when the engine no. 2 speed reaches 20.2% N2, X-Plane crashes

[Litjan]

45 minutes ago, Nima Razaghi said:

I do appreciate the time you spent in solving my issue.

And I do appreciate your patience in dealing with this problem and your help in finding the cause - even though we were ultimately unable to fix it for you.

I did like to start the engine with my window open once in a while in summer, but pretty much had to close the window as the engine sped up to idle because it would get too loud in the cockpit to communicate efficiently ;-)

Cheers, Jan

[Pils]

1 hour ago, Litjan said:

Well, Laminar is wrong, because the add-on developers themselves have no clue why your X-Plane crashes at 20.2% N1 .

There are a myriad of possible reasons in operating systems and hardware, we used the OpenAL engine for our sounds to our best ability but I think there is nothing we can do right now to fix this for you...except ask you to keep your window closed during engine start and maybe wait for us to move to FMOD sounds, it is planned for the future!

Unfortunately Gizmo does bundle a very old copy of OpenAL, so who knows if there's now some incompatibility. A weird one for sure. Not really fair of LR to just shrug their shoulders when there's nothing in the log--which they're responsible for--that gives any debugging information. Oh well. Fingers crossed for FMOD.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Pils

[Stephan737]

The problem described in this thread is linked to these two as well:

https://forums.x-pilot.com/forums/topic/27198-another-crash-in-exterior-view/

https://forums.x-pilot.com/forums/topic/27269-crash-after-audio-freeze/

I was recommended to write to Laminar Research as well. I didn't do this because I was quite secure at my anticipation that LR would react as it happened to Nima. Their planes work. If addons don't work it seems to be worth not more than shrugging their shoulders.

It's basically the same behaviour as with Microsoft and Asobo. And that's why I don't trust their announcement that all addons will work with MSFS2024. I feel that developers like IXEG - as the current example - and inibuild are being left alone. (I just mention the latter as there are sound problems on their product as well.) It's up to them to make their products work in the new sim. The sims publishers make promises that 3rd party addon developers have to keep. Without professional addons the sim itself won't attract the pro users. And pro users spend the big money on this software. Unless they're getting fooled.

I recently moved away from MSFS back to XP. It was a pure coincidence that I found out about the release of the IXEG 737 for XP12. Same goes for the Beta (!) version of the inibuild A300. Which brings me to the last frustrating point: In flight simulation and the gaming industry in general it has become best practise to relase sth. as beta version because publishers don't have to deliver a fully functional product then. They claim to sell these software products for a cheaper price. To me it seems like the crossed out prices and reductions in big furniture stores or at car salers. "Invent" a high price, cross it in red and claim to sell it for cheap.

I kind of feel sorry for the 3rd party addon developers who do a great job in enriching the sim with their IRL experience. Maybe the big and/or successfull players like IXEG, inibuild, PMDG, ORBX, etc. can schedule a meeting / call with the publishers. All of them are loosing money if the sim and the addons don't sell because the initial program (the sim) doesn't work. MSFS for example has the in-sim market place where they earn coimmision on purchases. I won't buy addons for a sim that doesn't work and therefore MS/Asobo themselves are loosing money when 3rd party addons don't sell. It's like buying a car without having a driver's license.

And there seems to be a mojor problem with the sound engine in XP12. FMOD here, FMOD there. I have no clue about this stuff but read that there is a new FMOD studio version and that sound files / sound sets created with the old studio software have to be converted. I'm pretty sure IXEG knows about this well better than I do but just in case:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/using-fmod-with-x-plane/

Since end users are not getting listened to by LR, MS/Asobo my hope lies at the addon developers. Maybe they get heared from the big ones. It would save quite some frustration that comes up when being send around between the addon developer, the sales platform and the sim's publisher. I'm just a small, private, person and I don't have the impression, that LR would like to chit chat with me.

Let's hope the sound CTD issue and the too fast engine start problem get solved in the near future because other than that the IXEG 737 is a great plane and brings back memories when I used to work on these planes in Frankfurt.

All the best to the IXEG team and thanks for your everlasting customer cooperation.

[Litjan]

Thanks for the nice words, Stephan.

One has to say in general that Laminar does work fairly well and close with developers. They have a Slack channel for devs and will answer questions and requests there frequently and timely.

In some cases the problems that add-ons (and even default X-Plane) encounter are so hard to figure out and affect so few people that it simply is not economically viable to pour a lot of effort into solving the problem.
Often it turns out that it is actually the "fault" of the hardware manufacturer of some component, the user misconfigured their operating system or some other freak coincidence and Laminar and everyone in this business to make money have to decide if they want to assign a specialist for possibly weeks of man-hours to try and recreate, get to the bottom of and finally fix a problem that more often than not turns out to be not Laminar´s fault.

Laminar´s support is already overwhelmed by requests from users that have a hard time finding the power switch on their computers (for some reason flight simulation is an area that suits geriatric users especially), and everyone has the attitude of "hey, I spent 59 dollars on this, now help me put this here compute together, install Windows, X-Plane, all of my add-ons, and  teach me how to fly an A330, too!"

In this special case Laminar (rightfully) shrugs their shoulders and says "well, we do not support OpenAL, so this looks like an OpenAL problem so we are out of it". If EVERY user of our 737 had this problem we would probably have a case where we could go and say "hey listen, we have thousands of users that can´t fly this add-on and will hate X-Plane for it, we need some help in figuring out why OpenAL crashes your code". But with only 2 or 3 out of thousands of users, it is more than likely that this is caused by some weird combination of hardware and software that is very infrequent.

As cruel as that may sound - unfortunately you and the other guys suffering from this sound problem are too few to really set a big effort in motion to fix this, especially since the obvious way out of this is to convert to FMOD...

I personally believe that if you had a computer with  different sound hardware, things would work just fine - maybe you can try to install the IXEG on a laptop (you have 3 licenses to install on different machines) and see?

Viele Grüße, Jan