed shortly thereafter by another crash. Additionally, ACARS finally gave up and gave an error message "Error restoring flight - timed out after 75125ms." It then popped up an "Error Console" with an option to send error details. That failed too.
There needs to 1) be a warning about what ACARS is about to attempt when resuming a flight and 2) checkbox to disable fiddling with the sim.
My software, if it matters:
Windows 10 (version 1703, build 15063.608)
Prepar3D V4 Professional
PMDG 737 NGX
ACARS 3.2 (Build 121 Beta 11) |
11 ISSUE COMMENTS |
Andrew Vane (DVA2887)
09/16/2017 09:11 ET |
Hi Tyler. I'm so sorry for your frustration. v4 is somewhat new and I'm not sure our ACARS implements FSUIPC 5 or not. This may be the issue. I will convert to an issue tracker for Luke. Thanks for posting your specs. This is definitely useful and thanks for involuntarily being a beta tester. Luke is persistent and I'm sure these issues will be worked out eventually.
Side note: We are having some detailed discussions in Ops on how to better implement v4 aircrat into our programs. Unfortunately, there isn't any freeware available yet that I know of. |
Andrew Vane (DVA2887)
09/16/2017 09:11 ET |
Converted Help Desk Issue at http://www.deltava.org/hdissue.do?id=0x2649 |
Luke Kolin (DVA043)
09/16/2017 09:31 ET |
I will have a longer post later but the bottom line is that restoring from a sim crash is not guaranteed. It looks like your p3d had some significant issues that ACARS could not recover from. Generally speaking ACARS flight restores work well, but it's not 100%. More than likely the flight save file was corrupted by P3D.
ACARS will restore back to a last known good state when it does a flight restore if the delta between your current position and the last saved position is too great. |
Luke Kolin (DVA043)
09/16/2017 09:36 ET |
I see the bigger issue - you are trying to link FSUIPC Autosave with ACARS autosave. Don't do that. If you have automatic flight saving on in ACARS you do not need FSUIPC autosave, and if you don't have automatic flight saving on, ACARS will not restore the flight. |
Tyler Devereaux (DVA3220)
09/16/2017 12:32 ET |
Hello again. Thank you both for responding so quickly. In my frustration, I see now that I neglected to include some details and I think I've steered you in the wrong direction. I think I gave you the impression that P3D had a catastrophic issue and I was hoping ACARS would save it. I'm sorry about that.
A couple notes:
1) My sim did not crash, initially. The only times it crashed were induced by ACARS. I understand that restoring from a crash is a sketchy business; however, I really didn't think my circumstance should've been difficult to overcome. P3D was not frozen, nor was ACARS having trouble tracking my flight initially. I had an issue in the VC (if it matters, the center console stopped updating properly, so I coudn't change frequencies) and, rather than take a long time troubleshooting the issue, I opted to simply restart my sim. At the time I decided to restart my sim, the sim was fully responsive, and ACARS was tracking the flight normally. I performed a manual save to ensure that minimal progress was lost (I used FSUIPC's save slot and overwrote that with my manual save). My P3D restart and reload of the flight was without issue. I loaded the flight, gave the PMDG time to re-initialize and figure itself out, and I was back in business. Once the sim reload process completed, I noticed that ACARS never seemed to reconnect to P3D (as indicated by the spam of errors related to position reports). At this time, I restarted ACARS, and that's when the problems began. Until I attempted to resume my flight in ACARS, everything was fine. The sim was loaded, the plane was flying, I was on course, all was well. When I attempted to get ACARS on board, everything fell apart.
2) As I alluded to in #1, I really don't think it was the save file (and I mean no disrespect!): the sim loaded just fine each time, initially. It was only when the ACARS resume feature attempted to wrangle the sim that things went downhill. In every case (I tried several times), I loaded up P3D just fine and effectively restored my flight without any issue. Once I tried to get ACARS to resume logging the flight, ACARS would send P3D into a loading state and eventually crash P3D.
3) FSUIPC-ACARS linking. I wasn't "trying" to do anything. I haven't messed with the settings on either of them. FSUIPC saves my flights by default, which is a feature I appreciate. I haven't had any crashes since moving to P3D, but that feature proved invaluable during my FSX days. Aside from crashes, I generally like to use that last autosave to start off wherever I parked during my last flight. However, if it matters, I did not do that this time. I had not had time to fly my plane to my departure point for this event, so I actually loaded a fresh flight for this event. ACARS "Automatic Flight Saving" is also enabled, and I don't recall ever messing with this setting. It is currently set at 90s. |
Tyler Devereaux (DVA3220)
09/16/2017 12:49 ET |
Luke:
I did some more digging, trying to see if P3D produced any log files that may shed more detail. Unfortunately, I didn't see any logs saved -- I discovered that there's an option to enable Content Error Reporting and, unfortunately, it's not enabled by default. (I've fixed this for the future.) I did find some information in the Event Viewer, though. In each of the logged P3D crashes, I found identical faults. I've included the last one below; however, the only difference between the crash logs were the process ID, application start time, and report id (which makes sense).
=======
Faulting application name: Prepar3D.exe, version: 4.0.28.21686, time stamp: 0x594a7255
Faulting module name: ai_player.dll, version: 4.0.28.21686, time stamp: 0x594a7254
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000004d4f9
Faulting process id: 0x28ac
Faulting application start time: 0x01d32e890678ffaa
Faulting application path: E:\FS\Program Files\Prepar3D v4\Prepar3D.exe
Faulting module path: E:\FS\Program Files\Prepar3D v4\ai_player.dll
Report Id: e9c9409c-7385-4f38-ab2a-35b3d98bbd91
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
=======
Since the module was ai_player, I thought my AI settings might have something to do with it, so here are my traffic settings:
Airline traffic density: 0%
General aviation traffic density: 0%
Airport Vehicle density: Low
Road vehicles: 0%
Ships and ferries: 0%
Leisure boats: 0%
And here is my [TrafficManager] excerpt from Prepar3D.cfg:
[TrafficManager]
AirlineDensity=0
GADensity=0
FreewayDensity=0
ShipsAndFerriesDensity=0
LeisureBoatsDensity=0
IFROnly=0
AIRPORT_SCENERY_DENSITY=2 |
Luke Kolin (DVA043)
09/16/2017 15:59 ET |
With regards to #2, ACARS doesn't do anything to the sim beyond telling it to load a specific saved flight. Everything else is entirely within the sim, and if it doesn't get to a good state, there's nothing I can do one way or another. If SimConnect isn't giving me good data, I cannot control that. I just wait until the sim gets to the point where it matches what I think the saved flight should be.
For #3, you were mixing ACARS and FSUIPC autosaves. The only way you can restore a flight using ACARS is to restore using the "ACARS Flight" saved flight, which matches the last known good sim position. If you want to do a manual restore, you can manually load that flight and then attempt to restore the flight using ACARS; it should match and not prompt a reload of the flight. Attempting to restore any other saved flight is likely to cause ACARS to load the saved ACARS Flight into the sim.
I can't speak to why ai_player is crashing; you may want to ask around to see if others encounter the problem. |
Tyler Devereaux (DVA3220)
09/17/2017 20:12 ET |
Luke:
That's what I've been trying to say, which is why I reported it as a bug. #3: I -wasn't- trying to mix saves. I had a good save I wanted to use and ACARS wouldn't let me. I would have been very happy for ACARS to let me use my save instead of its own, which was obviously corrupted (as evidenced by the crashes). I did load my manual save, then I started ACARS, and the only choice was to click yes to the prompt to restore my flight or click no and then be prompted to delete the partial flight record.
What I expected, and what it seems like you expect, is that ACARS would allow me to resume the flight using the save I already loaded. This is not what happened though.
The prompt specifically states that the user should have the sim ready (with the aircraft loaded) prior to clicking in the affirmative. In my opinion, this suggests to the user to load a flight up. This is exactly what I tried to do, so it was very surprising that ACARS then prompted the sim to reload after instructing me to have the sim loaded already. It is for this reason I recommended a prompt that more clearly explained (/warned) of the consequences of clicking yes. |
Luke Kolin (DVA043)
09/19/2017 09:54 ET |
Tyler, if the flight you restored wasn't saved by ACARS, then you were mixing saves. When ACARS restores a flight, it does a check - are we within (I think, don't take these numbers as exact) 2nm and 1000' of the last known position? If so, it considers this "close enough" and keeps going. If not, it loads the ACARS flight. In both cases, it purges any flight position records that were after the current sim time.
Here's the challenge - if your last save was too far away from where ACARS thought it was, and therefore it considered the sim to be in an unknown state and restored back to its own known good state. That's what I mean by mixing saves. |
Tyler Devereaux (DVA3220)
09/19/2017 10:16 ET |
Okay, I understand what you're saying now. I'm sorry.
Three thoughts then:
1) If ACARS determines that the loaded flight is not suitable to resume, could an additional prompt be added prior to reloading the sim?
2) Is it possible for ACARS to recognize "okay, the loaded save file doesn't match my 'last known good state' position, BUT it matches the one prior to it" and use a prior position report? I have noticed during submission of completed flight reports that ACARS collects several position reports and includes them in submission.
3) Not sure if you've picked up V4 and can test on that platform, but if not, is there a way I can help get you more data to determine why the ACARS save was crashing P3D? |
Luke Kolin (DVA043)
11/03/2017 10:33 ET |
The challenge I have is that I don't have an easy way of determining if a flight not saved by ACARS is suitable to resume. There's a large number of edge cases that I don't need to think about and don't want to validate going forward.
I'm not sure I want to add another prompt - this is the first time in several years that anyone has raised an issue about it. I'll close the issue for now, but if there are further reports I may reconsider. |