Pete Dowson

Hmm. not as bad as Vista, which I hated. I'm using Win7 Ultimate 64 bit -- mainly on Ultimate because I "upgraded" from the Beta and RC versions which I've been using since early 2009. I actually think it's the best version of Windows ever, and that's saying a lot from an old guy who until now thought Win98 to be the best, and then only reluctantly because I preferred DOS! ;-) I switched off UAC and generally eventually got rid of all the nags. I still sometimes wrestle with the annoying complexities of folder and file security and permissions, but, as you've found, if you steer clear of allowing programs to install into "Program Files" they don't come into it too much. I'm surprised your Joysticks sometimes take longer than 15 mSecs to respond. I've tried setting the timeout on my system right down to 5 mSecs and get nothing timing out. But I am only using default Microsoft drivers, nothing from the likes of CH or Saitek. I set the default at 15 because that was the lowest which got rid of a hanging problem on a couple of user's systems without causing problems on their real joysticks. I might have to raise it to 20 or 25 and only advise folks to lower it if they do get hangs in the options. Regards Pete

Okay. Thanks. Maybe I shall have to increase the timeout to 20. Can you tell me what version of Windows you are using, please? I know the log showed 5.1 with SP2, which implies WinXP SP2, but I think both Vista and Win7 tell FS9 this in any case as it installs in "compatibility mode". Regards Pete

sorry, I thought it was the other way around, that you get the black screen in full screen mode but not Windowed? I've never heard of anyone having such a problem in Windowed mode but not full screen. sorry, I don't understand that question. What works smoothly and what not? This is the forum, and in any case it appears we are not even clear on what the symptoms of this problem are. This second message from you seems to be almost the direct opposite of the first. Can you clarify at all? Regards Pete

There's no "registration page" for FSUIPC inside FSX, there never has been. And for FSUIPC you never have to "sign in as admin". You must register via the installer, as always. Please do refer to the document included in the ZIP about Installing and registering. That's what it is for, to explain things to you. Pete

Drat! This is the result of a safety timeout just added. It is set by default to 15mSecs because so far, under test, all legitimate joystick connections respond within that time, and bad ones (potentially causing FSUIPC's buttons and axes setting screens to hang), do not. Possibly 15 mSecs isn't generous enough, though any much longer for response from a joystick is going to slow your system down somewhat so can't be good in any case. Maybe it is because your USB ports are set to conserve power. Can you check? Go into the Windows device manager and find the Power Management tab on each of the USB hubs or devices you can find. Uncheck any option which allows windows to switch off the power. Let me know, please. Failing that you can edit the "JoystickTimeout" parameter in your FSUIPC INI file (in the modules folder). It will be set to 15. Try 20, then 25, then 30 and so on till it works okay. Sorry, you'll need to do this before loading up FS for each test. Please let me know about that too. Sorry. I really have no idea about what CPflight's MCP does. There's nothing about that in the log. Doesn't it need its own driver loaded? Regards Pete

Have you tried in Windowed mode? The FSUIPC dialogue is a standard Windows dialogue, nothing special. I have no control whatsoever about how Windows displays it. But so far ALL the problems with a non-display have only been in full screen mode and always tied to driver problems. Sorry, but this must surely be a different problem. How can running in Windowed mode cause a different problem in IVAP? And what does IVAP mean by "cannot load the Fsuipc"? That really doesn't mean anything to me. You aren't explaining things. There is NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER between a version installed by IVAP and a correct version downloaded from anywhere I supply FSUIPC to. They are the SAME! If you mean you deleted the KEY file, and so rendered your copy of FSUIPC (wherever it came from) unregistered, and that appeared to "fix" things, then the problem lies with your registration! The registration will cause problems with add-on applications in one of the following circumstances: 1. The key looks illegal (pirated). Unfortunately registrations in 2010 look this way if used with versions before 3.957. 2. The PC's date is set to one BEFORE the date of the Registration key. 3. The signature check on the FSUIPC.DLL file fails. The documentation tells you how to check that. Regards Pete

You might want to investigate MyTrafficX, which allows you to have the same amount of AI Traffic but with much less impact on performance, or, if you wished, much more traffic for the same performance. Another add-on which can (now) also improve performance with AI Traffic is "Ultimate traffic 2" -- but you would need the new update which is nearing the end of its Beta testing and looking good. In fact you can run both UT2 and MyTrafficX together, with the latter filling in those airlines and flights (like military) which may not be covered by UT2. They cooperate quite well. Regards Pete

No. If the menu is not showing, just press and hold the ALT key. It wil then appear. I think you need to refer to FSX help or other documentation and get to know it rather better. I've no idea what "CtrL+Shift+F12" does, but it isn't anything I'ver ever heard of. Sorry. Where did you find the Install log you showed? The FSUIPC4 log file, and the INI file it also generates, are all in the same place, the FSX Modules folder, the same place as FSUIPC4 itself. Pete

Ah, the document you must be reading, then, is the one entitled "FSUIPC4 Offsets Status", which is a supplement to the main "FSUIPC for Programmers" reference guide to provide updated information specifically for FSUIPC4 only. You might recall that FSUIPC4 is for FSX and ESP, not FS9 and before? The prime reference remains the document called "FSUIPC for Programmers". Please only refer to the supplement if you are specifically concentrating only on FSX and ESP. The earlier one is more general. Regards Pete

No, it isn't the same problem. your FSUIPC4 is installed correctly. This is a question for Air Hauler support. I expect they need you to run FSX and Air Hauler "as administrator", maybe because Air Hauler is not Vista or Win7 aware. Check with them. I don't have the program and I don't know what it does or how it checks things. To check that FSUIPC4 is okay, just look at the Add-Ons menu in FSX, when ready to fly. FSUIPC should be an entry there. If not, show me the FSUIPC4 log file, not the Installer's log which shows everything is okay. Regards Pete

Two possibilities spring to mind: one is the intensity of AI traffic as you approach the airport. If you reload a flight or restart FS youare putting the AI traffic situation back to start and it takes a while to grow. You could check that by turning off AI traffic just as a test. The other possibility if it is more time-related than approach-related is that you have some sort of memory leak which is degrading performance by increasing the swap rate to / from disk. Do you notice an increase in disk activity as the performance reduces? Are you using a 32- or 64-bit edition of Windows? Are you using a fully updated FSX installation? If not I'd strongly recommend to get it to SP2 or Acceleration level. Both SP1 and SP2 had substantial changes, and one of those was making Simconnect much more efficient and avoiding TCP/IP beffering. You might want to ask about this on a more generic FSX platform, like the FSX Forums here and over in AVSIM. Someone who has had a similar experience might know the answer. Oh, one other possibility now occurs to me. Could your system be gradually overheating? If temperatures ramp up too far I think these modern processors, and maybe the graphics ones too, intelligently slow down to prevent damage from overheating. Regards Pete

Yes, about 4 miles away now, they moved nearer before Christmas. I see they've put the bundle price up now -- it was a real bargain when I got it, less than £500. I've been to Scan's place. My dual 9775 system, also water-cooled, came from them. I'm using it now as my development system in my office -- and as an extra radiator to keep warm! ;-) Regards Pete

But the FSX.CFG file, which is always created by FSX when it terminates normally, is not to be found in any of the proper places for it. Look at the install log extract below. Can YOU find the FSX.CFG file in any of those places (remembering to look in the Microsoft\FSX subfolder)? If not, where? Without knowing where the FSX.CFG file is being loaded from, the Installer cannot create or edit your DLL.XML file in the correct place in order to make FSUIPC4 load with FSX. The only times this problem has EVER occurred before have been when someone has just installed or reinstalled FSX but not yet run it, so no FSX.CFG file has been generated. No no, most certainly not! The FSX.CFG file should be in the AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX folder for the User for whom you installed FSX, "dmedon" by the look of it. What do you mean by "uninstall the whole thing"? FSX? I wouldn't do that. Find the FSX.CFG file first (and not the one in the main FSX folder -- that's not the one which is used, it is only the prototype). One thought. In all the times you've run FSX, has it ever actually terminated normally? Maybe it is crashing during termination and therefore never saving its CFG file. When you set options in FSX's menus, like scenery, autogen, graphics stuff, do they stick? Are they retained on next load? If so, it must be saving the FSX.CFG file somewhere. If not, there's your problem. FSX is not terminating correctly. Regards Pete

No, there was really no noticeable difference so I stopped using it. I'm now 100% using Solid State Drives (a 128 Gb for Win7 and a 256Gb for FSX), and they seem to help a lot more. I got the OCZ Vertex drives. Also, since those experiments I upgraded to an i7-975 water-cooled and overclocked to 4.5Ghz, and that has 6Gb of 2000 MHz DDR3 memory. Of all the changes I've ever done I think the combination of the core i7 PC and the fast DDR3 memory is really responsible for the biggest improvements -- a fast processor isn't enough, the memory access is then the bottleneck, and I think that was the problem on my dual 9775 setup. Maybe now, with fast DDR3 memory using the direct connection the i7's offer, a RAMdisk would help, but to be any use I'd have to add far too much 2000 MHz DDR3 memory and I am told it is very difficult to get a stable overclock with more memory, even with water-cooling. That's my 737NG cockpit setup, used with a projector at 1400 x 1050. I'm upgrading the projector on Tuesday to full HD at 1920 x 1080. With the overclocked water-cooled GTX 285 I'm not expecting any deterioration in performance because I don't believe the 285 is working anywhere near peak as it is. I'm very pleased now, having at last achieved my ambition of getting smooth performance at a fully populated UK2000 Heathrow Extreme -- with 100% UT2 traffic, plus MyTrafficX traffic for the remaining airlines etc, and AES, it stays around 20 fps (I'm locked at 30 fps which is sustained almost everywhere else). Very satisfying, butnot cheap, obviously! I also have a VFR setup, on a 32" TV screen at 1280 x 1024, with a Piper Arrow hardware cockpit. I updated that for much much less money, getting a mobo, i7-920 processor, 6Gb 1800 MHz memory and decent cpu cooler bundle, pre-overclocked to 4.0GHz, for a tenth of the amount I'd spent on the 737NG setup. That's pretty good too, but I don't fly into large dense airports in my Piper! ;-) Best Regards Pete

There's no error there which would cause that error message. What editor are you using for this file? Don't use Wordpad or any word processor -- they don't stick to plain ASCII. Use notepad or a simple text editor. If you are still not sure what is wrong, ZIP the file itself and send it to me at petedowson@btconnect.com. Regards Pete

Of course you need a flaps axis assigned in order to calibrate detentes on it! How else could it possibly know what axis you were using for the flaps? Not only that you need to calibrate it normally first, following the step-by-step instructions given for calibration. Do not rush into programming detentes for an unknown and uncalibrated axis! Get it fully working and tested without the detentes. All setting the detentes really means is recording little zones along an already known axis which then are made to correspond with the specific aircraft's flap settings. You can't do that without an axis or with an axis with an unknown range through failure to calibrate! And what have you assigned the axis to? Of course you do! How on Earth do you expect to calibrate a flaps axis if there's no axis assigned to flaps? "Flaps detent"? Where are you looking? There's no such control that I know of. Are you assigning all of your axes in FSUIPC? Have you tried assigning anything in FS itself instead? Please just first assign an axis in one of the three ways possible -- Flaps in FS, or "AXIS FLAPS SET in FSUIPC, if assigning via FS controls, or just "Flaps" in FSUIPC if assigning direct to FSUIPC calibration. The last is the most efficient, but you shouldn't really mix things too much or you will run the risk of confusing yourself and getting multiple assignments for the same axis. Pete

For on-line flights it could be well worthwhile moving to ASA and enabling the Direct Wind Control (DWC) -- i.e. global weather. You don't need to worry about the ATIS for airports being wrong in FS because you will presumably have "real" ATIS from the on-line server. And you don't need to worry about wrongly assigned runways because your on-line ATC are in control of that too. In fact if the on-line linking program (Squawkbox or FSInn or whatever) is able to provide the weather inputs into FSX it would probably be a good idea if the implementers were to use the SimConnect global weather mode themselves. If they don't have that option, maybe someone should suggest it? Good flying! Regards Pete

FS9 doesn't have offsets 341C or 341D -- or at least there's nothing useful known in those offsets before they were assigned for FSX. Where are you getting your information from? Those were added in FSUIPC4 for FSX and ESP. FS9 doesn't support those indicators in any useful way. Pete

Sorry, I cannot help you debug your Lua plugin without seeing it. However, the clue in in the error message in the log: 518812 *** LUA Error: ...am Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Modules\J41 CD.lua:1: unexpected symbol near '{' Line 1, the very first line of your "J41 CD.Lua" file is in error. Some spurious characters I expect. Show that line to me if you don't see the error. Or, better, just paste a copy of the file in a message here. I cannot help without information. There's no point in changing any mapping. The Lua script is being run, as the log cleasrly shows, and if obviously failing on line 1 as it says. That's why there's an error message in the Log. The error message is there to tell you this and to show you where the error is. Regards Pete

The installer cannot find your FSX.CFG file so it cannot set up the DLL.XML file to get FSUIPC4 loaded by SimConnect. Have you run FSX at all before trying this? If not you must run FSX at least once first, otherwise the files needed are not present. it does clearly tell you this in the installation instructions. Regards Pete

Thank you. I have written to their "tech support" email address. They don't appear to publish any commercial email addresses. Regards Pete

It sounds like one of the databases created by my "MakeRunways" program. See the "Updates and other goodies" Announcement above, or download it from the http://www.schiratti.com/dowson site. There's a text file in the ZIP which describes the assorted files it produces. Regards Pete

Okay. I thought you meant the Installer. For clarity I will be adding the comment "or press CANCEL for no registration" to the installer dialogue. FSUIPC's dialogue in the Add-Ons menu doesn't ask for anything. It merely tells you whether you are registered or not, and if so under what name and address. If you are not registered there's no much else in the Add-Ons options. Regards Pete

Well, Squawkbox4 does not use FSUIPC, and I don't know why it has such a need, but perhaps that's why you enabled the compatibility mode in the first place? Certainly FSX doesn't install with that option set. Regards Pete

Versions of FSUIPC before 3.93 are not supported. When version 3.96 is released, probably this weekend, support for 3.93 will cease too. Saitek are not licensed users of FSUIPC and I cannot support their products. You must ask them for support. Sorry. I am actually not pleased that such a well-known company is using FSUIPC for commercial purposes without any permission or agreement. I shall be contacting them shortly to ask why this is. Regards Pete