EECH with Touchbuddy

[Scrambler]

Hi

Just wondering if anyone out there has tried Touchbuddy with EECH. I have thrown together a fairly basic profile and most of the buttons seem to work OK. Unfortunately I am finding that strange things seem to start happening after being in the game for a short period i.e. start getting spurious instructions sent when pressing buttons which causes unexpected actions. It is not 100% repeatable and does not appear to be associated with any one button in particular. I have so far been unable to successfully use Touchbuddy with EECH for more than 10 - 15 mins at a time.

Some of the things I have seen occurring:-
Spurious commands start getting generated when pressing buttons which activate things like padlock commands (have not actually programmed any of the padlock commands yet) - commands sometimes get issued when selecting new TAB.
Some buttons stop responding for short periods, as do some keyboard keys.
In game screen resolution changes when pressing buttons which also appears to affect the touch screen [basically goes out of calibration, the touch zones being displaced from actual buttons and tabs]
Experience lockups when using game menus
Sometimes see mouse pointer on touch screen and on game menu screen at same time.

I am currently using the EECH 162W4T3 exe with a Trackir, game runs fine when not using Touchbuddy.

Using Touchbuddy & Toolkit 1.0.1 , have tested the published profiles for FC and FS9 and they all work great.

Any ideas?

[Wild.Bill.Kelso]

Zorlac has made one I think. He'll chime in here sooner or later...

[zorlac]

I made a basic profile for EECH (not pretty), and spent 3-4 hours playing it last weekend (Client/server setup). No bugs or errors on my system.

Bit concerned abou the "commands being sent when changing tabs"... there is no possible way that commands are sent during a tab change.

You running client/server or local mode? EECH does "capture" the mouse, but v1.0.1 tries its best to release it. Downdside is that the in-game mouse position gets screwed up sometimes.

Post your profile up and i`ll take a look.

[Scrambler]

I have done some more testing and I think I now understand what is happening. The fact that I also had a faulty mouse further complicated matters (cat had chewed mouse cable! - at least I had a genuine excuse to buy a new wireless laser mouse)

I have come to the conclusion that the problem is basically down to mouse pointers being on both the touch screen and the main screen simultaneously. If I toggle from the cockpit to the menu screen there will be mouse pointers on both the Touch screen and on the primary monitor. If I then click on a menu item the touch screen may also send a keystroke if the pointer just happens to be over a button. It is not 100% repeatable and does seem to depend on what keystroke is issued from the touchscreen. There is a simple work round though i.e. moving mouse to extreme RHS of primary monitor makes it disappear from the touchscreen, clicking on menu items can then be carried out without any unexpected actions. Have altered my profile so that the Menu/Cockpit toggle key is now on the RHS of the touchscreen so that I have only have to move the mouse a short distance until it comes off the touch screen. Have managed an hour long session without any lockups or unexpected control actions, just have to be careful when I toggle onto the menu screen.

Runnning in local mode, would be interested to know it anyone has experienced anything similar.

[zorlac]

It could be worse.... EECH didnt work at all with v1.0.0 (and earlier) in local mode, it locks the mouse cursor to the game area, preventing the touchscreen from working. Thankfully, it uses a crappy way of doing it, so I was able to bypass it with TB v1.0.1.... but with the side effects you are seeing.

[Scrambler]

I think I have discoverered another reason for occassional glitches in EECH when using Touchbuddy - STUCK KEYS.

I have reduced the keypress_delay to 20 in the touchbuddy.cfg to see if it helps.

My assumption is that this is the time between the keydown and keyup events, the reduced time reducing the likely hood that a subsequent keydown event will overwrite (i.e cancel) the first keyup event, does this make sense and is it correct. I assume too short a keypress_delay will mean that the game may miss the keystroke altogether.

I have used Touchbuddy with FS9 & Lomac/FC and have never noticed stuck keys with them so assume it is something unique to EECH.


While I'm here another Q about writing macro's. Is there any disadvantage to aways using the predef statement or should I only use it when using extented keys i.e. "macro = g" does this get implemented any quicker than say "macro = predef:G"

OK another quick Q, if there are a lot of TABS in a profile I find the small scroll arrows difficult to operate quickly if I need to activate a button on a TAB that is not immediately visible. I have tried using the "multiline TAB" option, the TABS that are not immediately visible appear then to be stacked behind the others, only becoming visible when one of the front TABS is pressed - is this how it is supposed to work ?

Hope this makes some sense.

[zorlac]

decreasing the keypress_delay is more likely to create stuck/missed keys.

predef keys are far more reliable and flexible, but normal macros are easier to write. I tend to check that something works with normal macros first, only using predef for multiple shift/alt/ctrl states and those keys that dont work with normal keys

to use multiline tabs, you need to imcrease the tab height so they appear (I think... havent used them for a while)

[Scrambler]

Tried keypres_delay 20 and 50 with no change, but then spotted that I was getting a SHIFT key stuck after I had done a time accel in the game. Looks as if I have made a mistake in the macro programming
i.e. had the time accel macro ^({+}) changing it to ^{+} solved the problem.

Strange thing is that the time decel macro was ^({-}) and it worked and did not cause any problems.

Looks as if I have made similar errors elswhere in the profile, but as above all the macros actually seemed to work on initial testing!

PS how do I get the profile I uploaded a few days ago deleted.
(File:- Scrambler EECH)