Sporadic SimControl panel connection failure on MacOS Big Sur

[ezcrues]

We have recently moved to MacOS Big Sur on our simulation development laptops. We have noticed that for some simulations, the SimControl panel will sporadically fail to connect to the simulation at startup. We can manually start the SimControl panel and have it connect to a running simulation but that gets to be annoying.

[spfennell]

Hi @ezcrues, I am working on reproducing this issue. If you could keep an eye out for any specific conditions that cause this issue to occur that might help! Thanks for the bug report!

[keithvetter]

I have a similar issue with koviz connecting to the Trick variable server right after the sim starts. When the SIE database is large, koviz receives the SIE XML contents, but find it malformed. I wonder if the sim control panel is experiencing that same issue. I get around the issue by waiting for 5 seconds, then asking the var server for the SIE DB again. I request the SIE DB in a loop until the XML is no longer malformed. That's the way I handle it.

If this is the same issue, it's not a connection issue, it's more of an initialization issue. I can easily recreate this with the GIVS sim.

When I inspect the malformed SIE XML, it is oddly malformed. It's not completely trashed.