derammo

Hi Community! Following up on BlueFinBima's very successful Helios 1.4 releases, we are happy to annouce Helios 1.6, a significant step forward for Helios. BlueFinBima, myself, and the team have moved to a new github home at https://github.com/HeliosVirtualCockpit/Helios. This new version of Helios aims to make Helios much more usable, especially for new users of Helios who just want painless installation of available profiles. As such, a lot of features allow profiles to carry more information and do more tasks for you, replacing many manual installation steps of copying files and writing configuration with point and click interfaces. The current release of Helios 1.6 is always available at https://github.com/HeliosVirtualCockpit/Helios/releases/latest. It replaces Helios 1.4, and so there will not be any more releases of 1.4. To this end, we will prioritize any bugs reported that result from upgrading of unusual profiles or situations. If you do find any bugs, please file an issue at https://github.com/HeliosVirtualCockpit/Helios/issues/new and it will be worked on right away. The full release notes are extensive and are found at https://github.com/HeliosVirtualCockpit/Helios/wiki/Change-Log#helios-16-changes-from-14. Highlights include: * New Feature: Interface Status * New Feature: Control Center Console * New Feature: Preflight Check * New Feature: Multiple DCS Locations to Update * New Feature: DCS Interface support for Capt Zeen export modules * New Feature: DCS Monitor Setup * New Feature: DCS Additional Viewports * New Feature: Helios Plugins * Falcon BMS Support Features and Fixes * Control Center UI Changes * Profile Editor UI Changes * Version Check re-engineered * New Interface: Control Router * Changed Control: all Rotary Controls * Changed Control: all Image Controls * Changed Control: Text Display * Changed Control: Potentiometer T+R * Logging and Status Reporting Changes * DCS Export.lua Changes * Installer Changes * New System Requirements * Many bug fixes Download "Helios Installers" from here Get help / file a bug Look for new Helios 1.6-ready profiles from Capt Zeen! Cautions / Known Problems * If you have an anti virus that does so called "ransomware protection" it may disallow writing to Documents\Helios where we store all our stuff. So you will have to give permission to Control Center and Profile Editor to write to this folder. How you do that depends on the exact anti virus. I am collecting information about the various ones right now. If you have helpful details, let me know. One thing to keep in mind: the install location of Helios 1.6 is different from Helios 1.4 so any permissions you may have given to Helios 1.4 do not apply. You have to give permission again to Profile Editor and Control Center in their new locations.

When quoting the performance increase, it's better if you say "from 80 to 90fps" or whatever it was, instead of +10fps. Because the gain is gonna be completely different based on where you were before (graphics settings, GPU overclock, etc.) That said, I am glad to hear you got a nice increase. I would question the world's consistency otherwise. I know we are CPU bound in the higher end graphics cards with DCS, but I am also very curious to hear the numbers about the RAM clock increase alone. I have no way to test that myself at this point, as both my machines have the same RAM. It does make sense though that it would matter for DCS! Are we going to see Ryzen's getting competitive again with 5GHz RAM? No idea but exciting.

<rant> There is massive religious nonsense at this point, as people apply optimization techniques that applied to old CPUs to new ones that work totally differently. For example, locking threads to CPU cores made sense when switching cores would lose the cache. But if you have a CPU that doesn't has a shared cache, then you're actually better off letting your 100% thread hop from core to core, so the cores have less busy cycle and therefore can stay at max clock without getting thermally throttled. I find it best to stop redneck engineering and just let Intel do the work :) But then I am using an i9 that can't even overclock (9900 no K) and it doesn't need to because it just reaches max clock anyway (as DCS hops from core to core.) </rant>

Hey, nice detail! Could you please share your numbers (i.e. how much increase you got from the RAM upgrade?)

thanks for the PM. I will reach out there so we can compare code

we don’t have to do this experiment. Rendering viewports into a dongle and then screen grabbing / desktop duplicating that output to another display or even another computer over LAN is standard procedure that people use all the time. The dongle just looks like a display to Windows so you can position it as part of your Windows desktop and span the DCS window across it. Then you can place viewports on it.

Helios actually doesn't do anything magical with the viewports. We render the controls ourselves separately (all the switches and gauges, etc.) and then we overlay that separate application over the exported viewports (MFDs, RWR, etc.) that are just like the ones you use. So we are really just using the external viewports in a very vanilla way. So that's why I was asking if, in your normal use of external viewports, you have ever been able to set different rendering options (stroke widths, fuzziness, etc) for external viewports while simultaneously rendering the in-game ones unmodified. About your off base :) question: DCS just opens a window and draws it with DirectX. It positions this window a little bit cleverly, but basically it is just a super simple application in terms of how it uses the desktop. All the coordinates in the monitor setup are relative to this window. I have never seen it do anything weird regarding disconnected displays. I have multiple graphics cards and many monitors, and a virtual monitor dongle (an HDMI dongle that pretends to be a display) and I have used any combination of them for various tests. During those tests, I frequently have connected, disconnected, and connected but disabled displays. I have never seen anything weird. Helios is just a Windows application drawing some frameless windows. It doesn't do anything weird with displays either.

Hey, nice work! I'm a Helios developer, and our users pretty much always have to export the RWR (so it will match up with the extra cockpit panels views.) It is a known problem that the rendering math is somehow different for some exported views, resulting in the extremely fuzzy blobs on the exported RWR. It's like someone forgot to push some multiplier in that path or something :) People usually just dial down the stroke width and fuzziness parameters for the RWR, which then in turn destroys the RWR shown in the game itself. It seems there are some overall multipliers that are applied to these values in one path but not the other. So if you make them work well in the export, the in-game goes to hell. Since you have gone deeper than I have on the RWR, I wonder if you have found any way to use different rendering parameters for in-cockpit and exported views. If we could decouple these, we could do a lot better job exporting views and also having decent in-game views at the same time. I enjoyed reading your mods and learned some stuff I might be able to use in the future. Cheers!

yeah it’s a known Helios installer bug. you have to uninstall 0315 then install the new version

Helios does not contain any code to write any config files from Control Center. The only time it changes anything other than its own preferences is when you use the UI in Profile Editor. So it’s not us :)

I would like to work with you on testing this, because my setup does not act like that. Can you reach out on Discord please? This forum isn't really good for many round trips of discussion / testing. Discord: ammo#7063

what’s your frame rate before and after? the Lua exports unfortunately run on the DCS main thread so yes it can affect performance knowing your frame rate loss isn’t enough information without knowing what the rate was before finally yes you can turn down the updates per second. for the helios exports you can adjust this in the DCS interface editor dialog in the profile editor for capt zeens exports there is a parameter in the script itself also but you have to just edit it, since it doesn’t work with the UI

This is just a courtesy report. Probably nobody cares, but this line has a copy and paste error: local default_viewport = try_find_assigned_viewport('JF17_UFCP_1', 'UFCP_3') if should say UFCP_1 in the second (generic) viewport name argument

I don't disagree with you. It would be helpful to have a link to the best resolution for kneeboard issues in this thread and also in the Helios wiki / Discord support channel. It has come up more than once in the Discord and Helios community members had some answers. You could always check the Discord and share this information here like you suggested, so that the next person will have an easier time.

this is really unrelated to Helios. it just happens because DCS doesn’t place the kneeboard very well when you have multiple monitors

search a little more also. There are other threads about this issue, including a discussion (sorry I have no links this is from memory) about how some of the kneeboard fixes break integrity check and others avoid this problem by duplicating a lot of lua files and just selecting a different one from a "higher" point in the Lua call tree, where there is no integrity check.

[google translate] Le problème était que le profil avait été réinitialisé avec une ancienne version d'Helios qui dupliquait toutes les "bindings" sur "Reset Monitors". Tout recommencer avec une nouvelle copie du profil publié dans une copie actuelle d'Helios a résolu le problème. Ceci est la conversation Discord où je l'ai résolue: ------------------------------- The issue was that the profile had been reset with an old version of Helios that duplicated all the bindings on "Reset Monitors". Starting over with a fresh copy of the released profile in a current copy of Helios resolved the problem. This is the Discord conversation where I resolved it: Dangerman04/29/2020 It also occurs with mouse clicks so probably isn’t a touchscreen issue. Thanks for looking. ammo04/29/2020 @Dangerman like I said its super obviously screwed. The bindings for the UFC buttons are in there 3 to 4 times. (I did not check if the rest of the profile is like that too, since reading the raw XML isn't super efficient.) So when you press a button it is doing as instructed and firing it 4 times. I have never seen this before so I want to compare to the file you started with, that's why I asked. It would be a interesting bug if this happened without repeatedly copying and pasting the controls. I will check the original file and get back to you. and yes you confused me with the V4 thing :slight_smile: I was wondering where Blue released a version 4 and I didn't see it :slight_smile: ammo04/29/2020 Ok the V3 original is ok. Just so I get something out of this also, please tell me the exact version of Helios that you used to reset yours? @Dangerman Dangerman04/29/2020 @ammo ... 1.4.2020.0315 for helios profile editor. I dont know what im doing with these profiles so I haven't conciously adjusted anything or cut and paste any of the dials or buttons anywhere..... just loaded, reset monitors and used. ammo04/29/2020 ok I will have to repro this then when I have some time. These bindings should be automatic bindings that don't get saved at all, but apparently they are? This comment put here in case @BlueFinBima reads this and wants to fix it themselves and just FYI you are correct the UFC doesn't require a viewport because it is drawn by Helios. Other profiles have to use viewports for devices we don't have in Helios or that they can't use for compatibility reasons. Dangerman04/29/2020 :thumbsup: Dangerman04/29/2020 @ammo ..so after your discoveries you have listd above I reloaded a freshly downloaded v3 and all works well. No idea why this has happened but im gratefu for your help as it pointed me in the right direction for a fix ammo04/29/2020 only explanation i have is if you previously did the reset with an earlier version of helios when we had bugs in reset monitors. then if you reset it twice and ended up with 4 copies of the bindings. that’s why i asked which version of helios was used to reset it rather than what you are running now @Dangerman

I think it's all very unscientific. Get a lot of posts on here to show support.

agreed, but us stealing it from texture memory or graphics memory is technically illegal reverse engineering that could stop working at any time, whereas if ED does it then its legal and will continue to work Also, it is a crazy amount of work for each individual aircraft the hacking route. [Edit: I am guessing here, as UltaMFCD was also apparently closed source. So it's not like we can share this tech.]

People are having a hard time building larger simulator setups with Helios or other "additional screens" software. It comes down to the limitation of DCS having to render the "exported" viewports itself as part of the giant window that it opens. As a result, spanning many monitors or multiple graphics cards results in horrible frame rate penalties for no good reason, since these additional screens are just showing 2D viewports. If we could get an shared memory API to access the viewports, we could render them ourselves in another process (like Helios for example) on other monitors that DCS does not need to know about. Then we could have large wide FOV setups with many additional displays for instruments and exported views. You would not need to provide any software to do the actual displaying, just an API into a shared memory arena to which you can copy your rendered 2D viewports. We would handle the rest. I am asking this now in case it can be slotted into the graphics development work that seems to be going on continuously these days. An alternative if shared memory is just not good for you would be to open a second window for the exported viewports, so it could be rendered in 2D on a separate card or cards. This may be a dream, but it is my dream and I like it. Thanks for DCS.

Hi and thank you for your responses. I don't think I was clear enough in explaining my question so I created this write up to show exactly what I am talking about. I also linked this in Discord. I created this page to document what I am seeing and document the resolution (when we get one) for future Helios developers: https://github.com/BlueFinBima/Helios/wiki/Monitor-Setup-Logic You can see clearly that DCS (0,0) coordinate is not in fact a constant location and it is non trivial to predict where it will be. I don't know if case 3 is a bug. But at least this clearly documents that there is some algorithm trying to "intelligently" interpret the settings from the monitor setup, because it doesn't get any "Left" and "Top" offsets from options.lua, so it tries to do something smarter than just always take top-left or 0,0 windows coordinate.

The latest Helios release is always at https://github.com/BlueFinBima/Helios/releases/latest Also, it is hosted here on the forums in the link provided above. Helios is very well supported and actively developed. I know this for a fact because I am writing most of the code :) Come to the Capt Zeen discord if you need help. https://discord.gg/KHmkTXe If you find a bug in Helios 1.4 or later, please file it at https://github.com/BlueFinBima/Helios/issues/new

Hi all. Gadroc hasn't worked on Helios in a very long time. BlueFinBima created a fork (this means a personal "copy") and maintained it and added some interfaces. BlueFinBima is still maintaining it and we have been building a new version 1.6 (as yet unreleased) on that base. So in short, the files on https://github.com/BlueFinBima/Helios/releases/latest are always the latest release available (at least from us.) These will generally be the same files that BlueFinBima also uploads to the Eagle forum location linked above. Either of them gives you the installer (*.msi file) you are looking for. In general, there will be a zip file that contains the installer (*.msi) and a setup.exe to use in case you are missing dependencies.

Hey mods: Could you please try to get me an answer of some sort? I assume you like Helios. If you don’t and don’t want to support its development, that is cool too. Just let me know either way so I don’t spend my time on questions like this :)

So this is funny you brought this thread up. So that was my introduction to Helios last year? Now I am the currently primary coder on the Helios project. :) There are a lot of helpful folks hanging out on the Capt Zeen discord, and that's where we discuss and help people get stuff done. https://discord.gg/KHmkTXe