Troubleshooting crashes

If FlightGear crashes, it's possible that this is due a number of reasons, such as limited hardware resources (CPU, GPU, RAM etc) - so crashes are not necessarily due to a faulty program.

It's just as well possible that the FlightGear default settings are not supported with your hardware/drivers, so that the process will be killed by the OS because it's trying to do something not supported by your computer. If you are experiencing full system crashes, you should see System Crashes instead.

By default, FlightGear 2.6+ will assume a certain runtime environment and certain GPU features which may not be suppported by most older cards, such as GeForce 6/7 generation hardware and most older hardware (older than say 4-5 years), so that it can be expected that FG will not work on such computers "out of the box", i.e. the default startup settings will need to be customized accordingly, to disable all unsupported default features. See Hardware Recommendations for more details.

In such cases, it is important to start up FlightGear with "minimum settings", and start re-enabling features step by step, to see what settings are supported by your hardware. You may want to raise the FlightGear log level, so that you get to see where the program stops starting/working [1].

This article will detail the steps required to disable most "eye candy" features, so that people can experiment with different settings, and come up with a list of supported settings for their particular hardware.

These settings are really just intended to provide a minimal startup profile, with ALL eye candy disabled by default - so that FG doesn't crash due to lack of certain features (OpenGL, shaders etc). In order to change this, you need to really optimize all settings and then start enabling working stuff again, i.e. trial and error.

What all these settings do is ensuring that the least complex aircraft and scenery location are picked, so that startup shouldn't fail due to aircraft/scenery at all. The ufo is the least complex aircraft, by default the c172p with a 3D cockpit will be used. I'd keep using the ufo until you have optimized all settings accordingly, i.e. don't touch the aircraft or location (airport, azimuth, offset) settings until you have really optimized everything else.

Also, please only touch the aircraft/location settings after having optimized everything else already, and after ensuring that you are getting good frame rates (>= 30 fps). Once you have done that, I'd suggest to look at aircraft with 2D panels - such as the c172p-2dpanel or other simple aircraft (TODO: list of aircraft with 2D panels).

If you need help with the whole process, please get in touch via the FG forums.

When doing that, please document the whole process, i.e. including:

• startup settings (and fgfsrc if used)
• error messages and warnings (console output)
• screen shots