Layer layer

I'm investigating a CTD in the area close to Vancouver, where I installed the Jon Gabbert airport scenery for FS9 many years ago. I have tried to diagnose this in the past with no luck, and it seems it is still there. In fact it's one reason I seldom fly to western Canada.

The crash dump tells me that it's a UTIL.DLL problem, which suggests that it might be an Afcad/AFD (the Avsim CTD guide naturally doesn't cover UTIL.DLL).

I'd made some 52-week flightplans for London Air Services that includes helicopters (AW139) and created an overlay on that side of the airport to enable these to fly without interfering with the main (busy) flows of traffic. There are now two overlays there, and both of them (J Gabberts and mine) tend to cause some texture "peeling" with the ground textures. I've no idea whether that might have a bearing on the UTIL.DLL crash, but thought that I should mention it. If ground textures cause a crash it's normally because the flickering problem seems to create a problem with the graphics processing, but texture peeling seems to be more of a visual nuisance than a cause of crashes.

But one of the strangest things while investigating this problem is shown in the attached image. I've never seen this before.

Using AFCAD I thought I'd scroll through that programs list of airports in the British Columbia area (and Washington US as well, just to the south) to see whether there are addon AFDs that might be a problem. When I reached Vancouver I saw my new helicopter AFD, CXVR, listed with Vancouver Airport and the other helicopter overlay, CYV2.

The Vancouver airport AFDs, CYVR, CYV2, and my new CXVR share the same folder - but look at the layers! The layer number for my CXVR is actually a scenery in South America, Brasil, Viracopos), but the file is not physically in the Brasilian scenery's folder and should not have that layer number at all.

I deleted all the scenery.dat files in my scenery library and they were re-created on the next start, but the problem, for the moment, is still there.

This strange layer thing is probably not the cause of the CTDs, though, since my overlay is new and the CTDs are sadly a much older problem.

Any thoughts and comments welcome!

I spent some time today figuring out the layer problem.

As Dedl does, I edit the layers by hand and they were all properly sequenced (as far as I can tell). As it happens, I mistakenly said that the Vancouver Airport Helicopters overlay (the one I created) was on the wrong layer, in fact it was the only AFD on the correct layer! The rest of the Vancouver scenery was said to be on the Viracopos layer according to AFCAD.

In the end I chose to delete the Vancouver layer and then add it again at the end of the scenery list. When I did this, the final 80 (or thereabouts) layers went "out of synch" with the layer number and the scenery priority, so layer 600 would be priority 599. This edit was done in the sim, so it should have worked. FS had edited the file for me and missed an entire layer number out, creating a gap in the sequence that I then edited by hand. So that was fixed, but still doesn't explain why several BGLs in the same layer would have only the new BGL properly listed. Strangely, Viracopos was nowehere near the break in the list, which was my first thought.

Günther, since I changed the CFG and AFCAD is now (after hand editing) showing all the Vancouver BGLs in the same layer I guess I won't need to take up your offer, but thanks!

@Kobus I hadn't thought of looking at the seaplanes AFD since it is part of Jon Gabbert's original work and I assume was tested okay, Interestingly, the sim CTDs when I pan around to see the airport from the western side when my aircraft is parked, and Vancouver's harbor area would then be in the viewport beyond the airport. Tomorrow I'll make that .BGL a .OFF and see whether the sim behaves better. I might re-make the Harbor seaplanes AFD if necessary, since I made Lake hood when AS Anchorage was released years ago, and several floatplane landing areas on nearby lakes to get floatplane AI up there - and they all work.

The only addon airports in that corner of Canada that I have installed are YVR and YLW (Kelowna), although to the south I have the Seattle addon (FT) and even further south Flightzone Portland. Portland and Kelowna are both at least a couple hundred miles away.

I removed the overlays and the crash still occurred (I was out in town after that and didn't get any experimenting done).

Almost every AFD I have there is just the stock one, apart from CZBB, which for some crazy reason I just added (just to throw another variable into the mix).

I think I might check JG's YVR for texture problems, although that would normally throw a D3D error or a frame error. Presently I'm getting to make one small test every 24 hours. Might be AI-related, since they use AFDs. Tomorrow I might remove all but one AI traffic file (I need a few AIs to step through looking for the crash) and see whether that turns anything up.

When i last was involved with YVR I left it behind with that CTD as an intractable problem. I'm going to safely say that I'm not brighter or sharper now than I was then, and I'm equally unlikely to resolve it. The one thing I know for certain is that it crashes when I pan around to a particular heading, but I'm never completely sure which heading that is since I'm cycling around the AI in spot view and the only heading I get to see is that of the AI. If I knew for certain that the crash came at 140 degrees from airport X and 235 degrees from airport Y I could at least draw 2 lines across a map and see where they cross.

I did nothing on it today and might get a few minutes tomorrow if I'm fortunate.