FS9 CTD after installing Zurich

[oglitsch]

I re-installed FS9 on a new computer with Windows 7 64bit Ultimate. After installing many addons without any problem (amongst others all other FSDT airports), I want to install Zurich. The installation flows smoothly but whenever I try to start FS9 I get a CTD without any explanation after approx. 90% of the loading time. Even after the uninstall of Zurich and after deleting manually all registry entries the FS9 wont start up anymore. I have to restore the whole FS9 directory from backup.

- I installed Zurich by adding the registry key first (because I had Zurich installed on an other computer before)
- FS9 is running on a new computer with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, 12GB RAM
- I own all FS9 airports from FSDT and intalled them without any problem

What could cause this problem? Is there an incompatibility with Win7-64?

Your help is highly appreciated - thanks!

[virtuali]

There are no problems using our sceneries with Windows 7 64 bit, the only thing that might theoretically have issues is the Addon Manager but, as you can see, you have other FSDT sceneries and they work fine so, if there were compatibility problems with the OS, nothing from FSDT would work.

Zurich scenery doesn't alter any of the default FS9 files, even when it's installed, and if you uninstall it, you are in the exact same situation as before the installation which means, if you still had a crash after having uninstalled it, it means the problem wasn't caused by the scenery.

Nothing in the scenery can cause a crash at 90% loading, because at that stage you are already in the AI loading step, which explain why your other FSDT sceneries work: the problem is probably caused by a corrupted AI texture, for an AI that doesn't appear in other FSDT airports, or in the default scenery because of the different AFCAD airline assignment/density.

[oglitsch]

Thank you for your quick answer. You might be right assuming that a corrupted AI texture could cause the crash. Actually I installed another old scenery which included some AI traffic before I installed Zurich.

Now I restored my computer and I will install Zurich again without installing the other sceneries which I think could cause the problem. I will let you know the result of this attempt...

Thanks again!

[oglitsch]

I want to come back to my post concerning CTD after installing Zurich. The CTD's are definitively caused by the installer (at least on my computer). After several tests I installed Zurich on a different Computer running Windows XP Pro 32-bit without any problem. Then I just copied both directories Zurich and Zurich_terrain to the Windows 7 64-bit Computer and activated it again - result: No CTD's anymore! Not elegant at all but effective...

[virtuali]

Then I just copied both directories Zurich and Zurich_terrain to the Windows 7 64-bit Computer and activated it again - result: No CTD's anymore! Not elegant at all but effective...

If this worked for you, then it's ok, but I can only repeat and confirm the crashes cannot be caused by the installer.

With regard to the scenery folders, the ones you manually copied, the installer does exactly the same thing. It copies them and activates the in the Scenery Library. The files are exactly the same and, if you don't believe it, you can easily verify this, by making a file comparison of the scenery folders as copied by the installer vs manually copied, you'll see they are exactly the same so, obviously, there can't be any difference here.

The installer has self-integrity checks so, if your download was corrupted in some way, the installer would abort. And, of course, if the installer was corrupted, it would be under XP and Windows 7 so, fact you were able to install under XP, clearly means the installer you downloaded was fine.

The only thing that might happen in the installer and could be different between the two OS, is the automatic addition to the Scenery Library, since XP puts this file in a different folder than Windows 7. However, if this was the case, and the installer under Windows 7 was unable to automatically add the scenery to the Library, you would noticed that, because you wouldn't see Zurich being added.

Since the installers are fully compatible with 64 bit OS, and nobody ever reported this problem, the only possible explanation is that something on your FS9 under Windows 7 is not the same as in XP, maybe the scenery.cfg has a syntax error (because of have hand-edited it or other addons having corrupted it), but this usually results in no scenery added automatically to the Scenery Library, but you haven't said anything about it.

[oglitsch]

Umberto,

Thank you for your reply. I really don't want "accuse" FSDT for an incompatible installer, it was just my conclusion because I had no chance to install Zurich using the installer under Win7. It's possible that the scenery.cfg has (or had) a syntax error - I cannot verify this because I deleted the old file.

But don't worry, I'm still a happy user of all your FS9 airports and I really appreciate that FSDT still develops sceneries for the old FS9. Thanks a lot and happy new year to you and your team!