TL;DR – X-Plane won’t ask you if you want to reset your rendering settings when you crash unless you hold down the shift key.

Getting Locked Out

Some of X-Plane’s rendering settings take effect on restart, and this can lead to a nasty situation:

  • You dial in a setting that takes affect on restart, like FSAA in non-HDR mode.
  • You restart, and your graphics card can’t handle it; the driver crashes.
  • Now you can’t start X-Plane without deleting your saved preferences, which will cost you your joystick setup and other prefs.

This was a particularly nasty problem in the early 32-bit days of X-Plane 10; rendering settings that take effect on restart could push you over the RAM limit, causing a crash the next time around.

Safe Mode

To work around this problem, we added “safe mode”. If X-Plane detects that it crashed the last time it was run, then on the next start, X-Plane gives you a chance to reset rendering settings. If you reset the settings, you might avoid a crash on startup. You’re not locked out.

Don’t Reset My Settings

Now that X-Plane is 64-bits, getting locked out is much less of a concern. So we have received a number of complaints from users who don’t want their rendering settings reset if the last run didn’t shut down properly. The previous crash might have been due to an errant add-on, and resetting X-Plane’s rendering settings won’t help. If you have a multi-machine setup, having the dialog box come up on the external visual machines means an annoying trip to the KVM switch.

So we’ve changed how safe mode works. Starting in X-Plane 10.40 beta 10, safe mode is an option if and only if you start the sim with the shift key held down.

This gives you access to safe mode when you need it (e.g. after repeated crashes) but skips the annoyance of having your settings reset (or having to get a keyboard for external visuals).

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

18 comments on “A Slightly Better Safe Mode”

  1. I cry foul! This is a NEW feature!!! And you said, Ben…. 😉

    Hey, this is a great idea. I rather like the option. Thanks!

    It wouldn’t hurt if we could get a little relief from the “new version” message too. This would be a real boon to developers. But that’s another “new feature,” perhaps.

    Loving 10.40, by the way. Seeing the mountains in the distance from Ryan Field just outside of Tucson is a real treat.

    1. We put in the new feature because it was the least insane way to fix a series of bug reports from pro customers. 🙂

      Don’t hold your breath re: the new-version message. We feel -very- strongly that everyone needs to be on latest. As soon as we set up a system where third party developers can try to “park” the sim on a specific supported version, we’re going to have a tower of babble – you airplane vendor likes 10.25, but your scenery vendor likes 10.36 and your online flight network likes 10.40 and now you’re toast.

  2. Hi Ben,
    maybe it’s a stupid question, but what’s the difference between the new safe mode and the option ‘Offer to reset to default if crashed’ that you can set into Settings->Operation & Warnings->Startup section?
    Is the safe mode a further ’emergency exit’ for those who haven’t flagged that option?

  5. Is there any chance the option to when X-Plane does crash. That when restarting it is reset at the same place with all the same settings in place?

    If flying at 35,000ft you have to do the whole setup again and I know about the local map short cut, but it doesn’t quite reset perfectly at altitude and you have to wrestle the aircraft back into some sort of place, and still your fuel and weight loads are gone or reset to usually the start position?
    SD

      1. I think the proposal is not so unimportant, even if it is not 100% accurate position. It would be much easier, if it is possible, someday. After 10.40 final, it would be nice if Laminar, could be introduce a new handling for libraries, just for the restructuring of the library system, to install the airports easier.
        However, I am very pleased with the simulator, good work Ben and the rest of the Team :)..
        How do things look in the future, that there is a dedicated online servers for X-Plane 10, like dafsim.com for example (control with a voluntary ATC), but really supports the X-Plane features?

        Greetings and a nice Weekend,
        Patrick

      2. Band-aid solution?… Since my early X-Plane9 sorties its not been the X-Plane crashes that bother me so much, but the full multi-hour simulation ruined or the time lost just to get back to same point I was before the crash. X-Plane will always crash as there are so many different elements working together they will and do fail, a saving running copy of all the settings (does the replay do this now?) to go back just a few frames would certainly keep us very happy, In most cases we fix the fault and move on. SD

        1. I have to agree that being able to save and restore the full sim state is a good idea – you might have to leave X-Plane and finish a flight the next day. So having some kind of ‘perfect’ restore is a pretty sane (albeit possibly complicated*) feature.

          My only bone to pick is that I consider the state of stability of a fully enhanced X-Plane to be _not acceptable_ right now…the sim just crashes too much. I’m not sure what the next push can be to fix this; the crashes we get reported in-field have become useless because we’ve fixed the ones we can read. The remainder are crashes in the NVidia and AMD and Intel drivers, and on Windows, we don’t get good traces out of them (a limit of 64-bits and not having their symbol files). We are working to restore mac crash reporting, which may help.

          * If we implement perfect save/restore, it won’t help you – because you are using third party aircraft and our save/restore can’t save the simulation state inside their plugins. So every third party aircraft would have to be modified to support save/restore too.

  7. YMMV but the holy grail for me would be if it started in safe mode only by request (via shift key). Most of the crashes I get are sasl syntax errors — scores per day easily fixed by re-coding. Most crashes I read about are related to plugins. I’m very happy clearing the UNSAFE flag (except when I forget and the smaller ‘safe’ window appears which induces me to force-quit and clear two UNSAFEs to preserve my window size), but I wouldn’t have to do anything if it only tried to help on request via the shift key.

    Why not just Safe mode when started with the shift key, else nothing — that is, unless your complaints show a clear majority are due to overambitious rendering settings. My experience of betas crashing that are not due to plugins or scenery are practically nonexistent — kudos to you! An exception might be the arrival of a new beta with a preference incompatibility leading to a crash or slow fps, usually cured respectively by deleting X-Plane Binary.prf, or visiting Rendering Settings and making a trivial change to reset that.

    Anyway, let’s see. . .

    1. I think you may not have understood my post.

      ‘YMMV but the holy grail for me would be if it started in safe mode only by request (via shift key)’

      This is exactly what we have implemented in 10.40 beta 10.

      1. Egad! I thought you forced a Rendering Options screen on re-start, my bad. Yes, I crashed it via UNSAFE and it just relaunched. My jaw dropped. . . my eyes teared in gratitude. Yay! Thanks for this.

        Actually I misrepresented too when I said “scores per day” in my first comment. Bad sasl code doesn’t usually result in a crash. The only crashes I’ve seen in ages were due to scenery in Orly – cured by converting .bmp files to png and dds. But then maybe I forget because clearing UNSAFE is pure muscle memory.

  8. Hang on, was it about 155 MBs or am I screwing up the backups somewhere? A log on what files changed would be helpful — never found one. Obviously only written during downloads and not the search process.

  9. This is a nice solution.

    Another one should be that xplane won’t restart in windowed mode if it crashes…in my opinion it should restart in fullscreen if this option was selected before.
    Using 4 machines this could be very useful to avoid checking each one all the times xplane crashes for any reason.

    I would be grateful if you’ll add this function in near future!!!

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