Problem with devicesorting.txt
-
@SemlerPDX Thx, I have tried this already… I think this is not a common problem…I can live with my workaround. Thx all for all the input…!
-
@Cop23rd fwiw I tried to repro BMS overwriting my (readonly) DeviceSorting.txt file, and I couldn’t … although it does appear to still enumerate all HID game/button devices plugged in at startup, and presumably it maps button ranges from the key file as if those devices were appended to the bottom of DeviceSorting.txt – it just doesn’t actually save that in-memory representation to disk for next time.
So (a) hand-manage the DeviceSorting.txt the way you want it, and make it readonly. Then (b) do
set g_nHotasPinkyShiftMagnitude 5000
in your user.cfg file, or some number sufficiently high to make headroom for the 6 extra/unwanted devices (x 128) that may be implicitly mapped after your desired 5 or 6 devices. -
@airtex2019 Could be a solution, thank you. I will test it next weekend and report!
-
Dear Gentlemen,
my apologies if I dare to say this to you all: that blessed (yeah?) file is overwritten each time you run Falcon, so making it “read-only” it’s simply worthless.
I neither have been able to change anything about in years of Falconing, so I had to surrender and become very careful to keep the same system device configuration time after time, to avoid being obliged to configure my controllers keys from scratch both again before flying.
Who knows, would be particularly nice if the devs. could “fix” that in the next release? Something is telling me, though, that it could be not a real bug, but might be related just to the way Falcon is used to work, I’m afraid.With best regards.
-
@Jackal said in Problem with devicesorting.txt:
Dear Gentlemen,
my apologies if I dare to say this to you all: that blessed (yeah?) file is overwritten each time you run Falcon, so making it “read-only” it’s simply worthless.
I neither have been able to change anything about in years of Falconing, so I had to surrender and become very careful to keep the same system device configuration time after time, to avoid being obliged to configure my controllers keys from scratch both again before flying.
Who knows, would be particularly nice if the devs. could “fix” that in the next release? Something is telling me, though, that it could be not a real bug, but might be related just to the way Falcon is used to work, I’m afraid.With best regards.
You are now the second person I have ever heard from such an issue regarding this read-only issue, the first being OP at top. That “read-only” little trick saved me so many headaches of having my devices out of order after returning from a long absence, and still works (for me) to this day.
Makes me wonder if this comes down to our Windows OS, configuration, or other such things outside the influence of Falcon BMS… smh
I guess to note something productive, I have my Win10 “Home” version OS under highest UAC settings, “Always Notify” - and my Falcon BMS is installed on non-OS drive, on the second NVMe dedicated only to games/sims. No clue how helpful this info is, but I feel we need someone with development experience here, and/or (professional/certified) WinOS experience (tho isn’t that you @airtex2019 ?)…
This seems significant enough to warrant further and deeper investigation rather than just closing this thread out with a workaround.
-
@SemlerPDX said in Problem with devicesorting.txt:
I guess to note something productive, I have my Win10 “Home” version OS under highest UAC settings,
I have the issue where my device sorting file is made read-only and gets overwritten.
My Win 10 is Professional and my account is an administrator.
I think you may be on to something.
-
@SemlerPDX You might be onto something, wonder where OP has BMS installed? /Program Files on the OS drive is notorious for having permissions issues with Win 10 and 11.
I’m running Win 11 Pro, and the read only works fine even if I leave my other controllers plugged in. But BMS is on a separate SSD and installed directly off the root of that drive.
-
My setup is slightly different; I have BMS installed on my OS Drive, but the Config files are SymLinked to a second drive (my OneDrive folder - just in case my computer goes down, I have configs in the Cloud).
The file has the Administrator as the owner, I might change that, I’ll see if it makes a difference.
-
Are any of you running Falcon BMS as Admin? I do not and never have…
-
@CriticalMass Do you have OneDrive setup so the files are always stored locally and then updated in the cloud only when they are changed on the PC?
OneDrive can cause permission issues also as it thinks it’s the “owner” of the file, not your PC. -
@SemlerPDX I do. I’m sure it was needed for some other software, but that was a while ago:
- VA with your profile (obvs) (Admin)
- Helios (Admn)
- spacedesk (Not Admin)
- Opentrack (Admin)
- JoyStick Gremlin (Admin)
Do you run these? And do you run them as Admin?
-
@SemlerPDX thou hast summoned me… lol
if you want to get hardcore on the readonly thing … you can try setting the UAC elevation flag on DeviceSorting.txt … and run BMS as non-elevated.
WARNING: that might make BMS crash when it attempts to overwrite the file … or throw a UAC prompt or something? idk haven’t tried. be sure to make a backup copy of the file before doing this.
(run from an elevated CMD prompt) icacls "\Falcon BMS 4.36\User\Config\DeviceSorting.txt" /setintegritylevel H:NW
-
@TxMtb Hmm, OK, I’ll move it back to F4 BMS folder. This is what it looks like
-
@SemlerPDX fwiw I also never run BMS elevated… never have. but I’ve only been flying since 2019 (end of 4.34 / start of 4.35 era) so maybe it used to be necessary, long ago?
maybe some other tools in the ecosystem require admin privs… but if so, they should still be able to see into BMS shared-memory and/or write to pipes, etc. just not other way around.
-
@CriticalMass I also have my User/Config folder redirected to a spot within my OneDrive tree… thought I was the only crazy person here.
-
@airtex2019 COUGH
That’s not the only place - as soon as my SSD nears 25% space left, I’m looking for stuff to “move”
-
So I would be the second one, huh? Too bad, I love to be the first always.
To all those (yours too) above:
- lucky you, I’m experiencing this absolutely not capital “issue” since I installed Windows 7 -64 bit, and I am “on” Windows 11 Pro 22H2 now;
- I have no one of those softwares you quoted installed on my PC/system;
- I never felt the need to run any version of Falcon as an administrator;
- I always installed Falcon in its default directory (C:/Falcon BMS or the like) since years;
- there is currently almost 67% of space free on my 1Tb SSD after Falcon has installed.
With best regards.
-
So, regardless of being admin, it’s only when I run Falcon BMS via Alternative Launcher (not admin) that the
Devicesorting.txt
file reverts from read-only to write.Might need to raise this with @chihirobelmo
-
@CriticalMass said in Problem with devicesorting.txt:
@SemlerPDX I do. I’m sure it was needed for some other software, but that was a while ago:
- VA with your profile (obvs) (Admin)
- Helios (Admn)
- spacedesk (Not Admin)
- Opentrack (Admin)
- JoyStick Gremlin (Admin)
Do you run these? And do you run them as Admin?
I run my own AVCS profile for VA as Admin, because it is needed. That doesn’t mean that BMS itself also needs elevated permissions.
I don’t (yet) run Helios, was not aware this program requires to be run as Admin, but again, if so, that doesn’t mean that the BMS program also needs to be run as admin, unless Helios forces that requirement… does it?
I use TrackIR, and I do not run it as admin. When I used OpenTrack during VR testing in BMS, I do not recall having to run it as Admin, yet again, even if so, I didn’t run BMS as admin during those tests.
I do not use Joystick Gremlin (or spacedesk, or autohotkey, or any other utility other than VoiceAttack).
I also do not use Alternative Launcher.
-
Do all users here who have issues with Devicesorting.txt being overwritten ALSO use Alternative Launcher? Would be nice if it was as simple as this, because that could be coded differently and then we’d have a proper solution instead of just a workaround.
If any of you do NOT use Alternative Launcher and have this Devicesorting.txt overwrite issue, please reply and let us know.