SquawkBox

[SakisPapas]

I would like to post a rather peculiar and definately annoying problem with SB3 running on FS2002: SB3 actually runs PERFECTLY (and I mean PERFECTLY) on a rather low-end machine. For the first time I tryed it on Friday. Perfect m/p movements and liveries, fully stable! The problems actually started when VATSIM network went haywire and especially when m/p aircrafts with strange type and/or livery enter at my m/p session.

I tryed a flight from LGAV to EDDF on Sunday afternoon, which in fact I repeated 7-8 times with same end result: Whenever an a/f with the description "FOKKER Fighting Falcon" entered my session everything freezes, the mouse cursor disappears and after a LONG h/d activity, the infamous pop-up window with the message "FS has performed an illegal operation and will shut down" appears. Sometimes, but not always, it pops up an alert on the desktop saying "FS has run out of memory".

Same things happen when a m/p a/f enters the session with a VERY long description (usually more that 20 chars). Last CDT a had with FS2002 was on the final approach rwy 25R at EDDF, when such a long-description a/f entered the session with some of the characters at the descriprion being unreadable (looked like chinese to me LOL).

Here is my config:
P4 2.6GHz on an MSI m/b w/SIS chipset
512MB DDR
MX4000 nVidia w/128MB RAM
WinXP Pro English SP2
Latest drivers and OS security updates
uPNP is OFF
SB3 runs on the same machine with FS2002
Wilco Pub. PIC767 - PMDG also installed but not tested with SB3


Any ideas Gentelmen?
I'm really frustrated with all this random failures - anyway, I prefere random failures at my a/f during a flight, noit random failures in the software

[nickw]

Please can you post the technical details of the crash dump. They are normally displayed in the Error screen.

Thanks,

[SakisPapas]

I'll do it first chance given. To be honest, I didn't bother to look at the details of the error, due to my frustration but I'll try a flight with heavy traffic and hope this error pops up again.

One thing I forgot to mention: These CDTs mostly happen when I switch FS to enternal view, so somehow the programs (FS and/or SB3) have to access the livery details. But it also happened once over LGTS at FL380: I was exacly above the a/p, a FOKKER Fighting Falcon came in my session and boom! 2-3 min. of h/d activity and the well-known dialog

[tlinder]

Some friends of mine have observed similar problems when aircraft were joining their FS2002 session, I have posted it as bug 543. So far we came to the conclusion that this only seems to happen with unknown (i.e. question-mark) aircraft, it would be nice to see if this is 100% true or if there is another pattern behind these crashs.

[SakisPapas]

That's my conclusion as well, since I managed to get a frame-rate of 25fps with more than 20 a/fs on the ground, with multiple liveries, a lot of unknown "companies", but I thought everything was fine (anbd it WAS fine), since the peculiar company liveries were resolved using the generic VIP variation.

But as soon as something REALLY odd appeared -> CDT

That was probably happening because of a livery description bug or perhaps a corrupted livery library?

[joel]

Could there indeed be a buffer overflow error when the long plane name is created for qmark aircraft?

Hmmm.

Joel

[joel]

I checked and it appears there is indeed a critical buffer overflow inside FS when I add those long plane names.

I'm going to need to release a patch to this ASAP.

Standby for that.

Joel

[SakisPapas]

Well, it seemed a faint bug to me, since FS2002 and SB3 worked just PERFECTLY together. No problems with fps, voice, sceneries etc. But the point is with this problem, I'm afraid that it's impossible to complete a flight, unless of course you're lucky enough and don't bump up on those "faulty" aircrafts which is exactly what happened the first time I tryed it.

Thanks for your concern and support Joel - great job indeed! Hope this patch will be available shortly.


Sakis Papavasiliou
ASe769

[PegAir]

[Creppel]

Happy to hear this. I did not finish one flight with SB3, because of this problem.

[ACCFIN1]

[joel]

Unknown as of yet. But the fix will truncate the string in SB for BOTH versions, just to be safe.

Joel

[SakisPapas]

Well, it would seem that this patch spread peace again (at least in FS2002 world). Unfortunately I didn't have the time to test it thoroughly by means of making a full flight, but I thing that the buffer overflow issue is solved:

I logged in VATSIM at EGKK a/p, since I noticed there was a lot of "peculiar" traffic there. I have to admit that with this version of SB, the logging is DEFINATELY faster - just a small delay in adding the m/p a/fs though, but that could be the result of a server overload. What I noticed is that all those "peculiar" a/fs had a ver short name and an extra short description in parentheses. A question to Joel: is that the result of the long a/f description truncation?

The voice and ATC tuning worked perfectly and instantly as well. I also set at the livery library the VIP set to have high priority, since I saw from another thread at this forum that this could solve some lock-up problems with FS9 - I use FS2002 but you never know

As I stated previously, I didn't have the time to make one full flight, but I'll try it ASAP and report back here with the results.

Sakis Papavasiliou
ASe769