Help with Controls - testing with SET_EXTERNAL_POWER

[ark1320]

5 hours ago, John Dowson said:

Basically its the mask of bits to toggle.

Ah, a hex mask. That makes perfect sense, I should have realized that, and it explains why the offset byte value 00000001 gets toggled to 00000000, and vice versa.

Thanks John.

Al

[DaveSCUSA]

I used offset setbits and clrbits to set the state and a button modifier on the input event and it works fine.

As the "Offsets controls" are not listed in the Alpha controls listing, it is not very clear they are in the UI drop down. Once found, easy to use.

In addition to be able to add a second parameter in the UI, an ability to input multiple entries to a single button/key should be considered.

Thanks

[DaveSCUSA]

One additional question, are general offsets initialized to zero when a flight is "Ready to Fly"?

[John Dowson]

1 minute ago, DaveSCUSA said:

I used offset setbits and clrbits to set the state and a button modifier on the input event and it works fine.

You can do it that way, but its generally easier to use the togglebits controls.

2 minutes ago, DaveSCUSA said:

As the "Offsets controls" are not listed in the Alpha controls listing,

No idea what the 'Alpha controls listing' is. For standard controls (i.e. FS controls + FSUIPC-added controls), see the documentation. All FS controls are listed in the Controls List for MSFS Build 999.txt file, and FSUIPC-added controls are documented in the Advanced User guide, starting on page 28.

7 minutes ago, DaveSCUSA said:

In addition to be able to add a second parameter in the UI, an ability to input multiple entries to a single button/key should be considered.

Yes, that would be nice, but I doubt very much that I would ever have time to implement such UI updates. I would love to completely re-write the UI to update it to a more modern toolkit, but again this isn't going to happen. I spend most of my time on support, and remaining time on keeping up with MSFS/P3D updates, adding new functionality and correcting bugs, as well as updating documentation, testing, preparing releases, etc. I have to prioritize and updates that are 'nice-to-have' but take several weeks or longer to implement are just not worth my time.

Allowing for a second parameter to MSFS events is something I would like to implement, but this also is quite difficult as there is no way to know which events take two parameters and which take one. I would need to go through the documentation to discover this, and this would have to be done after each documentation update. And also note that the updated SDK allows for up to 5 parameters to event, not just 2 (although I do not know if any events that take more than 2 parameters at the moment). And as there is a workaround for this (i.e. by defining a preset), this is not currently that high on my list of things to implement.

16 minutes ago, DaveSCUSA said:

One additional question, are general offsets initialized to zero when a flight is "Ready to Fly"?

No. All offsets are initially initialized to 0 on FSUIPC start-up, but not when 'ready-to-fly'. So, once you have set a value in such an offset, it will remain there until you change it.
If you want to initialze your user-defined offsets, then do this yourself. However, this is rarely needed if you are using them to hold lvar or input event values as these will be set when the lvar/input event is received.

John

[DaveSCUSA]

3 hours ago, John Dowson said:

No idea what the 'Alpha controls listing' is. For standard controls (i.e. FS controls + FSUIPC-added controls), see the documentation.

There are two control files, one in Alphabetical order and one in numerical order. The documentation shows a list of offset controls, but no examples of how to use them or they are included in the UI dropdown.

3 hours ago, John Dowson said:

No. All offsets are initially initialized to 0 on FSUIPC start-up, but not when 'ready-to-fly'. So, once you have set a value in such an offset, it will remain there until you change it.

Thank you, very clear.