SIM Director - is there a fix planned or being worked on

[CoastalDriver]

I am running P3DV5.1.12 Professional with new hardware Win10v2004 with lated intel chipset, 32GB RAM, MSI motherboard and NVIDIA RTX2070 Super (8GB).

I cannot get Sim Director to load. I have seen it go to 29%, 57%, 87% and then hang the program as if there is a buffer overrun, once this occurs the P3D menu a program is unresponsive to any commands and can only be shut down by CTL+C or task manager.

I restrict model addons to 6 with the stock vehicles. All are installed via the ADDON xml method.

Scenery is limited to ORBX LC for most of the world but few addon airports - there a few simple addon airports all scenery is installed on a separate drive and accessed via the scenery config menu settings.

No mods to chip, motherboard or GPU all use recommened settings only.

The sim works fine in fact very well. But I cannot get SIM Director to work at all.

I note many many users have the same issues about load times and freezing.

Fix on the way?

[CoastalDriver]

I forgot to mention a check of the CPU shows it running at 98-100% when this is happens.

[CoastalDriver]

I note that there are multiple threads all with the same problem of Sim Director hanging or not loading. Is there any possibility of a response or advice as how to fix this or is LM and the P3D working on the issue. However the program is indexing objects or files seems to be the core problem.

Note - When I ran FSX there was a 32 bit program called Instant Scenery that could do this without any problems at all and it only took a few minutes to find and indexing all the relevant files for you to access in sim. So it is not that hard guys!

[CoastalDriver]

Ok in the abscence of any response on this issue - reported by many many users. I ran some tests.
1. I completely uninstalled P3DV5 - the did a clean install.
2. Ran the default program with no addons.

Sim Director did load but took 5 minutes to do so and the user interface was erratic.

3. Re installed multiple ORBX Scenery Addons using ORBX installer and recommended library and paths methods. (LC into Sim Airports onto seperate drive. Note this is all major ORBX LC regions and only a few airports.

Re ran Sim Director - after 20 minutes the load bar had not passed 5%. Stopped with WIN10 task manager.
Noted CPU demands running 48 threads and between 78% and 98% on a 16GB RAM I510500 chipset. MAG Motherboard. Basically the system flatlined at those values.

It is clear that the indexing function for Sim Director is not either indexing or is attempting to make a list of every file related to scenery on the system which of course is in the hundreds of thousands + with scenery.

I cannot resolve this non fucnctional apsect of Sim Director. Outcome - unusable in current setup!

[davidk64]

I'm running P3D v5 with Windows 10 on a considerably lower spec PC. Starting P3D takes 1-2 minutes to get to the scenario load dialog, choosing SimDirector at that point takes around 30 seconds to load. I've not noticed any erratic behaviour though I don't use it a great deal. I have no addon scenery installed. I think it's an excellent free addition and feel your pain that it won't load in a timely manner! Hope you can find a resolution soon.

[CoastalDriver]

Yes a lot of us do - really unable to work this one out. Basically it seems to me that Sim Director is the former inbuilt FSX tool (Object Placement) with a more updated interface and GUI and few more layers of functionality. I could run object placement as a tool in FSX and a proprietary addon called Instant Scenery (basically a scenario visualisation tool) and it could load up and find every libary object in less than 5 minutes with over 500 different scenery addons installed and about 24 or two dozen object libraries as well. A lot of us have this issue with Sim Director, either not loading or hanging after initialisation. The thread count and CPU usage tells me that it is buffer overload and it is actually only the multi core and multi thread capacity of my system that is preventing a complete program crash to desktop.

The issues are also related to scenario save function - mine seems busted and unable to fix itself despite a reinstall, it corrupts the constructed scenario and tries to read it as the default scenario. So that alternative scenario development path does not work for me either.

Acutely frustrating especially when the rest of the sim is so damn good!!

[CoastalDriver]

You know they could just buy the Instant Scenery program rights - update it for 64 bit and install it instead. Problem solved!

[davidk64]

Was browsing the doco today and noticed this:

"SimDirector White List
The SimDirector White List allows the user to choose what objects are shown in the SimDirector catalog.
The SimDirector White List is a configurable file called SimDirectorWhiteList.cfg located in the %APPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5 directory.
Open the SimDirectorWhiteList.cfg and list the desired objects each on their own line in the file to be shown in the SimDirector catalog. When Prepar3D is restarted, open the SimDirector catalog to see only the objects listed in the config file shown."

at https://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/LearningCenter.php (Scenario Tools/SimDirector/SimDirector Overview - bottom of page)

It's a long shot but would be interesting to see what happened if you put just a few objects in the whitelist and see whether that stops P3D trying to load all the 3rd party objects. If it did perhaps there is a way to get a list of the default objects plus just those 3rd party you want to use ...