This issue has already been discussed several other threads and yes, I can only repeat and confirm Couatl, by itself, CANNOT CRASH THE SIM. This is really not something opened to any discussion.
However, it's still possible that an operation started by it, can cause SOMETHING ELSE in the sim to crash and, since all previous reports seems to indicate some place in eastern Canada, I think the only possible cause of this, is some issue with a strange airport NAME in that area.
When you are flying in an area, GSX/Couatl are not doing anything, except asking the sim, in the background, a list of airports close to you. This is started from GSX, which sends a request to the Addon Manager, which in turn sends the same request to the sim, since in order to do this, we interface with the built-in functions of the GPS, since through Simconnect we cannot get everything we require.
So, technically, is the Addon Manager (which is a .DLL), which "caused" the sim to crash but, of course, it's doing it following a request from GSX (which runs under Couatl), so you are easily mislead it's Couatl which is crashing the sim, something it really cannot do, since it's an .EXE, so it has no access whatsoever to the sim.
Now, we arrive to the next issue, if it's really an Addon Manager fault, or is something even more internal to the sim, which might crash BY ITSELF, just because something is asking for an airport which has a wrong/unusual/corrupted name in that area. If I could check the area precisely, it would be very easy to check if the crash it's really an Addon Manager fault, or it's just the sim which is crashing when asked about the airport, so it could happen with every other addon that ask for nearby airports in the same way, for example with its gauges, if they interface with the default GPS in the same way.
That's why, whenever someone reported this issue, I always asked for the EXACT location, but so far, nobody has ever able to supply anything more precise than a generic "somewhere in the north-eastern Canada" so, please, if you want to have a chance to contribute to the eventual solution of this issue, try to get the exact Lat/Lon coordinates of the location that cause this crash. Even if it's a bug of the sim default airport data, maybe we can find a way to defend from it.
- Is there any possibility to run the FSDT airports without the couatl.exe? (I am quite sure it is not, because of the activation, which is stored in the addon manager, but asking costs nothing
This has been explained so many times:
we don't use Couatl JUST for the activation, that's only maybe 1% of its features. Our sceneries are not just sceneries, they are Python SCRIPTS, which require an interpreter to run, which is obviously Couatl, which allow us to do things nobody else can do (see our new O'Hare preview to get some idea), without taking ANY processing power from the sim, since Couatl runs externally to it, so it can use whatever spare free CPU cycles you have in one of your multi-core processors, which would be the case if we tried to do a scenery-helping .DLL (which slows down the main thread), like other developers did. And the *WHOLE* GSX runs entirely inside Couatl.
