K5083
SOH-CM-2024
SU5 broke basically all of the ported-over legacy planes that some of us did hundreds of, and that were a main source of enjoyment of the sim.
I would like to explore whether we can resurrect at least some of these. I would like for this thread to be about brainstorming how we might do it.
I will start.
Troubleshooting a problem starts with describing the symptoms precisely. Legacy planes in MSFS generally render fine in the Hangar view and the preflight animations, but they crash straight to desktop when running in the active simulator. Sometimes they crash almost immediately after you click "FLY," sometimes it takes longer, and they seem to crash only when you look around the cockpit. A couple of us have found that at least one port-over, the Vertigo Stearman, can get through an entire flight and function perfectly fine, but you may have to be careful not to look in certain directions in the cockpit, or it will CTD just like all the others.
The following is my current hypothesis. From comments by developer types here and on other forums, I gather that SU5 "cleaned up" (removed) a lot of old FSX legacy sim variables. Maybe the legacy planes crash when they try to read a variable that is now gone. They may not do that until you look at or try to manipulate something, thus the variability in when the plane CTDs. If we could get some documentation of which legacy variables were removed, perhaps we could use the MDL editor to change or remove the dependencies on those variables. At the cost of some gauges or controls becoming inoperable, we might be able to save some of the planes. DOES ANYONE KNOW OF SUCH DOCUMENTATION? Maybe provided to developers or as some part of the SDK warnng them to stop using old legacy FSX variables?
Another hypothesis, that I have seen on the Curtiss Robin thread, is that it has to do with mouse interactions in the cockpit, and that you could fix the planes by removing cockpit mouse interactions with the MDL editor. That certainly seems easy enough to try.
Anyone who is interested, please feel free to take shots at these hypotheses or advance your own. I don't know how many of us care about the old legacy planes any more, but there are definitely some that I would like to resurrect.
August
I would like to explore whether we can resurrect at least some of these. I would like for this thread to be about brainstorming how we might do it.
I will start.
Troubleshooting a problem starts with describing the symptoms precisely. Legacy planes in MSFS generally render fine in the Hangar view and the preflight animations, but they crash straight to desktop when running in the active simulator. Sometimes they crash almost immediately after you click "FLY," sometimes it takes longer, and they seem to crash only when you look around the cockpit. A couple of us have found that at least one port-over, the Vertigo Stearman, can get through an entire flight and function perfectly fine, but you may have to be careful not to look in certain directions in the cockpit, or it will CTD just like all the others.
The following is my current hypothesis. From comments by developer types here and on other forums, I gather that SU5 "cleaned up" (removed) a lot of old FSX legacy sim variables. Maybe the legacy planes crash when they try to read a variable that is now gone. They may not do that until you look at or try to manipulate something, thus the variability in when the plane CTDs. If we could get some documentation of which legacy variables were removed, perhaps we could use the MDL editor to change or remove the dependencies on those variables. At the cost of some gauges or controls becoming inoperable, we might be able to save some of the planes. DOES ANYONE KNOW OF SUCH DOCUMENTATION? Maybe provided to developers or as some part of the SDK warnng them to stop using old legacy FSX variables?
Another hypothesis, that I have seen on the Curtiss Robin thread, is that it has to do with mouse interactions in the cockpit, and that you could fix the planes by removing cockpit mouse interactions with the MDL editor. That certainly seems easy enough to try.
Anyone who is interested, please feel free to take shots at these hypotheses or advance your own. I don't know how many of us care about the old legacy planes any more, but there are definitely some that I would like to resurrect.
August
