Could not find valid AFCAD data at this position

[d00nicus]

GSX is throwing this error at every airport in the sim, across P3D 3,4 and 5.  It seems to work fine for the first couple of runs, and then will stop working with no other changes being made to the sim and no other addons being added or removed.

I have already completely disabled Antivirus protection for the entire machine, run live update (and reinstalled GSX/Addon manager completely) multiple times.  Reinstalled all three versions of the sim and experienced the issue identically every time.

I have also purged the cached data in ProgramData and rebuilt the cache more times than I can count.

This occurs even on copies of the sim with no third party scenery installed. AI traffic (if enabled) will follow the AFCAD correctly, and other addons (if installed) such as UGCX will also read the correct AFCAD for the airports and pathfind correctly for pushback + towing to other parking positions.

Once the issue starts occurring the "Customize parking position" option disappears in the GSX menu, and the log shows that it isn't even trying to load an AFCAD (not even the wrong one!)

In the attached log, it should have been loading the AFCAD for EGSS

[virtuali]

Nobody ever reported this problem before. Your log shows something that would be basically impossible, as if you had NO files in the simulator folder. Since this clearly cannot be, the only possible reason I can think of, is ANOTHER program locking the same files for reading, which is wrong, since there's no reason to open a file that should only be *read* in Exclusive mode.

This program might be:

- the antivirus, locking access to the simulator folder. Configure the antivirus to exclude the whole Addon Manager folder from scanning.

- another product that needs to read the scenery library and has mistakenly open the files in exclusive mode. Disable all other add-on and try to rebuild the GSX cache again.

[d00nicus]

As posted, this is also happening on clean copies of the sim, with nothing else installed, and anti-virus is disabled for the entire system.

Is there any way to increase the verbosity of the logs to get better visibility of where it's failing?

[virtuali]

As posted, this is also happening on clean copies of the sim, with nothing else installed, and anti-virus is disabled for the entire system.

As explained so many times on the forum, the antivirus should NOT be disabled. We have countless of evidence that, unless the antivirus is completely uninstalled, it will never be really "disabled", even if it looks like that, because the low-level antivirus service is still running, and the only way to stop it is to remove the antivirus entirely.

That's why we never suggest do disable the antivirus but, instead, add the proper folder to the antivirus EXCLUSION, so you can leave it enabled, as it should be.

Is there any way to increase the verbosity of the logs to get better visibility of where it's failing?

No, there isn't, because the logging is normally supposed to catch real errors, like an O/S error reading a file, this is the first time ever in almost 10 years GSX is out we seen something like this.

Just to be sure: are those paths where the simulator is really installed ?

[virtuali]

As posted, this is also happening on clean copies of the sim, with nothing else installed, and anti-virus is disabled for the entire system.

As explained so many times on the forum, the antivirus should NOT be disabled. We have countless of evidence that, unless the antivirus is completely uninstalled, it will never be really "disabled", even if it looks like that, because the low-level antivirus service is still running, and the only way to stop it is to remove the antivirus entirely.

That's why we never suggest do disable the antivirus but, instead, add the proper folder to the antivirus EXCLUSION, so you can leave it enabled, as it should be.

So, try again adding all the Exclusions to the antivirus.

Is there any way to increase the verbosity of the logs to get better visibility of where it's failing?

No, there isn't, because the logging is normally supposed to catch real errors, like an O/S error reading a file, this is the first time ever in almost 10 years GSX is out we seen something like this, as if there really weren't any files there.

Just to be sure: are those paths where the simulator is really installed ?

[d00nicus]

Yes, those are the actual paths.

No, there are no processes related to the anti-virus running at all - it's completely blocked at the group policy level, and it's absence has been verified through both task manager, and command line process lists - you're welcome to inspect my process and service lists if you doubt my abilities there. Regardless of that, all relevant folders are (and have been since Windows was installed) completely excluded from it as well (in fact, the entire drive containing Prepar3d is completely excluded) so can we please move on from anti-virus now?

As nothing else is having trouble accessing or using the AFCAD files in question, then more detailed logging is clearly needed to have any hope of diagnosing this issue. As a developer myself, at this point I would want to be logging (at minimum) specifics of which BGL files were being seen, their apparent size and if they could be opened or not (along with any appropriate error codes from whatever I/O library you're using)

[virtuali]

No, there are no processes related to the anti-virus running at all - it's completely blocked at the group policy level, and it's absence has been verified through both task manager, and command line process lists - you're welcome to inspect my process and service lists if you doubt my abilities there.

The antivirus low-level service won't be listed in the processes, because it's not a process, it's a service.

Please don't try to tell me otherwise, I personally witnessed by doing remote assistance on an user's system some antivirus can do that, the only way I could *know* it was blocking files, was to check the antivirus log because, even if it "looked disabled", with zero processes that could be found, it was still running, I guess some antivirus are able to run stealthy so they won't be seen by virus that try to intercept them.

Regardless of that, all relevant folders are (and have been since Windows was installed) completely excluded from it as well (in fact, the entire drive containing Prepar3d is completely excluded) so can we please move on from anti-virus now?

That's the first time you ever said you have Excluded the folders, so NOW we can "move on" from the antivirus.

more detailed logging is clearly needed to have any hope of diagnosing this issue. As a developer myself, at this point I would want to be logging (at minimum) specifics of which BGL files were being seen, their apparent size and if they could be opened or not (along with any appropriate error codes from whatever I/O library you're using)

As I've said, since this is the first time ever somebody had this problem in the 9 years GSX has been out, we don't have any more detailed logging because, until today, if there was some kind of problem accessing files, we properly catch the error and properly log it. That's the first time ever that files are not found but there's NO error, not even a crash, which is what would have happened if the program didn't properly handle an error condition.

Adding extra log information is surely possible, but it can't be done immediately, and would at least like to have *another* report.

Do you have another PC you can try GSX on ?