Weather crash from PM Instructor

[AJMurray]

HI all,

I'm having an issue with weather in FSX, specifically when using the Project Magenta instructor station. The general idea is that my application synchronises the weather across any given number of clients from the server. This works fine on its own, the weather stays in sync nicely. The problem arises when the user attempts to set the weather using the PM Instructor station in parallel with my application, it crashes FSX.

I originally thought the problem may have been the ulSignature variable was denying PM access and that was somehow causing FSX to crash, but I've since gone to using a zero value for the signature to leave access rights for PM and the same crash happens. All other PM functions seem to work fine without issue.

The process I'm following is:

Create a NewWeather structure, populate ulSignature field with zero, populate chICAO field with 'GLOB'.

Write the NewWeather structure to 0xCC00, call process.

Read the NewWeather structure from 0xCC00, call process.

NewWeather nw;
					nw.ulSignature = 0;
					nw.chICAO = "GLOB";
					if(!FSUIPC_Write(0xCC00, 1024, &nw, &dwFSUIPCResult) || !FSUIPC_Process(&dwFSUIPCResult))
					{
						printf("Modifying weather structure failed!\n");
					}

					if(!FSUIPC_Read(0xCC00, 1024, &nw, &dwFSUIPCResult) || !FSUIPC_Process(&dwFSUIPCResult))
					{
						printf("Reading weather structure failed!\n");
					}

Has anyone had this issue before? Can anyone see anything obvious that might be causing PM to bunk out FSX? Is it possible that PM is seeing the GLOB variable and freaking out?

[Pete Dowson]

I'm having an issue with weather in FSX, specifically when using the Project Magenta instructor station. The general idea is that my application synchronises the weather across any given number of clients from the server. This works fine on its own, the weather stays in sync nicely. The problem arises when the user attempts to set the weather using the PM Instructor station in parallel with my application, it crashes FSX.

Do you have any information at all regarding the FSX crash? Like module name and offset?

Turn on FSUIPC4's weather logging and ipc Write logging, and enable SimConnect logging (instructions in the FSX Help Announcement in this Forum). Generate the crash. Try and obtain more information on that -- if Windows shows a crash message there's usually a way of seeing the "APPCRASH" details on screen.

ZIP up everything and send as attachments, with an explanation, to me at petedowson@btconnect.com, and I'll see whether it helps. Note that it may have to wait a couple of weeks -- in a few days I'm off till December 14th.

Has anyone had this issue before? Can anyone see anything obvious that might be causing PM to bunk out FSX? Is it possible that PM is seeing the GLOB variable and freaking out?

It should not be possible for PM to crash FSX no matter what weather data is supplied, because FSUIPC4 has to process all the binary data in the weather structures and turn it into one of FSX's extended METAR structures -- a character string. In the process it should eliminate any bad data.

I'm mostly concerned there might be some previously undetected error in my processing in FSUIPC4. That's really why I want to see all of the data. On the other hand it may well be a bug in SimConnect or FSX weather -- this is why locating the actual module in control when the crash occurs is so important.

Regards

Pete