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Simbol avatar image
Simbol asked some1 commented

WASM Compilation time on user PCs weird behaviors

Dear Asobo,

Since PMDG 737, MD-80 and Fenix A320 are out in the market some weird behaviour is occurring on user PCs.

When they install or update any of these products, the compilation time of WASM takes very long time (20 minutes is the average), during the time the user cannot do anything.. however what is happening is after such time, the airplane will behave erratically unless MSFS is restarted.

This seems an odd behaviour, and I am not sure if these developers have reported it to the asobo team, my aircraft about to be released is using WASM, however it compiles faster since the modules must be much smaller, and my beta testers have no issues or have to restart MSFS after installing the product or after me pushing an update.

So it seems the behavior occurs after very long compilation times, so the question is:

1) Why such long compilation times? anything that could be done in the future to avoid this? users are not very happy with this behaviour on many forums, so if we could find a way to avoid this issue I think it would be good for the overall experience.

2) Why MSFS needs to be restarted so the modules work? is this the expected behaviour from your point of view? PMDG and Leonardo (MD-80) are instructing users to reboot MSFS after a compile in order to ensure all modules are loaded. It seems to be by design, everything should work despite of a long compilation time.

People are starting to become worry when an airplane is WASM enabled due to the issues explained above, so I am looking for ways to improve the process, etc. since I will be using WASM again for future projects.

Thanks in advance,

Kind Regards,
Raul

aircraft
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2 Answers

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FlyingRaccoon avatar image
FlyingRaccoon answered Simbol commented

Hello @Simbol,

Regarding WASM compilation, it's done on the user machine to make sure it matches its specs and doesn't use unavailable set of instructions. The good side of this is that it's very optimized for the user machine.
There are no workaround for Community packages.
For Marketplace packages, the compilation is done at ingestion.

As for the module that would need to be restarted to work properly, we are not aware of this.
Could you provide a specific example so we can investigate?

@EPellissier FYI

Regards,
Sylvain


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Simbol avatar image Simbol ·
Hi Sylvain,


My project WASM is not as complex as the products I mentioned above, so I don't think my sample would be helpful. In any case you can take my project directly from Market place now if it help? "Sting S4". Al thought my users are not seeing this. But a couple reported they had to restart the flight after loading the S4 because WASM was not started. If this is compiled during ingestion for MP products, it is odd they had to do such ting.

I am mostly passing feedback of what users are experiencing with the projects above via community folder, 25 minutes of compilation time seems an awful lot and slow considering we are in 2022? just a thought.

Thanks for coming back to me,

Raul

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some1 avatar image
some1 answered some1 commented

I think if a wasm file contains several gauges, or the panel.cfg contains several wasm files, then the gauges may start after first compilation in a different order than usual. That may catch some developers off-guard if they expect a certain initialization order.

On the compilation time, I wonder if the compilation of a single WASM file on MSFS side can be made multithreaded? Currently from what I can observe, most CPU cores during WASM compilation sit idle.


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RXP avatar image RXP ·


I think if a wasm file contains several gauges, or the panel.cfg contains several wasm files, then the gauges may start after first compilation in a different order than usual. That may catch some developers off-guard if they expect a certain initialization order.


Was gauge load order even an SDK guarantee to get started with?

To my knowledge it never was and probably will never be a guarantee, for obvious reasons, but I might have missed a few discussions in this board?!

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some1 avatar image some1 RXP ·
I haven't said that the order is guaranteed anywhere.
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RXP avatar image RXP some1 ·

I must have miss interpreted "than usual" and "certain order" in here:

"in a different order than usual. That may catch some developers off-guard if they expect a certain initialization order. "


In any case, I didn't implied anything wrong with what you said either. I'm just raising the question whether any order is guaranteed, because if not, logically I'd tend to think that no gauge should expect any other gauge to be loaded prior in order to work correctly. Failing gracefully in this case is one option, alerting the user something is amiss and recommending to restart the game could also be an option then?!

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FlyingRaccoon avatar image FlyingRaccoon ♦♦ ·
@EPellissier @Arzop FYI
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