I keep having problems with FSX, for over a year already. Can anyone help me get FSX installed propperly?

I'm not a flightsim-pro, I have no need for the ultimate FSX-experience, I only want to relax with a fun flight, so now and then.
I have one decent computer for all my work, which runs all the normal programs as msn, skype, firefox, photo and video editing, etc and I simply want to run a fun game at the side.

Some of the problems I get stuck with:
-Traffic signs/wind direction poles on the runway.
-Wheels, shadows, or flying lights drive over the roads on the airports, with no vehicle attatched.
-Being directed back and forth between 2 ATC sources, like Rotterdam hands me to Schiphol, schiphol hands me back to Rotterdam, back to Schiphol, back to Rotterdam and so on and so on...(Is there a 'make up your fucking mind'-button to use in ATC? A 'fuck you'-button would be satisfying as well). Then when I get handed to another controller I often only get the option to go back to the one that just handed me off and I keep getting back to the same controller all the time.
-Engines wont start. When I run a freshly installed FSX all aircrafts work fine, the engine is running when I load the game and they keep running all through the flight, but after a while the engines arent running when I get in and I cant get them to start, or they turn off once they're started. I also notice that the left engine does start(for a short while), but the right doesnt start at all.
-ATC window closes when I switch frequencies on any radio.
-Progressive taxing only shows when looking at it from one direction and disappears when you turn your point of view, which mostly means I have to look at the nose of the aircraft and drive the aircraft towards my point of view. In other words, I have to drive backwards with my point of view over the markings.
-As soon as I start installing addon scenery or aircrafts, all kinds of wierd bugs show themselves once or a couple of times and this can be a lot of different things, this isnt constantly the same thing with the same addon, but differs every time. Can be that GPS guided flight misses turns, that instruments go wack, ATC controllers stop giving commands halfway a flight, buildings show in impossible places(for instance, on the runway), roads run over buildings, ground vihicles drive through buildings, I get a different GPS in the GPS screen then the one that's present in the aircraft, aircrafts are parked in blocks and covers and I cant remove those, HDG and/or ALT are already switched on when I turn on autopilot, al kinds of bugs appear when switching from GPS-mode to NAV-mode, and a lot more things that have shown themselves once or twice, but nothing seems to appear as a consistant effect from a specific procedure.

Advised by FSX support from Microsoft, I already rebuild most of my computer, installed a 64bit win7 and I've been trying all kinds of things for almost a year and Microsoft cant give me one single fix for any of the problems.

I also tried to install the whole computer for FSX only and followed all instruction from Nick N, but this didnt make any difference concerning the problems I just mentioned.

So... HELP! Can anyone hand me any advise to get my FSX running propperly?

Thanks

Demious wrote on Apr 24^th, 2012 at 12:26pm:


, same here,but please remember this is a family friendly forum,and have a nice soft pillow on your desk so your head wont hurt as much when your beating your self on it.

I feel your pain, and I'm sure most everyone on this site does too, but you came to the right place to get the best info on the web to find out how to get your FSX up and running. As Daube said, FS9 is a much more user friendly sim and will get you flying right out of the box. FSX takes awhile to set up, your on the right track by going to Nick N's sticky. My advice is to take one problem at a time, don't add any add-on's untill you get the base FSX running. Once you get it going good it's well worth it. Fegedabout the ATC, sorry to say, that's the virtual government for ya .
Goodluck and welcome to the headbangers club!

Demious wrote on May 2^nd, 2012 at 3:24pm:


No your FSX addons will not work at all with FS9.
However, FS9 has quite a great base of freeware and payware addons to choose from. If you're looking for fun and relaxation, you won't need to buy any payware, a lot of freeware addons will bring you just that.

Concerning the bugs in FSX, there has been two patches, SP1 and SP2 (and Acceleration, which is SP2 with some additionnal and specific stuff). There were no additionnal updates. FSX still has a lot of bugs but nowadays with a little bit of info gathering on the forums, anybody can find the explanations on how to configure the sim properly.

I'm using FSX and I absolutely love it. But I do not only use it for fun and relaxation, I also use it because of the unmatched realism of some of its addons (paywares), which is why I cannot switch back to FS9. On the contrary, you should not get any problems with FS9:
- you will get tons of freeware planes (fun, sci-fi, airliners, general aviation etc...) that won't get any display problems
- you won't get anything like OrbX sceneries, but you will nevertheless find quite a lot of nice airport sceneries, nice-enough landclasses, nice-enough meshes etc...
- you won't get any crisp photorealistic sceneries, only 5m/pixel ones, but they already look quite good once you reach a certain altitude. Check out http://www.blueskyscenery.com/ to discover some excellent examples.

FS9 is definitely worth a try in your case.

Ok, if you liked the OrbX sceneries, then there is indeed no way back to FS9, so let's forget about this.

What is your current hardware ?
Getting FSX to work properly will require multiple steps, from setting up the game settings, the video card settings, and finally optimizing the FSX.cfg.

There are only four things that you need to keep in mind when you buy a new computer for FSX:

1- FSX wants cores and GHz. Dual cores are not a good choice. Go for quad-cores or higher. Also, don't even think about buying any CPU running at less than 3,2 GHz. The rule is simple: the more cores, the fewer blurries. The more GHz, the more FPS. Go for an i7. A 2600K is a great start, but even my i7 960 gives some nice results already, as you could see on my various screenshots.

2- FSX doesn't need a high end video card, but cheap video card (low range) are forbidden. NVidia card names are quite easy to understand:
- first number (hundreds) = the generation (more or less, because the tend to lie from time to time). The higher, the more recent.
- second number (tens)= the quality. '9' are for extreme gamers. '8' are perfect. '6' are minimums. Anything below 6 is for Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
- the third number is useless.
- the letters are relative to the power as well, but I'm not too sure about this.
Anyways, I have a NVidia GTX480 from Asus and it gives fantastic results. The card power is important to deal with high screen resolutions, AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering, and finally to handle the high-res textures on some airplanes or sceneries. You don't need the top, you must avoid the cheap, you must aim for the "good".

3- Power supply: ensure the power supply unit in your computer case is a powerfull one, enough to handle your video card (!!), the various harddrives (you might want to add some in future), the memory, the additionnal fans for the CPU, and the CPU itself.

4- cooling: summer is coming. FSX will transform your PC into a volcano and your CPU+video card will become lava if your computer case is not cooled properly. As we're just getting out of winter, people are not thinking about this too much at the moment. But in just a few weeks, we will start seeing so much topics about computers crashing on all forums, just like EVERY year ! So plan some money to get an efficient computer case, or AT LEAST a serious CPU cooling system.

Interesting reading.

For all the love in the world, and hours of faffing, i finally admitted defeat trying to get FSX to run anything like properly on my old Intel based core duo iMac running Win 7. However it ran fs9 to perfection.

The solution? I bought a Quad core i5 iMac. Ive not even touched the cfg, and it runs FSX beautifully. With the sliders maxed it still runs ok suprisingly, knock them back a little and its very smooth, now ive gone from win 7 32bit to 64 anyway! Using 32bit was a mistake!

With your PC, i dont think youll ever get there - sorry to say, but only based on my core duo experience. Fs9 on the other hand, can be made to look very good and run very well. I still think it can give FSX a run for its money.

Good luck!

Demious wrote on May 9^th, 2012 at 6:06am:


What a wonderful question!... ...!

...and one which still has me baffled, even today!... ...!

Paul... ...!

As an 8-Bit, Zilog Z80, Computer programmer from long, long ago, I have always suspected that it was due to Ace's coding of FSX which maybe was rushed, and not very efficient at the time...Microsoft delivery demands?
Perhaps, if they were to do it all over again, it may be much improved, and more efficient?

Bought a new computer this week, think this one is gonna do a lot better already.

Processors: intell core i5-2310
RAM: 6GB DDR3
Video card: Geforce GT550
Hard discs: Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm & Kingston SSDnow200 (got FSX on this drive)
OS: Win7 64bit

Everything seems to run very smooth and aircrafts fly more stable and easy then ever before.
I just started testing and only problem I'm experiencing so far, is that once I start using ATC, there are no voices and the volume of the overall sound goes down by a lot.
Do you know what the problem is here?

Thanks, I'm used that the sound just works, never had to choose another option then the one that was setup as default and since the rest of the sound worked, I didnt think it would have been the output choice.

I got most running properly now, Aircrafts are flying better and smoother then ever before, got a lot less wrong ATC commands(sending back and forth between the same 2 controlers), Progressive taxiing doesnt bug anymore, AP landings work fine for every aircraft I tried so far. The only serious problem is the screen going black, showing only parts of the view and I need to switch to map/choose aircraft etc, minimize the program and so back and forth, until I got normal view back. This mostly works, but it takes several minutes of going through different screens before it resets. It can start with going to map, or other screens, or when I pause the sim. Any ideas on how to fix this?
A second thing is that my ATC window disappears when I start or stop the push tractor.

Maybe this could help a bit about buffer

http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread.php/20310-Jack-s-guide-to-the-BufferP...

Hmmm, didnt have any problems all evening and could switch between different screens without any problems, but now I requested new IFR and everything starts over again.
I've been trying different pool sizes, but this doesnt seem to help.
Restarting the sim helps and not I cant seem to trigger the problem again, but question is: for how long?

Can it be the poolsize has to be tuned more precise and if so, how can I do this without having to try 490000000 different options? Or is there something else that can be going wrong?

Another thing I find is that I get asked to report other traffic in sight and apparently they do see me, but I havent seen any other traffic at all, ever! For over a year, I havent seen any other flying aircraft then my own. Can this point to some issue is my system?

I noticed that the problems occur when the sim has been running for a while and now it only seems to get triggered by requesting new IFR. Restarting the sim solves it, but of course its not meant to stop every flight halfway and start over...

I tried the 8.000.000 setting and it seems to work a lot better already, but I'm still testing this. I changed it while my current flight, in which I already noticed this problem, was on pause, and in the same flight I cant trigger the problem anymore, only some glitches when returning from flightplan screen back to the flightscreen.
For further tuning, by what amounts should I go up or down?

No, I havent replaced the uiautomationcore.dll yet. What can I replace this with?

I also notice that when I change back to flightscreen, from several other screens, or when I use 'scroll lock' or 'pause break', I get a small item in lower right corner of my main screen with 3 squares, one green with a 1 in it, one white with an A in it and one green with a down pointing arrow in it. My guess is this is from the HP win7 version, but I cant tell for sure. Is this something I should worry about? Can I switch it off, somewhere?

quick question, I fond posts that tell me to replace the file in the syswow64 folder and others tell me to put it in the FSX folder, which one do I follow?

Far as I tried now, I cant replace the one in the syswow64 folder, because I need permission... I got admin access, so not sure what permission they ask for.

Demious, PLEASE listen to Daube here!!!

Demious wrote on May 11^th, 2012 at 5:01am:

I suggest that you make sure all of your drivers are installed for your sound. If you did not get a CD or DVD for the mother board you will have to go to the web site of the manufacturer and down load it.

I got the UIAutomationCore.dll in my FSX main folder now and tuned the bufferpool up to a point where the screenflashes are minimal, when returning from map or flightplan page back to my aircraft. I still have some fast flashes and I can see a strange texture in the window, but that for a fraction of a second and even after 3 hours flight, I cant seem to trigger the black areas and missing parts of the picture anymore.

I'm still looking for newer UIAutomationCore.dll, the one I've got now is from 2008, but so far things are going very well, better then ever before.

Hope I can keep this up and maybe even tune it a little further, but for now I'm glad I got things working in a way that I can make a decent flight and dont have to worry about things getting messed up.
Thanks a whole lot guys!!!

I would try to remove that ac (save it in another place), and try again.

If i understand you right!??
This is the first time i ever heard of a flightstick, telling how to start up a sim/game 

Starting FSX and maintain these two keys.... that reminds me something... perhaps this forces FSX to generate a totally new FSX.cfg... that would explain why all your tweaks were gone...

I'm completely baffled now...

I reinstaled the whole machine again, after trying so many different things and instaling and deinstaling programs and addons and I had everything running perfectly again, everything seemed to work propperly and the movements and picture were so smooth, but now all for sudden I'm getting loads of problems again. Only thing I did was instal a couple of side programs like vroute, ultimate checklist, a demo of SimplatesX and a couple of aircraft addons.

-The settings of my controls within FSX are gone every time I start up FSX. Sensitivity and nulzone, as well as the control axes I programmed for mixture and prop.
-When I ask for pushoff, with a simple shift-P, so I dont ask to turn, the push does turn somehow and when I ask to turn in the push, it keeps going staight out.
-I always had the aircrafts drift off to the left on the taxiway and when taking off, so I made it easy for myself and activated autorudder and the aircrafts went perfectly straight out, but now from one moment to the next, they start drifting off to the right. When I try to steer, the slightest movement of the rudder already makes them turn enough to not be able to keep the aircraft driving straight out, I have to steer left-right-left-right and the aircraft keeps moving from side to side on the taxiway. The movement of the rudder is minimal, one tick less and it doesnt turn at all.
-I entered my heading at 035, the coarse of the runway straight out, but when I took off after taxiing and activated the AP, my aircraft turned a hard right and checking the heading indicator, it was set to 172 all for sudden.
-Every time I change frequencies on the radio, my ATC window disappears.
-Every time I change camera view, all my instruments on my right monitor (GPS, engine panel, electrical panel) disappear.
-When changing altitude the aicraft wil not automaticly set the VS and I have to do it by hand.
-When I'm already descending, ATC keep telling me to please expedite my descent
-The beacons next to the runway wont show up untill I'm just several yard from the runway, I cant see them when flying up to it.
-Once landed ATC tells me no less then 8 times to exit next taxiway, even before I had a chance to reach the first upcomming taxiway and it keeps telling me to exit next taxiway, even after entering the taxiway.

Those are all things I've never seen before, except for the instruments disappearing after changing camera view, not even with all the issues I've had before with FSX.
Does anyone have any idea what is happening here?