Free Flight Selection causes CTD

[Eoraptor1]

After a major hard drive failure I've been slowly rebuilding my various CFS2 installs from my backup discs. So far all my Rami installs work. CBI is fine. Fox Four is fine. The only thing giving me trouble is PTO. The missions load fine, but for some reason any attempt to initiate from the Free Flight menu causes a crash to desktop. Any ideas as to what might be causing this would be appreciated. Many thanks.

JAMES

[Allen]

Dose one aircraft cause the CTD or all aircraft? Also the 100 airplane cap?

[Eoraptor1]

Dose one aircraft cause the CTD or all aircraft? Also the 100 airplane cap?

I did consider this. I've been removing planes from the AIRCRAFT folder, but I'm at work now so I'll have to wait till I get home to see how many are left.

JAMES

[Eoraptor1]

Just noticed (because I rarely use it) loading the Quick Combat option also causes a CTD. It's also definitely not the number of a/c in the AIRCRAFT folder.

JAMES

[UncleTgt]

Other possibilities:

Too many ships (they also use mdl format)

Too many objects - this seems to be PC hardware dependent. Check your OBJECTS_DP folder. If you have more than 1400-1600, start archiving all those ETO weapons etc. that you don't need in a PTO install.

Bad gauge - very unusual, more likely to cause a freeze after loading, or starting QC with engines stopped, rather than CTD

Bad 2D panel - aircraft specific, on WIN 7 or later. Win 7+ doesn't like 1024 x 768 bmps. Unusual to get CTD with this, more likely plane will not load instead.

[RWILLS]

After a major hard drive failure I've been slowly rebuilding my various CFS2 installs from my backup discs. So far all my Rami installs work. CBI is fine. Fox Four is fine. The only thing giving me trouble is PTO. The missions load fine, but for some reason any attempt to initiate from the Free Flight menu causes a crash to desktop. Any ideas as to what might be causing this would be appreciated. Many thanks.

JAMES

Have you tried Free Flight from different locations to check if some locations work? Also worth checking if mission builder is affected.
is there an "error" text file with any information, eg this sort of thing?

[Mission file error]
error=Unable to init unit 1000
title=Quick Combat
filename=C:\Combat Flight Simulator 2\qc

[Eoraptor1]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. At work again so I'll have to wait to try them out. I can't really switch planes or locations in Free Flight because when I select "Free Flight" from the home menu, the program crashes. I should have been more clear about that. I did try changing the plane in the CFS2.cfg file, but it made no difference. Having too many ships never occurred to me. That is definitely a possibility. I have a lot. There are so many great add-ons, and this is the Pacific, after all. I'll try pairing those back first. Thank you again.

JAMES

[Eoraptor1]

Alright. Last night I removed every ship from the SHIPS folder except those from the original install. This changed nothing. I have just under 1300 files in the OBJECTS_DP folder for the PTO, but I have over 1400 in my Dunkirk/Battle of Britain install and that works perfectly. I'm eliminating the possible Gremlins. I have a feeling this is going to be something very simple I've thus far overlooked.

JAMES

[kdriver]

Hi James,

How big is your mdlnames.txt file? The limit is about 36 kb.

Kevin

[Eoraptor1]

Hi James,

How big is your mdlnames.txt file? The limit is about 36 kb.

Kevin

That's something else I never considered. It's probably huge. Thank you for the suggestion.

JAMES

[Eoraptor1]

Okay. It's not the mdlnames file, at least in as far as I can tell. I've started a new PTO install from the ground up. So far everything's working correctly. Actually, I've started two new PTO installs, because I'll need one for 87 Days. If I figure out what's causing the CTD's in the meantime, I'll post it here. Thanks to everyone.

JAMES

[Fibber]

.Just curious on this one, and I may be wrong, but when you are reloading from your backups are you using all the same planes ? I had the same kind of problem years back and it was the qc mission file in the main folder. It was looking for a plane I no longer used and was crashing the game. Changed it and problem disappeared.
Also do you use the utilities like the quick combat editor (JSQCED) and MK_cfs2_util (aircraft mission utility) ? These make the verification easier.

[Eoraptor1]

.Just curious on this one, and I may be wrong, but when you are reloading from your backups are you using all the same planes ? I had the same kind of problem years back and it was the qc mission file in the main folder. It was looking for a plane I no longer used and was crashing the game. Changed it and problem disappeared.
Also do you use the utilities like the quick combat editor (JSQCED) and MK_cfs2_util (aircraft mission utility) ? These make the verification easier.

My apologies for taking so long to answer. Real life has been interfering with my flight simming. Once upon a time I did use quick combat editor, but I almost never use quick combat anymore. I'll check the qc mission file as soon as I get the chance, and post what happens. Thank you for responding.

JAMES