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Couatl menu requiring a restart

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Tobus:
I am a happy owner of PHNL, Hawaiian Islands 1 and 2 and GSX.
I would love to expand my fsdreamteam collection, but am very hesitant.
Why?

Because after installing my bought products, I had issues like no buildings, disappearing textures and stuff like that.
That's now solved, although Couatl.exe still needs to be restarted from my FSX menubar to function correctly, apparently after a Couatl update.

I have installed the trial versions of all other fields. All of them have aforementioned issues: missing buildings and textures, all within the trial limit.
I have followed all kinds of tips shown here on the forum: shutting down F-Secure virusscanner when installing, shutting down firewall when installing, setting up F-secure to NOT look at certain files/folders to not upset Addonmanager and/or Couatl.
I have tried an uninstall of product, addonmanager and couatl, reboot, then reinstall, then reboot, only to find the same problems persist.

The forumlobby's of all FSDT products are rife with these kinds of issues. This means they are not a one-off fluke on my system, but widespread. The "solution" is always the pc of the user: fsx install, simconnect install, firewall, virusscanner, something else ... never the FSDT product itself.
Yet the problems persist, with many of the threads with issues "ending" in a open end.

My point is: I'm very hesitant in expanding my FSDT products. They are not cheap, though worth every penny, but the technical issues that seem to come with the product are what's holding me back. This in a world of FSX addons where this is the exception: I know of no other developer that has this many issues and hoops for a user to jump through to get his bought product installed and working.

My question: is there ANY way that in the near future FSDT will bring out it's products in a way that buyers can simply buy, download, install and enjoy it?

virtuali:

--- Quote from: Tobus on March 17, 2014, 11:25:15 am ---Because after installing my bought products, I had issues like no buildings, disappearing textures and stuff like that.

That's now solved, although Couatl.exe still needs to be restarted from my FSX menubar to function correctly, apparently after a Couatl update.
--- End quote ---


I've had a look at the log file you posted, the one before the restart, and it shows an error I didn't noticed, only in the file "before restart"


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 53, in loadAddons
  File "couatl\GSX\__init__.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "couatl\GSX\airportCustomization.py", line 793, in <module>
RuntimeError: boost::filesystem::current_path: The directory name is invalid


This LOOKS like an illegal pathname (problem with the filename encoding ) in one of your scenery folders.



--- Quote ---The forumlobby's of all FSDT products are rife with these kinds of issues. This means they are not a one-off fluke on my system, but widespread. The "solution" is always the pc of the user: fsx install, simconnect install, firewall, virusscanner, something else ... never the FSDT product itself.
--- End quote ---

Exactly, 99% of the cases it's NEVER the FSDT product, and this has been always proved. The remaining 1% is fixed by updates that, as anyone can easily check through the update history, are always a followup coming from USERS reports. When we need to fix something, we do it and we do it fast.


--- Quote ---Yet the problems persist, with many of the threads with issues "ending" in a open end.
--- End quote ---

No thread ended up in a "open end", unless the user that started it decided not to post anymore, so we'll never know if he has solved it or not.

Your own last post from last November is the clear example of this. The last message was *mine*, giving you a suggestion, but you never posted again so, you left it "open ended".


--- Quote ---My question: is there ANY way that in the near future FSDT will bring out it's products in a way that buyers can simply buy, download, install and enjoy it?
--- End quote ---

They already are like this.

We won't sell many of them, if they "didn't work", since they are sold in Trial version. And since we sell this way since 2007, and our sales are increasing, that's clear enough proof they WORK.

Of course, if one reports a very unusual problem, that nobody ever reported it before, we can only proceed by exclusion trying to understand what's wrong with your system.

If you followed up to the thread you started, instead of leaving it "open ended", we would have continued troubleshooting it.

The issue is, you are confusing the CAUSE with the EFFECT. The "missing buildings/textures" is the EFFECT. The CAUSES can be many, the most common being the antivirus, then problems with users Window install (missing C++ libraries), then problems with users FSX install, like missing/corrupted Simconnect.

ANY of these will cause our modules to malfunction, but the end result will look the same: missing buildings, but we can only start by suggesting the solutions from the most common to the least common.

In YOUR case, the issue is so uncommon that you were the one and only one reporting it and, by the looks of it, it seems you have ONE of your scenery folders containing an illegal name or an illegal character in the filename either of the scenery itself, or the folder. Unfortunately, the Couatl.LOG can't log it, because being illegal, it can't even try to open it, because the OS would block it.

The only solution I see, is to check your Scenery Areas folder names to check for anything unusual, perhaps using foreign characters with the wrong encoding, etc.

Tobus:
Umberto,

thanks for you extensive reply. As it stands, THAT stands highly in favor of expanding my FSDT stuff ;-)
It's really a hard decision for me, one which I'd wish wasn't that hard, so I'd have all your stuff bought and installed long ago.

Regarding my specific problem: where should I, in your eyes, begin to look?
In all my scenery folders, or just in the FSDT folders? If the last, I'm tempted of uninstalling all FSDT stuff and starting from scratch.

virtuali:

--- Quote from: Tobus on March 17, 2014, 12:53:11 pm ---In all my scenery folders, or just in the FSDT folders? If the last, I'm tempted of uninstalling all FSDT stuff and starting from scratch.
--- End quote ---

In all your scenery folders.

The problem is not likely an FSDT scenery folder. Unless the filename has been corrupted in your system, we surely don't install sceneries using strange/foreign names, if only because all our airports have English names. It's most likely any scenery you installed that has something not right in the folder name.

Tobus:
I was hoping for the other answer.... Ok, I'll get cracking.
For good measure, my best bet would be a compare of scenery in scenery.cfg with the actual folders, correct?

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