Re black window announcement

[merlins]

I wrote in a forum recently that I suspected some timing issue somewhere, and that FSUIPC was either getting bombed out by the window switch or was letting go of the sim in some way. Primarily because although the PC was way fast enough for the sim, I observed that fs2002 window switch was much quicker than as for 2004. Thus, there is something about 2004 timings which is diferent than it's predecessor.

Ok here's what I did: In XP, uncheck window animation:-). Use XP style desktop, not windows classic (possibly something is running ) Now minimise and restore a few windows, any will do and you might well see a noticeable inrease in speed when they switch. This suggests window animation may be upto some mischief.

Now start the sim and get into flight window, full screen view and then minimise, but DO NOT minimise with alt+enter or mouse. Instead from the full screen view minimise using the 'windows' key ONLY, located at lower left hand of keyboard. Restore at your liesure with l/h mouse click on task bar sim indicator. This will not crash or hang the sim and affords quicker access to other windows anyway. Note also abcense of 'beep' when using this method, why? i wonder.

By this method I swear I must have toggled windows in 2004 about 100 times, not one single freeze.

Perhaps this may shed light or give some hint as to what is going on, I would hedge a bet on FSUIPC not being quite at home with timings, somewhere.

Merlins

[Pete Dowson]

By this method I swear I must have toggled windows in 2004 about 100 times, not one single freeze.

But oddly enough, on three different PCs, I've never had a freeze when toggling screen modes at all, not since early FS2004 Betas, and this is without taking any special precautions. Only since a change of motherboard, yesterday, have I been getting a black screen when changing from Windowed to Full Screen mode. And that isn't a freeze as such, either, though I suppose it would look like one. When it happens I can still access the menus, and going into Options-Settings-Display-Hardware and changing something there does recover the situation and give me proper full screen mode correctly operating.

Perhaps this may shed light or give some hint as to what is going on, I would hedge a bet on FSUIPC not being quite at home with timings, somewhere.

What you say is certainly interesting, but perhaps some greater detail from my findings might help.

The fix for my particular black window problem, which of course may not be the same as yours, shows that it isn't anything FSUIPC is actually doing, EXCEPT that it is hooking into the main FS window subclass chain. Many add-in DLLs do that. But in FSUIPC, ADVDISPLAY and PFC I delay this subclassing for a number of seconds after FS starts. This seems to be a problem, in FS2004 only. Somehow the subclass chain is getting corrupted and something is getting left out.

With my current ability to reproduce the problem at will, I actually eliminated everything FSUIPC was doing, so in fact it loaded but didn't hook anything, didn't do anything, was never called, nothing. Okay, no problem. Then I gradually added things back, one at a time. The only addition to cause a problem was the subclassing, and this still caused a problem even when my subclassed window was bypassed so that it did nothing at all but pass messages on!

I experimented further and found that if I do the subclassing immediately my module is initialised then it works fine! So it's the delayed subclassing which is the problem. Why or how I have no idea.

The same applied to ADVDISPLAY and PFC.DLL, but none of my other modules. It looks like the same applies to Lago's new "ViMaCore2004" module too, so I've written to them advising of the solution I found.

Until I get feedback on the test I've asked folks to do (the "InitiDelay=0" parameter) I won't know if this is just a peculiarity of the problem I've seen and can reproduce, or whether it really does cover the other cases. Hopefully I will get feedback which will clarify this. Perhaps you could try the fix I suggest too (but take care not to get the issue confused by other add-in modules).

Thanks!

Pete