Pete Dowson

2.974 is not only several years old, but it wasn't even the last version supported for FS2002! What are "mutitasking issues reported with pre 3.4x FSUIPC." I'm afraid I don't understand what that is about at all. How is your panel dealing with course selection? FSUIPC has nothing to do with that part of FS, it is left to FS and your gauges. Surely you do not use FSUIPC to access this? Missing from what? No .KEY file is supplied with FSUIPC. Like the INI and LOG files it is generated when FSUIPC runs, and FSUIPC runs if it is installed correctly in the FS Modules folder. It sounds to me like either the user does not know how to use Windows Explorer to see files, or has not actually installed FSUIPC yet. What issue? Surely you are not using FSUIPC for anything to do with course? What do you use FSUIPC for? It seems quite clear that you have a gauge (DF734NJ6.GAU) which attempting to use FSUIPC but which is not accredited to use it. I have no record of a key ever being issued for this gauge. The gauge appears to be reading part of the AI TCAS tables, so presumably it wants to populate a TCAS radar or ND. Again, this really has nothing to do with course selection. Regards, Pete

All my software is available in the same place it's always been, http://www.schiratti.com/dowson. There are also Beta updates and other things attached to the announcements at the top of this forum. Regards, Pete

Try removing the FSNav.DLL, see if that helps. Maybe it's an old version? I understand there were problems with the original FS2004 version. If you have the latest versions of both, then, I'm sorry, but there's something horribly wrong with either your FS installation or the system it's running in for such drastic effects to manifest themselves. I've really not heard of anything quite like the symptoms you describe before. Maybe it is down to something else running in the background. You wouldn't be running something like a Kensington mouse or similar, perhaps? Some horrible things have been reported with that. Either way, check all the other processes running and see if there are some you could do without. A process of elimination may show the culprit. Regards, Pete

The rudder control input at 0BBA does work. It is the main control for the rudder. Are you sure you don't have some joystick axis input interfering? You can disconnect the joystick rudder via bit 2 in 310A. The other possibility is that you have auto-coordination set (auto-rudder in the menus). With that setting the aileron control also operates steering. You can control the auto-coordination option via offset 0278. Use FSUIPC's IPC logging to check what your code is actually doing, and try things out in FSInterrogate. Regards, Pete

No. There should be no measurable frame rate difference with FSUIPC, unless something is using it. Then it depends upon the performance of whatever is using it. What else have you got installed in FS? There's something else in there which does nothing if FSUIPC isn't there. Assuming you have left the FSUIPC options pretty much all on their default settings then it really isn't doing anything except waiting for something to use it. Regards, Pete

Does it? Do you know, I've never noticed that. Does it say where this description applies to? When you download weather is gets it for a great many weather stations and they'll all have their own weather. Maybe your airport is not actually at one of the weather stations and it is only reporting weather for the nearest one to you? The weather is interpolated between weather stations. Alternatively, pehaps you are getting the weather reported at the place where your aircraft is, but the clouds you see are over so many miles away (I think the distance is something like 5 miles -- if there's no clouds above you, nor within a certain range, then it is clear). Try looking straight up, see if you see any clouds. If you are in one of those areas like New York or Los Angeles where there are a load of weather stations quite close to each other, the weather can be quite different in FS not so far away, especially if each station reports at different times or intervals. Try placing yourself in some place far away from many other airports and see if you get the same. If you have my FSUIPC package you will find a utility program inside called WeatherSet2. You can run that to tell you the weather at the aircraft and at any selected airport or location. Currently I use ActiveSky 2004.5 most of the time. I used to use FSMeteo, and still do occasionally. Regards, Pete

I wouldn't have thought so. If you've tried them and they do nothing they were probably added as part of some good intention which never amounted to anything. There are many like that I think, as well as some left-overs from older FS versions which don't work. Regards, Pete

No, only in Flights and in the Themes. When you say you are loading "actual" weather, I assume you mean you are using the built-in FS facilities for downloading weather from the Internet? Where exactly are you seeing this "clear" report? I didn't think it gave reports before or after loading. I must admit I don't really use FS's own weather much, but I've not heard of any bad discrepancies. Maybe your question would be better on the FS2004 forum? Regards, Pete

Turning slew on individually for a specific AI aircraft doesn't change the user simulation into slew mode. Your own flight continues as normal. It simply allows the position and path of the particular AI aircraft to be changed, or frozen -- for instance to precent AI traffic encroaching onto a runway which a third-party ATC program has cleared you for landing. It is worth experimenting with MS's own Traffic Toolbox to see what can and cannot be accomplished with AI traffic. I would hope that MS will provide a programmable interface for it in future FS versions. Regards, Pete

The latter two are trivial. That is a user thing, nothing to do with Radar Contact. Sorry, but you will have to wait to see what has been accomplished, or experiment for yourself. I did tell you how to start! :wink: Regards, Pete

I may well become one, once I'm a decent flyer again! I find it hard to remember the last "fun" flight I did. I do a lot of short and repetitive flights, testing things. I'm afraid I let things get on top of me, saying "yes" to almost all requests I get. :? I'm going to have to start dividing my time and reducing the number of additions and changes I make. Trouble is, that's what I decided last time, and then FS2004 was on top of me! I am here hoping the next FS version is a couple of years off, giving me some time to fly! Fat chance, eh? :wink: Regards, Pete

That wasn't me but Hm. :) Regards, Pete

I hope someone else can help you here, because I really have no idea. I don't know or use any of those programs and have never flown on-line. Sorry. Don't the VATSIM sites have someplace you can ask questions of other on-line flyers? Regards, Pete

Well, that's not really true, that's why. It's just that if a button is programmed in an aircraft-specific section, and that aircraft is currently loaded, then the specific programming for that button takes precedence over any programming for the same button in the generally applicable section. You can have the same button programmed for completely different things in each aircraft-specific section and also in the general [buttons] section. The latter programming simply becomes the default action for when you load an aircraft with no specific programming. What you were effectively trying to do was have a single button, with a number of different conditions attached, spread over a the section and a specific aircraft section. It's not only horrible to contemplate programming that way (well, it is to me :) ), but it would be a devil of a job to understand what was going on when it went wrong (as it, in fact, did! :wink: ) Is that by measuring the sending of the commands in the Log (Event logging), or merrely by seeing the results? Other things conspire to slow things down. I also noticed that for several functions you were using FS keypresses rather than the equivalent commands directly. That will slow things down too -- each of those keypresses get looked up by FS in its assignments list and converted to an FS control then posted back to the same window for execution. Why not simply assign the control you want in the first place? Regards, Pete

I've not really got a "main page". The nearest to that is the page that Enrico Schiratti maintains with all my stuff. I am not providing full new releases yet. I'm targetting those for the end of the month or early March. I'll just be posting test versions for folks to try and, if applicable, feedback problems and so on. These will be within announcements here, at the top of this forum. They will contain the modules as attachments, if I can keep the size down to what I'm allowed here. This is an experiment at a wider Beta test period than the very restricted ones I've been operating till now. I'm doing this because there have been some relatively serious problems recently which no one in my normal circles of testers found. I'm also trying to get folks to expect a slower rate of updates than in the past. Getting a serious update ready, tested and documented every month is exhausting me! :wink: Regards, Pete

Yes, it is here on my list. I'm afraid I am running rather later than I'd hoped. So many things have been happening on other fronts. I do hope to get the outstanding PFC things wrapped up before I go on holiday in four weeks, though, so please watch this space. Sorry for the delay. Regards, Pete

You can do that, but Radar Contact 4 (in Beta still, as I said) will deal with AI aircraft and you are better turning the MS ATC volume right down. Well, I think you'll be surprised what Radar Contact will be able to dobut it has taken a lot of development work and experimentation, and there's no release date set yet. I really don't know so much about VoxATC. I think its main claim to fame is the voice control side. I saw a brief presentation by the Author at the Birmingham FS Show last year, but didn't have enough time for questions. If you want to do your own thing be aware it is a very big job. The ins and outs of ATC are many and varied even if you are going to only concentrate on one area of the world and with one type of flight. For AI interaction you will need to experiment with the areas I mentioned. Regards, Pete

Check out Radar Contact and VoxATC first. Version 3 of Radar Contact doesn't deal with AI traffic, but version 4 is in Beta and looks very promising in this area. No. And Microsoft themselves says you can't have both operating together. No, only the density setting, which you can change via added FSUIPC controls (see the User Guide and Advanced User guide). But these won't accomplish anything in MP mode. You can do some things with AI traffic through the control interface FSUIPC offers via offset 2900. You would need to experiment though. Mostly I think you have to put them into slew mode to make them do what you want -- changing A/P settings and so on doesn't seem to help. Best thing is to download Microsoft's own traffic toolbox and experiment with that -- you can try sending the AI aircraft all sorts of FS controls there, then apply what you learn via FSUIPC's offset 2900. Regards, Pete

Okay, curiosity got the better of me in the wee hours last night, and I worked out what was happening here. It's the "Repeat" action which defeats the anti-duplicated button check. In fact the initial "Press" is still eliminated -- what you are getting is the first and subsequent repeats. These are effectively defeating my duplication checks because a repeat action is neither a press or release -- there's no change in the button state. I'll work out a fix for this and it will be included in the interim version uploaded here later today or tomorrow. Sorry for any confusion this has caused! BTW on the question of repeating for so many seconds, etc, I forgot to mention that you can set the Button repeat rate using the ButtonRepeat=20 parameter. This is covered in the Advanced User's guide. Regards, Pete

Check the thread a little way below entitled "Brakes no Longer Work off Joystick" (not too obscure a title, really?) :wink: Sorry. It is a bug in FSUIPC, affecting those who have calibrated Throttle 1 separately in the multiple throttles page. I have fixed it several weeks ago and sent out a few interim releases for folks to use -- again you can locate one via the threads. However, an "official" pre-release of the next version of FSUIPC will be placed here in an announcement either later today or more likely tomorrow, so your best bet is to wait a few more hours or so and use that. Apologies for the problem. Regards, Pete

The title makes this ambiguous. If the title you have used here ("Keyboard Buttons") is meant to imply a keyboard emulating device, not a joystick button device, then the answer is "it doesn't matter" because your HID is looking like a keyboard, so it must produce keystrokes. The keyboard interface is all in Windows, not in my programs. The rest of my reply is on the other assumption, that this is a question about a joystick type device. I'm not sure what a HID is defined as, apart from an "input device". FSUIPC and WideClient use the Windows joystick API (joyGetPosEx), not the over-complicated C++ COM-style stuff in DirectInput, which I really can't get my head around. In the Windows joystick API everything revolves around a unit called a "Joystick". The maximum it can handle on one joystick is 6 axes, one POV (point of view or "hat") and 32 buttons. The API supports a maximum of 16 such joysticks, 0-15, making the total number of buttons per system equal to 512 (not counting POVs, which I handle as up to 8 more buttons, just like FS2000 used to). This is the same interface FS always used, from FS95 through to and including FS2000. They changed to the DirectInput interface in FS2002. If it supports the joystick API as well as DirectInput it would have to appear as 4 joysticks at minimum. This is how the EPIC does it -- up to 16 joysticks for the ISA EPIC using my VXD (Win98), up to 8 with the USB version using the WinXP drivers. I am not sure, but I *thought* the DirectInput standard joystick driver only supported up to 64 buttons (and 2 POVs) per joystick, but of course companies can make their own drivers for USB devices and bypass the whole joystick and DirectInput APIs. In that case the question is moot because neither FSUIPC nor WideClient would handle them, in the same way it doesn't handle any non-joystick HID. Regards, Pete

I don't have anything called "UIPC", so I assume you mean FSUIPC. And the only version i support is the current one, which is 3.45. As far as I know there are no panels which "flat out don't work" because of anything to do with FSUIPC, but if you have specific gauges which use FSUIPC then they should have access keys built in for this. The documentation that comes with the aircraft or panels should tell you if you need to enter anything manually. There is no way I can support all the programs which use FSUIPC. It is really up to the individual authors. If you have some freeware gauges needing access and for some reason the author hasn't bothered to program in the key, you may find one in the Freeware Keys list above. To determine which gauges are suffering this problem you can look at the FSUIPC.LOG file (in the FS modules folder). But I'd advise you to check the documentation or support for your panels first. It should be all explained or programmed for you. Pete

Why do you think that FSUIPC can stop a panel working? Panels don't use FSUIPC and don't need keys. Some individual gauges do. If one needs a key and isn't supplying it (they should do it automatically), then FSUIPC will tell you, and you can find out which gauge it is by looking in the FSUIPC.LOG file. There's a list of Freeware keys in a sticky thread above and this includes several gauges. Regards, Pete

Okay, so the bug in FSUIPC is that I am allowing the line 2=CR(F-0,10)(F-0,11)0,0,K190,8 to work in the [buttons] section when I shouldn't? Hmm. That's odd. I'll try to reproduce it here, but it will be in a few days from now, as I explained. No, no: that isn't how it is intended. The programming is for button 0,0. If you program button 0,0 in an aircraft-specific section then it should be ignored in the general section. That applies to all instances of it as the prime operating button. I thought I already explained this? Why do you think it should be opposite to what I say? Do I have it documented wrongly some place? Regards, Pete