Bug description:
VFS Projector tool can be overloaded and hang the title and subsequently the shell. ~After a failed graceful shutdown, VFS Projection can’t be used anymore.~
Open vscode to that VFSProjection/SimObjects/Airplanes folder
Search merge
Observe results are coming in (yes! that’s good we have search)
Now the title is frozen though and can’t be used, and after closing VS code, it’s still frozen. Explorer is frozen too when touching the VFS Projector folder tree. Ending FlightSimulator2024.exe from task manager is the only obvious solution. ~Now after restarting the title, you can no longer use VFS Projector because Start yields an error “Projection failed to start”~
Thanks to @WithinRafael for pointing out recovery is possible.
If you search the whole VFS from VSCode without restricting to specific folders and or file types, it means the sim will download every single file for VSCode to look into it - which can take a long time indeed, if it ever succeeds!
That being said, while checking this issue this morning with the next update, I encountered some kind of lock-up in the projector too - it happened while restricting the search to a specific folder and even opening some files in Notepad++ or VSCode led to the same behaviour.
I never saw this on our test builds so I am wondering if this may be caused by some changes we make to the shipping ones - this is under investigation on our side.
I mention that I scoped to VFSProjection/SimObjects/Airplanes. That doesn’t seem that egregious. At least, this is what I’ve been doing for years now with MFS20.
But your point absolutely stands, setting a file scope to .cfg or .xml would reduce time and data usage by a huge amount. Searching gltf, locPaks etc. would be a huge waste.
Yeah, the first thing I tried to do is just copy Airplanes to another disk. But some Xbox/Windows feature rejects that with some permissions type message.
I would happily let a copy go overnight, and take a lot of disk space. I consider searching the base game packages to be pretty much the most valuable learning resource available. The large assets aren’t necessary though most of the time.
Does enumerating the VFS projection folder trigger any Internet downloads? My understanding is that the game projects contents from the rolling cache or mounted package layers. Is that correct?
If so, assuming the Projected Filesystem implementation is robust, there shouldn’t be significant slowdowns during the search. If there are, it might be worth checking that the get-file-data callback isn’t limited to ~1MB chunks as it is in the official Microsoft docs/sample.
Disregard. I see the projection does pull down content on the fly.
We have found the reason for the VFS Projector hanging and implemented the appropriate fix. Unfortunately this was too late to include it in the mid-December update.
We are looking at ways to provide this ASAP.
Apologies for the additional delay.
Apologies for this: the fix was pushed on the SimUpdate 1 branch while the hotfixes have been produced from the Mid-December branch - this is why you are still having this issue with the latest updates.
Unfortunately I cannot give you an ETA since SU1 doesn’t have an official release date yet.
Until we see SU1, here are some tips I’ve created that may be helpful to some of you;
Don’t use the VFS from the main sim intro/welcome screen. Go into something such as the Free Flight screen, or into a flight itself, before opening the VFS connection and copying/perusing files. When used in the main sim intro/welcome screen, the amount of data that can be transferred seems to be very little until a crash occurs.
If you are moving a larger amount of files, such as a few model files, copy 1 set of GLTF + BIN at a time, and only a few times. Then, give it a rest for a few minutes, and then come back and repeat as necessary. This seems to give the VFS a bit of time to “cool down”, and has improved the amount of time and data I can use in there.
When copying from the VFS, do your Control+C and then wait until the file size populated in the File Explorer — only then should you paste into your desired directory. Pasting prior to the file size populating seems to create an inclination to crash the VFS.
Hopefully that is able to help some of you extend your usable time in each VFS session until we see the fix for it
