xoomigo

You had asked and before and had done it before. See my post on April 29, 2023 in the link below: https://forum.dcs.world/topic/207264-touch-portal-app/page/13/

Hi SuperTonique, I happened to chance upon your post here. You had asked me before about the issue and I had pointed to DCS-BIOS being the issue - requires know-how which is beyond my pay grade. After going though plugin setup again and reviewing the latest bundle of DCS-BIOS, I now suspect it may be due to changes in the aircraft alias in the latter which may be the cause of the disconnect. Please post the output of "dcs-coins -v" when you have the SA342 up and running. I need to know the "aircraft" value returned by DCS-BIOS for the confirmation. Cheers!

It should be doable. Just need to create a state similar to "Aircraft" parameter. Need to add to my to-do list.

Looks great! Like the way you did the makeover of the buttons. There's evidently a lot of time spent and love for the L-39. I will add the link to the DCS-COINS plugin in the next opportunity. Your video is also impressive! All aptly covered and explained - with key points and limitations highlighted. Great job! Appreciate the promo of the plugin.

KleineWimpie, Please share the content of your Export.lua file. Thanks & regards, xoomigo

TP 4.2 Build 1 (Beta) is out and supposedly fixed the bug I mentioned earlier. But it did not fix the lag in button/slider dialog window loading time. The issue appears to correlate to the number of plugin actions/events or connectors registered. The more you have, the longer it takes to load. Therefore for the time being, I would advise to limit install the aircraft module one at a time - to the one that you are going to work with in your TP pages. I will need to contact TP to report this issue. TP4 "Edit Control Screen" does not appear to be optimized to initialize large number of actions, events and connectors. I will take a look later. I hear you. It's on my to-do list.

Hi Virgo47 & all who had been waiting patiently... It's finally done. You can get the TP4-compatible DCS-COINS Version 4 from the same place: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3319022/ Note that this version of DCS-COINS is not be compatible with TP v3 and older. Therefore, please do the necessary backup of your existing TP pages and DCS-COINS version on-hand before you do the upgrade and page editing. The TP4 basic plugin support is not exactly clean. I had to do a workaround to enable its new parser to accept the generated TPP format. It may be a problem later when the known bug is fixed in future. The bad news is that all actions added using the pre-TP4 format cannot be edited. The only recourse is to delete and then add them again - and you will need to bear with the 5-second loading time of the "Edit Control Screen" with each button click. Cheers. xoomigo

Just a little note that I will start review of the latest TP requirement changes soon... hope to be able to give an update here in a few days time.

Hi virgo47 & DCS-COINS users, Besides work, I have been very preoccupied with many other things and have been out of touch with DCS and TP for quite a while... The latest TP 4 release came with revised TP format structures - which unexpectedly broke certain DCS-COINS functionalities. I will need to go through the API documentations to identify the changes needed before I can determine what needs to be done for the plugin. However, I can only try to do so sometime in the first quarter of next year. Sorry.

Will look forward to it!

Thanks for the update - you are welcome! Will the next DCS-BIOS release by FlightPanel will include your mod? Also, will you be sharing your work on TP pages when it's complete?

Can you share the BATT_SW line in the PP file? Potentially, it is caused by unexpected inverted values. If the second last column value is "OnOff", change it to "OffOn", or vice-versa.

Sorry, the earlier format that I gave you was incomplete - it was missing the first column which indicates the PP file concerned. Please try replacing the line in CustomACParams.dat file: MH-60R.pp|LGHT_SW|lght_sw|Lighting_Switches|0|0|=int(65535)|0 Or if you want the value to be in percentage, then use the following MH-60R.pp|LGHT_SW|lght_sw|Lighting_Switches|0|0|=pct(65535)|0

This is a gap that I was trying to address too within DCS-COINS earlier on but to no avail. The solution needs to come from DCS-BIOS - something that's outside my capability (for the time being). If you can build a DCS-BIOS function, either in general as a Common parameter or aircraft-specific, I can define a DCS-COINS action to trigger it. I would suggest consulting WarLord to assist here.

What's the output of "dcs-coins -V" (running in Command Prompt) when the value changes? Was there an event triggered from DCS-BIOS that was captured in DCS-COINS? If not, it will not be passed on to TP.

Oh, this is due to the presence of "#" character in the line in the PP file - which a deliberate way to make tell the plugin to bypass the record from being loaded into TP. Not all records mined from a DCS-BIOS JSON file is enabled by default. In this case, "int(65535)" data type are ignored - unless they are included in an exception table. This is to avoid risk of unused/unnecessary parameters overwhelming plugin performance and TP/DCS-BIOS response time. In your case, just use the text editor to remove the 2 hash characters in the line concerned. LIGHTING_SWITCHES|lighting_switches|Lighting_Switches|0|0|=int(65535)|0 Then, add the same line to the file CustomACParam.dat. This will ensure that the next time you run the PP extractor script, it will not add the hash characters for the line concerned. You will need to do the same for all new record lines with the data type concerned.

Are you referring to specific DCS-COINS aircraft action or TP button action in general?

From my past experience, the control states (of button, dials, levers, lights, and etc) events are not all triggered by DCS-BIOS on start-up (whether cold start, hot start, in flight and so on). This could a matter of how DCS-BIOS programming was done for specific aircraft.

It's a matter of introducing an invert function to adjust the values before sending it to DCS-BIOS. Will add to to-do list.

Not sure whether this will help but there's "Common Data" Action "Reset Aircraft States" option to reinitialize aircraft to intial default values. Essentially, the defaults are for aircraft parked on the ground, ready for a cold start. I have the action in a TP button which I will trigger prior to restarting a mission immediately (or starting a new mission) using the same aircraft.

Yup. DCS-BIOS was maintained by various volunteer individuals over a few years and unfortunately as you have discovered, there's a lack of coordination/emphasis on naming convention/format to use. You may have noticed in my changelog, the mention of "user-friendly TP value refinements" - where I tried to fix some of these parameters via a "translator mapper", essentially a table (DCS-BIOS -> DCS-COINS PP -> TP and vice-versa) to translate to more human-friendly terms, the description and control options. I can include your work into the mapper so that you don't need to manually change them each time you update the PP files and others can also enjoy the fruits your labor and time. Actually on that point, I can add you as a contributor once I create my GitHub account and upload the code there, and you can edit it directly. (Sigh..., so many things I want to do and yet so little time available... ) As Tanuki44 had said, the PP files need to be generated and plugin reinstalled to refresh the upload package for TP, every time the DCS-BIOS Lua/JSON files are updated. Currently, there's a prequisite that the PP files must be compatible with the DCS-BIOS version used. A future enhancement in mind is not to have the PP files pre-generated and packed together with the DCS-COINS plugin, and instead have them generated on-the-fly during the DCS-COINS Setup using the existing DCS-BIOS installation (if not installed via DCS-COINS package) in the DCS Scripts folder. This will avoid incompatibilities/mismatches between PP and DCS-BIOS JSON files if the latter are from a different version. Cheers.

Yes, I had also thought of the feature earlier - but I don't think it can be done within the plugin itself. It will require TP to provide a way to pass a variable to the plugin action. Currently, the plugin can only accept a fixed value from a predefined list.

Are you asking for the plugin action "AC Voltmeter Source" to accept value from a TP variable?

I will PM you.

Hi virgo47, Sounds reasonable. Unfortunately, my schedules are packed for the next few days... also need some time to explore the options. Will get back to you when I can. xoomigo