• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

FSX Not really a developer problem but I'm desparate

Status
Not open for further replies.
Is there any specific location in the registry I should be looking? And what would I be looking for? I couldn't find any references to FSDT or GSX in there, I need some guidance as to what and where. I've quadrupal checked all of my directories and could not find anything relating to GSX or FSDT. Like I said, there must be a "ghost" in there someplace. What would be killing all of my exclusions? The flattens seem to be working again, but none of the exclusions are working. Is there any other way to remove vegetation from taxis,vehicle links,and runways other than using an exclusion since they no longer work. I even have buildings in the middle of my taxi and vehicle links. What now, just remove all of my landclasses and keep the whole thing bare and just use whatever is there naturally (no backgrounds or exclusions)? I just don't know what todo from here. Guess I may just have to 'live with it' until I can either get a new rig, or new sim. I just don't think whatever the problem is,can be fixed at this point. I'm going to try the last thing I can think of and that is to run a registry cleaner and do a full system cleaning. If that don't do it, then yeah, the rig is completely screwed up and I won't be able to use it for FSX anymore. I am already researching FS2024, but seems like it is full of 'bugs' as well, lots of complaints about it, so not sure if I want to waste money on something that isn't working properly. It may come down to me getting a new rig. Or at the least, make me a new system drive with a clean and fresh copy of win11 on it, and only install the sim and ADE with other sim related software on it. That way, when I want to sim, I just swap out the system drive, then put the original back in when I am using the computer for other things. That is a absolute last resort.
 
Last edited:
I have downloaded a 'fresh' copy of the 'modified terrain.cfg' and have replaced it in FSX. There are no running services or otherwise pertaining to GSX or FSDT , everything looks clean. I just don't know why it's only 'Exclusions" that are affected. Everything else seems to be working fine. I also thought it could be one of the tweaks causing the problem, so I put in the original FS.CFG (The one created by FSX upon install) to see, still no Exclusions are working. I've deleted the airport files and had ADE make new ones, still the same thing. You can see I've pretty much done everything possible and it ain't fixin' it. Don't know where to go from here.
 
Well, I think I may have already crossed the streams in this case. I have one other option open to me, I am going to have to wait until I get enough money saved up to do this, but I am going to create a 'virtual machine' on my rig, but I have to install the OS when I do that as when you create a virtual machine, it's just a blank slate with no OS or anything. Since I only upgrade from win10 to win11 and don't have a 'disc' version of win11, I will need to purchase one in order to install it onto the VM. Then I have to install FSX and all the other support apps such as SBX,ADE,MCX, etc.. and use the VM specifically for FSX. Hopefully that will restore full proper functionality of FSX. That is absolutely my last resort. Unless there is a way to extract all of the 'textures' from the install discs for FSX, I won't be able to fix it. I think somehow, even my backup texture folders have gotten messed up. I think the main one is the texture folder that is in the main FSX directory that's causing the problems, I think that even though I uninstalled FSX before reinstalling it, I don't think it actually removed some of the old folders and it left them there, so when I re-installed FSX, the 'infected as I am now calling it' folder and files were still there and all FSX did is replace "some" of the files in that folder, but not all of them, so remnants of GSX textures that were modified are still in there, but I think GSX just left the original filenames so there is no way to find out which files were affected, the only sure way would be to replace that texture folder with a known working one which I don't have. For now I just have to live with the issue, it's a bit distracting to take off with a big old tree in the middle of the runway, but, it can't be helped.
 
I've pretty much given up at this point. I'm not going to be simming for a long while, until I get enough money to just start from scratch. The problems with this rig is just too severe to even be fixed at this point. I've done exausted every possible thing to fix it and nothing works. FSX will no longer work with ADE projects unless you just create your airport in some far off dry,flat and barren desert somewhere. Flattens will work, but any exclusion backgrounds WILL NOT WORK. I'm not even sure if they would work using SBX exclusion polys. I might try that, but it will take months to do since I will have to go in and place road vectors on top of all taxi,vehicle,and runway links in order to be able to place the exclusion polys under those links to remove the vegetation, and since nothing else has worked, I'm not sure if I want to waste months of time doing all of that and then find out it don't work. I'm going to re-install ADE to see if that does anything, maybe for some reason ADE isn't compiling exclusions anymore, I'm just grasping at straws at this point. I may still try the Virtual Machine thing, but that is going to take time and money to purchase the required win11 discs in order to install the OS onto the VM. then I have to install FSX and all of its components, install ADE,install FSWX,install MCX,Install SBX, etc... that is ging to be a lot of work. And I have to HOPE that the ,what I am now calling an infection, doesn't spread to the VM. So for now, my rig is so screwed up, simming is no longer possible. I even found out that the exclusion problem is affecting STOCK airports as well. I could go in and just remove all vegetation from my ADE project and use it completely bare, but it would be the only 'working' airport at that point. Anyone who has any other suggestions ,besides starting over from scratch, please let me know. Oh and GSX technical support won't even help you unless you purchase the product, and why the heck would I do that? As I said earlier, I think the product was designed so that you cannot successfuly remove it, forcing you to buy it to make your sim work semi-properly. You'll still have lots of issues even with it installed. Purposely designed that way, just like MS designed Windows so you have to upgrade all the time, more money. That's the name of the game.
 
By now you might consider linking to a ZIP project backup so your airport(s) can be tested on a computer with a proper install of FSX. ;-)

I also mentioned that there is a way to convert exports from your airports to substitute Roads.

There is no reason with a basis in fact that your computer can not be restored to proper functionality in FSX and Windows.

GaryGB
 
Last edited:
I went in and checked the CVX file with tmfviewer and all of the exclusions are there, FSX is not loading the CVX file for some reason. Is there something that tells FSX not to load CVX files or to load them? It has to be an FSX problem, all of the files are being compiled correctly. There has to be something that is keeping FSX from loading the CVX data.
 
I tried re-installing DirectX9.xxx ,still no go. I don't know at this point. I would try to zip the project and link it, but there are so many support model files and such that it woudn't run properly on another system.
 
I give up and am not fooling with it anymore. I'll wait until I get a new rig then start over. I'm too frustrated to fool with it anymore. Whatever got screwed up will have to stay screwed up. I'm tired,I'm cranky and I just don't want to fool with it anymore. It's not worth it.
 
I once had something similar occur back in the FS9 era, and I was too busy IRL, so I went 6 months until I was finally able take on the task of reinstalling FS9 and a huge group of add-ons and FS utilities. ;-)

GaryGB
 
Well guess what.... no one told me to check this, but I did anyway, I removed the acceleration pack and DirectX9, I made sure everything was gone, rebooted the computer to make sure all was gone, then re-installed the Acceleration Pack and DirectX9, I wasn't expecting anything to happen, but....it worked! So somewhere in the Acceleration Pack, GSX modified something that was preventing CVX vectors to even load into the sim. Nothing or no one said anything about checking the Acceleration Pack for errors. If GSX would provide Support for "trial" users, then there would be less problems. But they only want to supply support for 'buyers'. I do not like companies that try to FORCE a product on you even when you don't want the thing. In other words they wanted me to buy something that already screwed things up, and that I wasn't going to use. How stupid is that? Anyway, it seems to be working, I'll know for sure when I attempt to make a flight tonight. I've been working on this for so darn long that I'm too tired to even do anything else. I just guessed at it, there was no mention of this anywhere online. Even FSX doesn't say you have to uninstall Acceleration and re-install it. It was a last ditch attempt and I guess it worked.
 
Oh and for future problems, I'm going to CLONE my main drive, that way if something like this ever happens again, all I have to do is put in the clone drive and be done.
Oh I also took my custom airport out of the Addon Scenery folder and put it in its own folder and added that folder to my scenery list at the top. I also had ADE compile to that folder from now on.
 
it is working..sort of...there are a couple of areas where the exclusions won't work, plus the moon and sun isn't showing up, also I've noticed my special effects (ie: Aurora.fx) are acting strangely. If you turn just an inch away from them, they turn off, move back 1 inch and they turn on. That has never happened before. For the most part, things are working, but not as they used to. I am starting to think it has something to do with DirectX causing some problems. My rig won't run DirectX10, so I can't use that. I'm probably going to just ignore these problems until I can get me a copy of wn11 on disc and do the Virtual Machine where I will have a 'test bed' to work on things. That would give me a clean install of FSX to work with.
 
Tomt478 said:
Oh and for future problems, I'm going to CLONE my main drive, that way if something like this ever happens again, all I have to do is put in the clone drive and be done.
Oh I also took my custom airport out of the Addon Scenery folder and put it in its own folder and added that folder to my scenery list at the top. I also had ADE compile to that folder from now on.
Click to expand...

Yet another reason to always keep Addon Scenery Area layer at a priority # in the stack of Scenery Library that ACES' installer puts it.


Yet another reason to not use Addon Scenery Area layer as a "catch-all" for miscellaneous BGL files, and to instead always add new Areas.

GaryGB
 
Last edited:
Tomt478 said:
I went in and checked the CVX file with tmfviewer and all of the exclusions are there, FSX is not loading the CVX file for some reason. Is there something that tells FSX not to load CVX files or to load them? It has to be an FSX problem, all of the files are being compiled correctly. There has to be something that is keeping FSX from loading the CVX data.
Click to expand...

Please read the edits added to my reply in your thread elsewhere:

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/what-the-heck.460638/post-938844


Note this FSDT thread on issues with excludes when end users manually moved Area layer positions in Scenery Library after GSX installed:

https://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,20906.msg142636.html#msg142636

GaryGB
 
The thing is I don't have any exclude folder, oh and it stopped working again. It was working for a while, but as soon as I had to restart the sim because of a win11 update install, everything is broken again. No exclusions are working, the sun isn't there, the moon isn' t there, same as before. I just don't know what is going on with this thing. Now I'm starting to suspect the FSDT installer changed something on the rig's system that is messing with graphics display. I've already re-installed the NVIDIA drivers, but that didn't help any. So FSDT installer really messed up the entire rig. It has to be that, I've re-installed everything else, FSX,ACCELERATION,DIRECTX,DRIVERS, you name it, I've done it. There are NO remnants of GSX anywhere. Whatever FSDT did, I don't think I can fix it. Maybe a professional programmer or computer tech could figure it out, but the damage is embedded somewhere within the OS I think and I don't know anything at all about the Windows structure or its system files to even attempt to find the culprit. FSX just isn't going to run correctly on this rig anymore, unless I simply format the main drive, and re-install the entire OS, and that I am not willing to do at any cost. I'd rather just save the money and buy a new rig than to do that. I have too many other things on my system that are not related to FSX to 'throw away'. So I guess I will just use FSX (although it's crappy at this moment) like it is, until I can get me a dedicated rig for the sim only. I've done all that I can do to this and there is just no fixing it at this point. Thanks for all the sugested help, but, I just don't think it can be fixed. I'll find some temporary work around like maybe removing all backgrounds and land polys, and maybe try using SBX to put them in, maybe the exclusions in SBX will work, but ADE isn't going to work anymore. I can go in and put some road vectors over my links such as vehicle,taxis, and runways, I found that removes some of the stuff on the surfaces, but not all of them. I could possibly try just re-doing the entire project itself using SBX instead of ADE and see if that works. These are absolutely last resort ideas.
 
I noticed something really weird which leads me to think the OS was modified in some way. I have a backup of my ORIGINAL main texture folder. Ok, when I first installed FSX everything worked, but if I have to shut down the sim and restart it, everything is messed up again. I got curious so I examined my main texture folder and compared it to the backup copy I saved after the fresh install, low and behold!! This is the weird part..the texture folder had changed back to the 'damaged' one. Don't even ask me how. I completely deleted EVERY SINGLE copy of that 'damaged' texture file. Explain to me how the heck the 'damaged' texture folder is being reloaded over the fresh new one? Where is FSX even getting the damaged folder from when there are NO COPIES of it anywhere on ANY DRIVE. It's like it's some kind of 'ghost folder' that gets put back in no matter what I do. I've done a virus scan, I've done a complete system cleaning, everything you can think of I have done, but still that folder keeps getting replaced. I just don't understand how. Windows must have saved a copy of that folder somewhere and it's getting recalled when I start FSX up. But where that folder is being stored, I have no idea. It's probably not even using its original name , most likely some strange name MS uses, in which case, I will never find it. I need to know if there is any way I can possibly extract a fresh copy of that folder from the install discs that I can store onto a flash drive and replace my folder each time I have to restart FSX. But I need a fresh and unaltered folder for that and one that has never been used on my system. I may have to take this thing to a repair shop and have a pro take a look at the OS and see what is messing with folders and files. I wish I could turn back time to before I even heard about GSX and prevent myself from installing it. Everything happened after I installed GSX. It was working 100% fine before that, now functionality is about 30% working. And that number is decreasing day by day.
 
A reinstall is the best way to restore original default FSX / Acceleration files.


It would not be as simple as extracting files from FSX Standard / Deluxe as you must then update it with FSX Acceleration's files.


Only the MS ACES' installer knows what is to be done and in what order when writing out Texture files from FSX install media DVD *.CAB files.

When finished, it updates multiple entries in Windows Registry, and changes the icon and name in Control Panel > Programs and Features applet.

GaryGB
 
Last edited:
And make sure you do not reinstall into any Program Files folder. Those have special protection by the operating system.
 
I've tried in the past to install FSX to a different drive other than the main drive, and it never works, it'll come up with all sorts of errors saying this directory can't found, that whatever can't be found, plus I don't have another SSD other than the main one installed in the rig, running FSX on a HDD is a no-go, too slow and FPS are so low it's not worth doing. I've never had any problems installing to the default folder, it's always worked.

Here's the thing, and I've stated this many many times since all these problems started.... No one seems to be seeing this one statement...........

Here it is............."EVERYTHING WAS AND HAS BEEN WORKING AT 100% 'BEFORE' THE INSTALLATION OF THE GSX FSDT PROGRAM ADDON. FPS WAS PERFECT AT 32 WITH OCCASIONAL DROPS TO 25, ALL EXCLUSIONS ,LANDCLASSES,WATER CLASSES, MOON,SUN,'EVERYTHING' WAS WORKING PERFECTLY. I DID NO ,AND I STRESS THIS...NO MODIFICATIONS TO ANYTHING BEFORE THE GSX INSTALLATION. ALL PROBLEMS BEGAN WITH THE INSTALL OF GSX."

I appreciate all the suggestions and insight, they gave me places to look for possible modifications made by GSX, but none of them panned out. All the suggestions imply that it was not working BEFORE the install of GSX, read the statement again. All of the problems began AFTER installing GSX. GSX caused a lot of FPS problems, and crashes of the system, most likely because my rig couldn't handle it. That is why I un-installed it. But ever since then, NOTHING works right. I've re-installed the sim THREE times now, each time completely removing directories,files, reg entries. It still refuses to work. I have even re-installed ADE to see if something there was modified, still not working. For those who may be reading this the first time, here is the problem(s) in a nut-shell.

FSX run ok, I have a lot of 'sudden' FPS drops (never had before), the sun or moon does not show AT ALL or at ANY TIME, CVX Exclusions (not exclusion rectangles) ,I'm talking about the airport background exclusions here, do not work NO MATTER how my areas are arranged in the scenery library, no matter what folder I put the airport files in, nothing, they simply do not work anymore, again, read the above statement. As far as all other backgrounds, flattens, etc.. they seem to be ok, but anything with a 'Exclude Autogen or Mask Class' will not work. I've tried everything I can think of. I'm on my 4th re-install of the sim now, but still it does not work. The texture folder I spoke of, seems to be getting modified by 'something' and I have no idea what. There are NO, I mean 000000000.0000000 remnants of FSDT or GSX that I or even a Cleaner can find on this rig. But yet, 'ghosts' of it seem to keep coming out of nowhere. I can't get any help from the tech team at FSDT unless I actually purchase the product, which I refuse under any circumstances to do.

So there you have it...I strongly believe now that FSDT installed something into the actual OS that prevents a user from fully removing the software so they are forced to buy the product in order to get tech support to actually uninstall it from their rigs. That is the only explanation. Therefore, unless anyone else has any other ideas, my only option is to just ignore the problems, work around them by possibly just removing all land classes from the project and use it 'bare bones' (Oh and it's not just my airport affected either, other stock airports are also affected) as my main airport, or lower all of my graphic sliders to bare minimum leaving things pretty much just baren, and just wait until I save enough dough to purchase a new rig to install FSX onto. FSX WILL NOT RUN on my rig anymore since the install of GSX, I accepted that now at this point, but if anyone has any possible work-arounds I can use, please let me know, fixing the problem is out of the question at this point. I just need some kind of temp work-arounds to at least make things look decent instead of baren.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top