Repeat rate between "physical" and virtual joystick different

[pilotjohn]

The "repeat while held" rate seems to be different between physical (those coming from the OS) and virtual (device IDs 64-72) joystick buttons. As I switched to triggering FSUIPC through virtual buttons from Stream Deck (instead of using vJoy), the rate at which events are sent to MSFS (for example, MHz increment on COM1) appears much higher for virtual buttons. This makes it hard to do step increments. I have the repeat set to 25,10 (40ms with 400ms initial delay), but the "initial delay" also seems to be ignored.

[John Dowson]

@pilotjohn Yes, after testing we have found that there is definitely an issue here - initial delay times are ignored (!) and subsequent delay times are different for virtual button repeats .... I'll post an update for you to try when I get time to investigate and resolve.

Cheers,

John

 

[pilotjohn]

Thanks, no hurry. Please enjoy your "vacation". 🙂

[John Dowson]

On 12/31/2020 at 9:09 PM, pilotjohn said:

Please enjoy your "vacation".

I think they are called "staycation" these days!

[John Dowson]

@pilotjohn Please try the attached version. The initial delay should now be working, and the repeat rate adjusted to give acceptable values for standard and virtual buttons.

FSUIPC7.exe

Using that version with the following:

PollInterval=40

ButtonRepeat=25,12

 

gives initial and repeat delays near enough identical, and hopefully you should get similar results (but not guaranteed!) for other values.

 

John

 

[Pete Dowson]

7 minutes ago, John Dowson said:

hopefully you should get similar results (but not guaranteed!) for other values.

I think the timings for virtual buttons stay pretty much spot on. the PollInterval value doesn't affect those -- that's only applied to hardware polling. The way to get the timings the same is to make sure that the repeat rate is a divisor of the poll rate -- eg in this case an interval of 40 mSecs is a rate of 25 per second, , so 25/25 = 1. If there's a mismatch, as i think the default values currently provide, then the rate for real buttons will suffer -- i.e. be slower compared to the virtual buttons.

So:

PollInterval=20

ButtonRepeat=25,12

is okay too, as the poll rate is 1000/20 = 50 and 50/25 = 2.

And so on.

All this stuff isn't normally all that important -- except when comparing rates! Earlier versions of FSUIPC did assume there was a lot more overhead in polling real buttons and so adjusted the timings to suit, resulting in the much slower real button polling. Experiments on more recent hardware (and Windows versions) showed that these adjustments could be significantly relaxed.

Pete

 

[pilotjohn]

Seems to be working now. Thanks for the fix!