SimXperience Commander For X-Sim Nearing Beta Stage

BTW, I am just keeping this version of x-Sim to see if we can sort this out...
Otherwise, I would have installed the old version back.

@MasterYoda

I began reviewing your settings, and it seems that with a few exceptions) almost every setting is contradictory to the settings recommended for use with the Commander software. I was under the impression that when you installed the Commander that you chose the 2DOF SCN5 Based Simulator settings option, but this is definitely not the case. It appears that you chose the 'Use My Current X-Sim Settings' option.

This is obvious for several reasons:

1.) You have every plugin enabled. The Commanders recommended settings automatically disable all unused plugins to improve the load time of the profiler.

2.) Your timing settings are both uneven and higher than recommended.

3.) The autoscan section appears to be manually modified. Your setting reads D:\\Program Files\\X-Sim\\MyProfiles\\SimXTemp\\SimXperienceFSDOutput.fsd which is indicative of an entry created by the Sender menu due to the unecessary double slashes. When the Commander makes this entry, it does not place the unecessary slash in the path. Were this entry created by the Commander, it would read D:\Program Files\X-Sim\MyProfiles\SimXTemp\SimXperienceFSDOutput.fsd.

4.) Speech is enabled, and the Commander settings would have disabled it.

5.) Your initial position settings are uneven, which will cause your seat to calibrate to an uneven position unless it is intended to compensate for an uneven physical design in your simulator hardware.

I deleted my X-Sim registry settings and imported yours. With the exception of the Exchange dialog box (which will cause alot of problems and is yet another reason for the Commander provided standardized settings), everything worked well here. All lof this leads me to believe that you may not have the latest Commander update, or that your issue is related to the exchange dialog box.

Do you see an exchange dialog box when launching a game from the commander? If not, we may still be facing some kind of no c: access issue that I have not yet discovered. I was going to configure one of my test machines to not have a c: drive, but I'm not sure how to do this. Even when I install to the d: drive, I am still able to see the c: drive. Can you give me some additional info on how to configure a PC this way.

Finally, I would like to suggest that you give the Commanders settings a try. I think you will find that they are an all around improvement for you.

Thanks again for your feedback. I'm looking forward to getting this core stabilized so that I can begin releasing some of the cool stuff (like in-game menus...a recent development that I'm excited about) for testing.

EDIT: Please ensure that in your Commander X-Sim settings section that the following three checkboxes are checked(1-Single PC Setup, 2-Start Profiler, 3-Start Sender).

EDIT: Also, in the profiler, when using your settings, I see an IP address of 0.0.0.0. This is incorrect, and should report an IP address of 127.0.0.1, or the actual IP of your machine. Please try entering 127.0.0.1 as the IP address for a single PC setup in the Force Sender 'manage network cluster' dialog box. Also, your send interval is 50ms!! This will cause you to miss alot of subtle effects. This number should match your timing numbers in the profiler in order to achieve optimal performance IMHO. Again, the Commanders recommended settings (gotten by selecting the 2DOF SCN5 based simulator option during initial Commander setup) would have set this optimally for you.

Hey Bernard,

Question: I'm not really sure if this is a Commander problem or not, but I've noticed with the New X-Sim Beta and Commander installed, Force Sender has gotten really unstable. It crashes repeatedly during a driving/flying session (about 5-15 min in) and even when Commander is idle for like 20 min (when the PC is left alone for a while. Is there some setting I can try?

Any help would be great!

I am aware of this issue, and posted about it several times over the last few weeks both in the forums and in the bug tracker. Checkout this post for a quick explanation: http://www.x-simulator.de/forum/post17387.html?hilit=new force sender chat#p17387

The issue is a bit unusual, but very reproducable. It is a Force Sender 2.1.0.2 bug.

In order to get things up and running quickly, the Commander automatically sets the X-Sim Chat username and password to SimXperienceUser. This is done to prevent the user from being harassed by an X-Sim login dialog box every 30-seconds. This brought to light an error in the new force sender which is not trapped. SirNoName is aware of this and I am confident that he will correct it in 2.1.0.3.

The issue is this.

When you login automatically as the predefined user, you crash whoever else is logged in as that user. When they restart the sender, they will crash you and thus the cycle continues. Simply change your X-Sim chat username and password and at least one of the new force sender bugs will go away. For some reason, the new sender crashes if you try to login as the same account multiple times.

I am rather disturbed by this forced login as it is, and I have high hopes that SirNoName will remove the forced login into or allow for multiple logins. It seems to me that there is no good purpose to filling up a chatroom with a bunch of people who arent really there and willing to chat! If the users won't be using the mechanism, then I think it is logical to provide them a way to use their simulator without forcing them into a chat. Imagine asking a question in a chatroom that shows dozens of active members, yet no one replies. This is likely to occur.

Fair warning...if you see me in an X-Sim chat and ask me a question, I am not being rude and ignoring you, I am simply just not really there.

Bernard,

I DID select the 2DOF SCN5 Based Simulator settings option during installation.
There was probably an installation problem form the Cmdr which did not set my Profiler properly.

This would explain all these things you reported.
I can try to remove everything and see if this newer version will do it right.

3. Are you saying I typed \\ manually? I didn't even knew there was this temp FSD path, etc...
The game autoscan does not work and requires that we point the game path. Would that be an error created by Cmdr during that manual game exe selection?

Not sure about the exchange box? Pics?

IP is ok here for the Profilem shows 127.0.0.1, remember, the profile works fine and comms with sender properly.

Cheers,

Erick

P.S.: My installation is C drive with Windows 7, D drive with Win XP pro SP3. They are both two separate drives and WinXP is not able to change the C drive letter or write to as it is locked by W7.

Ok, this work-around fixed the problem it seems. I do join you in questioning the need for the mandatory chat. I'd rather see it become an option.


This brings me to some other issues:

When I skip Commander and make a profile, I set the speed and acceleration in the the SCN5 plugin. I can close and open Force Profiler many times and the value stays. However, if I open commander, the values change..... The plugin shows the sliders in the correct position, but the numbers are greatly reduced. I can Drag the slider (or manually enter the number) and click set. The value will then stay for the entire session of Commander. Is this a bug? Should I report it on the tracker?

Beyond this bug, will there be some way for us to dictate those values through commander (perhaps attached to a motion profile?) in the future? Should I add this as a Feature request in the tracker as well? (wasn't sure if it was addressed already or not)

@CxcSimulations

With regard to changing SCN5 Plugin values, the Commander simply does not do this in the current version except at the time of the first installation, where it sets those values to the recommended speed / accel to perform calibration safely. Anytime that you load a profile, or launch a game from within the Commander, it is possible that the profile contains speed and acceleration values, which would cause the behavior that you are mentioning.

This next release will indicate to you whether or not the profile includes speed and acceleration values, and provide you with the ability to alter the original profile creators values.

I think that we are pretty close to having the core stable in a reasonable variety of environments. Once this occurs, we can start testing things like G25 integration, Actuator Speed / Accel integration, In-Game keyboard shortcuts for starting / stopping simulator and a variety of other more interesting features.

Bernard,]

Today, I did the following experiment.

Removed the X-Sim and Cmdr completely.
Deleted the x-Sim registry entry that remained there.



New Boot and Cmdr 1002 fresh installation from zero.
x-Sim 2102 was installed by Cmdr (although install screen says 2072 will be installed, not sure).

No games were automatically detected (as I reported before):


2DOF SCN5 Simulator template selected (as before):


Got two error msgs by the end of the installation (don't recall seeing them before):



After running Cmdr for the first time, selected rfactor.exe location manually:


As you can see, there we no changes at all on stock x-Sim registry settings, even the actuators names were not properly set, see the send interval, etc...




Hope these details help explaining what is going on here.

So, do you thing these issues can be worked around or should I forget until I have a regular Windows installation? :?

Thanks.

Erick

Thanks for the feedback Erick That finally makes the problem clear! Even though it is related to your unusual installation, the use of the Commander under these circumstances is a scenario that I believe to be reasonable and one that I am willing to support. I am grateful to you for your troubleshooting efforts! I will have a bug-fix prepared sometime tomorrow evening.

Hi! Bernard,

Don't need to rush.
Glad to know you will be able to fix it.

Cheers,

Erick

Hi Erick,

A few quick questions.

1.) Are you starting with the 1.0.0.2 version from the SimXperience website?

2.) Are you using 32-bit or 64-bit XP?

3.) Are you using any security tools that might block the Commander from importing and creating registry entries?

Bernard,

1. 1.0.0.2 downloaded from your website.

2. Win Xp pro 32b SP3.

3. Not at all. I can edit the registry with regedit without any problems.

Cheers,

Erick

Bernard,

Any news here? Been a little quiet

I unfortunately spent a bit of time in the hospital recently. Good news--all is well. Bad news--I lost a bit of time.

With regard to the Commander, I had to take a few steps back in order to take many more forward. I have decided that I would like the Commander to have in-game menus that can be activated either by keyboard shortcuts (and therefore button presses) as well as voice commands. If I'm not mistaken, this will make X-Sim the first voice-controlled simulator with no need to Alt-Tab out of games. This will work in any DirectX 9 or 10 game based on my current testing. DirectX 7 and 8 games will not be supported.

Also due to the fact that X-Sim will not be providing 64-bit support, I needed to rearchitect some portions of the software to ensure that it can be easily adapted to other simulator software should the need arise in the future.

I also adopted a different threading model that allows much more flexibility when determining what processor a voice command will be processed on etc.. Most of this is not yet visible in the public beta but the 1.0.0.3 core will be released soon and these features thereafter.

Recently added core features include:
-The ability to support a 3rd actuator for the rotation axis
-The ability to support non-SCN5 based simulators (for my next project)
-Auto adding of default speed / acceleration values to profiles that do not have them
-User adjustable speed/acceleration values via slider bars
-User definable ability to auto-remove gauges from downloaded profiles
-3rd party ability to distribute X-Sim configuration files and have them be available in the Quick Start Wizard.
-Ability to run properly from ANY installation location ;D

The 1.0.0.3 release will be out within the next couple of days.

:

hey Bernard, this sound REALLY promising. I haven't tried the commander yet, i think i'm gonna give it a go and see how i like it.

One question regarding the future. You say you will add the ability to use another actuator and different actuators. I'm personally thinking of something like a force dynamics. Now they use 3 actuators and then they have a model with 180 degree yaw, the force dynamics 401 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld6xT5yfbhw

Do you think something like this would be possible to engineer using your software with the extra actuator??

Simcraft uses actuators that don't seem nearly as powerful as the force dynamics and they get the job done. I'm thinking something along the lines of 2 actuators to control pitch and roll and the 3rd controlling the yaw, do you think this would be possible? is this what you're aiming for in your future project??

Sounds very interesting. Having this seat moving cockpit is really awesome and takes things to another level. I would really like to try something like above to really get a comparison. I don't think getting 180 degree yaw would be possible with an actuator controlling the yaw, but it'd still be awesome to have something.

Here is another video of the force dynamics 401 and showing off how the yaw works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b27q8hctMaw

Thanks

Dave

I hope you do and are able to offer some feedback / ideas. The Commander for X-Sim is fast becoming an excellent simualtor management tool which I think will help us to continue to grow the X-Sim community.

I was referring to the rear-traction loss / drifting module that I developed based on adding a third SCN5.

It is possible to engineer such a solution with X-Sim. It is possible to manage such a solution with the Commander. The SimXperience Commander for X-Sim is an add-on tool for X-Sim users that makes configuring and using an X-Sim based simulator easier. It also makes it possible to share complete motion profiles. IMHO, a complete motion profile is a matched set of the following:

-X-Sim Settings
-Motion Profile
-Actuator Speed / Accel Settings
-G25 or Otther Wheel Steering Settings
-Game Controller Configuration (ex. rFactors controller.ini)
-In Game Car Setup

From here, the goal of the Commander is to be able to easily assign all of these settings to a single button making it easy for non-technical users to obtain and utilize a simulator. The Commander started as a solution for some of my less technical family members who did not want to have to learn to use X-Sim, maniplutate G25 settings, rfactor settings, etc... They just wanted to drive and of course they wanted it to be as realistic as possible.

It may be easiest to think of X-Sim as an excellent motion engine, and the Commander as a management tool that pulls together many aspects of your Sim Xperience, one of which is X-Sim.

What you mention is definitely achievable.

I am contemplating several actuator designs and may choose to produce an actuator in the future. Much of this will depend on market reaction to the SimXperience DIY Motion Series vs the SimXperience Completely Assembled Series.

With regard to diferent simulator designs, I have contemplated and tested many, as have many others in these forums. If you would like to start a post regarding the comparison of these designs, I would be happy to respond. You may be surprised to learn that a Yaw, Pitch, Roll simulator actually does much less to fool your brain than what I see in your current avatar picture UNLESS it has actuators capable of producing something near the G-Forces of a real vehicle.

The 1.0.0.3 release of the Commander will be delayed for a few days. I am rebuilding my development environment in preparation for Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4. This will result in alot of efficiencies that should help to get new features in to the Commandedr more quickly.