Hi Everyone:

You may have already seen an announcement from MicroProse that talks about BMS. I’m happy to confirm the details here.

Benchmark Sims are delighted to announce that the Falcon Series has returned to its original home at MicroProse, and we at Benchmark Sims are excited to continue our work with their full blessing and support.

Our team is committed to delivering the best possible experience to our fans of Falcon. With MicroProse’s endorsement and support assured, there is no end in sight for the BMS Mod or the Falcon Series. We would like to thank the community for their continued support, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you in the near future.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from Benchmark Sims and MicroProse!

@HikerOne yes…you can do that if you turn on windowed subtitles. You can enabled that window feature with

set g_bWindowedRadioSubtitles 1

in the config file. There’s a callback you can add to the key file which then will toggle the window to be either on the screen full time or transient for a short time when a new radio subtitle message is added. That callback is:

OTWToggleSubtitleWindow

It’s a simple toggle – default behavior is the window comes and goes. Hit this once to make the window sticky. Hit it again and it reverts to coming and going with message traffic.

While the window is displayed persistently, you can change a few things…there’s an options menu that’s hidden in there. For some reason we missed adding this to the documentation so far but since you are asking questions about it, here’s the skinny on that. If you hold the Control key and then click on the close gadget top right corner of the window (which would on a normal click close it and revert to come/go behavior) you will get a new window with options in it.

Things in the options window:

An autoscroll toggle. TBH, this doesn’t seem to work very well…kind of a WIP thing.

A timestamps toggle. This prepends the game clock time when the message was played. This is probably most useful with the next option…

A save to file toggle. When active, this ensures that all radio messages received during the current mission are saved to a file on mission exit.

A way to set the number of lines that will be shown in the window. So this would let you pick 10 for example.

There’s also a slider that lets you adjust the window background transparency in real time as the game runs.

And there is also a color picker gadget that lets you change the color of the window background which can be helpful sometimes to adjust for contrast. But to be honest, this is only there as a test of functionality so I’m not sure how really useful it is…fwiw, in testing I found some shades or pink/magenta as background colors worked quite well for in-game contrast.

No there isn’t. But you can change it in the game. Both in terms of alpha transparency and color.

It’s a bit goofy to get at it, I’ll admit, but you can change it on the fly in the 3D world.

What you do is hold down the CTL (control) key then left click on the “close” button (top right corner of the subtitle window. Doing that brings up an “options” pop-up. One of the things in there is a slider for alpha. You can also pick a different background color if you like…can be handy in some light conditions, I agree

@SoBad - yeah, I know. This is something a little strange with the maintainer of the ImGui library that is used to code up these windows in our game code. Fundamentally that person doesn’t want to support persistent data for these window style elements so there are no lib functions to support that (unlike for example window placement and sizing data that are persisted into the related ini file). That doesn’t mean this can’t be done somehow separately by the game code logic. It’s more just explaining why it wasn’t already done…the lib doesn’t readily support it so it wasn’t a quick add when the code was originally written for these subtitle-in-a-window capabilities.

I’ll read your question as a reminder that we probably have to figure out a way to do this through our own code extension. [Logically the data belongs in the ImGui-related ini file not the game cfg file.]

When i assign the comm 1 or comm 2 button on my hostas,your program assigns 2 keys,no idea why.
The second key it always assigned was my missile/ dogfight deselect button.

This happens because your DGFT switch is not on center when you record the UHF/VHF push to talk presses…FoxVox sees DGFT override or MRM override as pressed if that 3-way is not centered when you press another button like the radio switch. Ask me how I know

@Ironman3 said in Training features request:

In my opinion realism has to do with the way you fly and you deal with the sim generally.

I think you are right

For your consideration…

I’m curious why there’s such an aversion to exiting 3D and re-entering in a new flight.

This surely is a better way to provide the kind of realistic training regimen that you are alluding to in the original post. Just make a TE that has the follow on flights in the frag and then if you want the same pilots flying in all those extra seats, make sure they join the game as clients and just hop in and out of the appropriate flights at the right moments to extract the training value that you are after. In all cases, doing that will put your trainees in a jet with more realistic limits in terms of fuel and loadout not to mention avoiding the artificial trip to the “penalty box” to reset. I would imagine that the hop out and back into 3d is considerably faster than the transit time to and from an airborne regeneration zone.

The scenario with jets resetting in a staging area might be “realistic” given limited airframes for real life exercises/training and of course the inability to hot swap seats while the jets are in the air. The sim world we have doesn’t have those restrictions so why not take advantage of that and use the frag to deliver a more realistic training context for pilots than the real air forces can?? Heck the frag can let you pick different jets and loadouts for different mission roles for those follow on flights; better than simply replenishing the jet you have with the same fuel and loadout which might well be role-inappropriate.

I know that for a long time the development team has advised that you should not visit 3D world multiple times in a single game but those days are - we hope - long gone now. There’s been a lot of time and attention lavished on making multiple trips to 3D be both possible and stable.

And of course the other upside in this case is that no new code work is required to deliver that experience to you

A couple of quick follow up notes.

The Documentation already includes supported key codes in charts for the supported locale specific keyboard layouts. See under Docs, Input Devices, Keyboard Layouts for the PDF files that have these charts.

The docs team tell me that one should read this like a white list - they key codes shown are the ones you can map. So things not shown, notably the PAUSE/BREAK key, should be the clue that the game doesn’t support them.

Regarding the supplied Excel based editor tool and the ability to assign callbacks to physical make or break for a given switch and the ability to invoke callbacks with either or both of key up and down semantics: the device tabs for joysticks like Cougar or Warthog do not support that.

However, there is a “DX specifics” tab which can do this. The idea of this tab is that you can construct one or more lines for a specific switch and then paste those lines from that sheet into your key file as required. Yes, that means lines constructed there do not show up in the automated “output” tab so there’s a little more work to do to leverage what’s in the DX specifics sheet but… I was wrong to say that the capability is not supported in the supplied editor tool at all. My apology for the mistake on my part there.

I did add a to-do item for adding more defense in depth to the key file parsing code. This is at best 4.<thirty-next> though so not all that soon.

@oldtommyboy so at the risk of laboring the point… I’m not sure what stick device you are using. However, what you want is to set it up so that it does NOT show windows a button press for the center position – i.e. when you look at the game controllers control panel applet for the stick, when the switch is in the middle position you don’t want it showing one of the buttons “on” (brighter red color)…if it does show that in the middle position and your controller programming will not let you stop it doing that…then I think you are just out of luck with the double recording thing…there’d be no way, regardless of what you map in the game key file to that switch position, to have FoxVox not see a button press there as well as whatever else you were actually trying to record.

Generally speaking controllers that always show a button pressed and held regardless are a no-no…I’d argue it’s bad design so I hope you can use a config program or something to not have it do that.

Good luck!

@Ironman3 said in Training features request:

Reentering 3d with a different aircraft can affect datalink and fuel remaining on the new aircraft which the AI was flying with.

I think that’s “old news”, bordering on “fake news” maybe these days

Try it…if you find problems like that we’d like to hear about it. That kind of thing you will find the development team will readily respond to for you.

@Falco said in Reliable crash due to key layout file:

@Boxer
I assigned the pause key. Like the actual key that says pause on it.
In any case, it should behave more reasonable. For example displaying a reasonable error message and then continuing without assigning that key.

I think this is related
https://stackoverflow.com/a/38850436/10263660

This is not what you meant I know, but I think my answer would be: yes, it [alternative launcher] should behave more reasonable [sic]…you probably want to let the author of the alternate launcher know that this key is not supported in the game and one might consider it a bug in that tool if it allows assignment of that key

All humor aside, the game UI and the keystroke editor provided with the install do not allow assignment of the BREAK/PAUSE key for callback binding. Therefore, if you stick to what comes with the game to edit key file content, it’s not possible to encounter this error. We have at various times talked about defending the code against “bad data”, hand edit errors or third party tools issues. Some measures are taken in spots, including against some forms of bad data in key files. You are right in that more could be done. However, one has to recognize that there are very many ways to “break” the code with unsupported changes to data file content and defending against all of those is…well, a lot of work.

Suffice it to say, this is probably going to be on the “will not fix” list for the foreseeable future.

With luck, the fact that you kindly pointed it out and we discussed it here will allow anyone running into this issue in future to at least search the forum for help and find the simple work around: "don’t try and map the PAUSE/BREAK key in your key file.

This is virtually certain to be a mangled data file looking at the crashlog signature. The code is attempting to read a file expecting information in a certain format and the content of the file doesn’t match…this crashes the code.

Have you by chance used any tools to edit the scenario that you are attempting to load?? Can you think of any other reason that the files might have been altered from their original saved state??

It is possible that if this is a saved game that the save didn’t work right but if that’s the case, we might need to try and replicate the steps you took to get to the state of the game when it was saved in this apparently broken state.

If you could say a bit more about which theater this is…are we talking about a campaign or a TE…is it a problem with all saved games or just one in particular…a little more information might help us figure out next steps to resolve.

@airtex2019 can you show me what that window does look like??

A guess… If it’s transient then you don’t get the “x”. You toggle the transient behavior with OTWToggleSubtitleWindow. The “x” gadget when shown in the window and when clicked without a modifier will return the window to transient mode.

Hi Everyone:

You may have already seen an announcement from MicroProse that talks about BMS. I’m happy to confirm the details here.

Benchmark Sims are delighted to announce that the Falcon Series has returned to its original home at MicroProse, and we at Benchmark Sims are excited to continue our work with their full blessing and support.

Our team is committed to delivering the best possible experience to our fans of Falcon. With MicroProse’s endorsement and support assured, there is no end in sight for the BMS Mod or the Falcon Series. We would like to thank the community for their continued support, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you in the near future.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from Benchmark Sims and MicroProse!

@SoBad - yeah, I know. This is something a little strange with the maintainer of the ImGui library that is used to code up these windows in our game code. Fundamentally that person doesn’t want to support persistent data for these window style elements so there are no lib functions to support that (unlike for example window placement and sizing data that are persisted into the related ini file). That doesn’t mean this can’t be done somehow separately by the game code logic. It’s more just explaining why it wasn’t already done…the lib doesn’t readily support it so it wasn’t a quick add when the code was originally written for these subtitle-in-a-window capabilities.

I’ll read your question as a reminder that we probably have to figure out a way to do this through our own code extension. [Logically the data belongs in the ImGui-related ini file not the game cfg file.]

No there isn’t. But you can change it in the game. Both in terms of alpha transparency and color.

It’s a bit goofy to get at it, I’ll admit, but you can change it on the fly in the 3D world.

What you do is hold down the CTL (control) key then left click on the “close” button (top right corner of the subtitle window. Doing that brings up an “options” pop-up. One of the things in there is a slider for alpha. You can also pick a different background color if you like…can be handy in some light conditions, I agree

@Snax – one other thing to try and eliminate issues.

I see you are opening a save game called RKR110-TR

Is that something that has been edited with external tools?? You mention WDP so…that seems possible maybe??

If the other things above didn’t run for you and it’s still crashing, I would also ask if you experience this crash with all save games or mission starting points?? Perhaps try a fresh new campaign or one of the stock TE files that can be used with multiple players…just some save file that hasn’t been edited since it was installed from the original game content.

I do also see some strange “game” related data in the dmp but I can’t quite tell if that’s just the dmp being incomplete or if there’s a something whacky lurking there. Again trying a new or at least unmodified starting file for the MP game you try to join may help eliminate this as an avenue of inquiry.

Edit: now that you’ve said my pilot name was blank, I had an error with Weapon Delivery Planner saying “couldn’t load pilot” or something like that.
I went to reinstall BMS, now WDP loads successfully (but the issue with the IVC remains the same :/).

That’s not definitive but it is a little suspicious. With luck the “try a new logbook” entry experiment might rule out issues there.

@Snax ok great. We’re eliminating possibilities as we go then

Would you mind creating a new log book entry and trying the process again – doesn’t matter what the name used for this is – just something newly created.

If that crashes the same way, the next thing I’d ask you to try is to turn on logging for IVC connections. This you can do with the -mono command line flag on the exe before you start it and the following in your cfg file:

set g_fXMonoprintFilter 0x200000

There should be a file in the User\logs directory, something like today’s data, time and xlog.txt on the end for the filename.

Output from that may help narrow down the sequence of when things go off the rails.

@Snax – very helpful, thank you.

If I understand this correctly you are using a voice server on your local system. There are no other players connected to that. You are the only player connecting to the network game, using the local voice server at the time of the crash. Is this the correct scenario??

Also, the one thing I see in the dmp that looks “odd” is that the log book name for the local player appears to be blank. What are the settings you have for pilot name and callsign in the logbook entry that is in use as you connect to the network game in this case??

@HikerOne yes…you can do that if you turn on windowed subtitles. You can enabled that window feature with

set g_bWindowedRadioSubtitles 1

in the config file. There’s a callback you can add to the key file which then will toggle the window to be either on the screen full time or transient for a short time when a new radio subtitle message is added. That callback is:

OTWToggleSubtitleWindow

It’s a simple toggle – default behavior is the window comes and goes. Hit this once to make the window sticky. Hit it again and it reverts to coming and going with message traffic.

While the window is displayed persistently, you can change a few things…there’s an options menu that’s hidden in there. For some reason we missed adding this to the documentation so far but since you are asking questions about it, here’s the skinny on that. If you hold the Control key and then click on the close gadget top right corner of the window (which would on a normal click close it and revert to come/go behavior) you will get a new window with options in it.

Things in the options window:

An autoscroll toggle. TBH, this doesn’t seem to work very well…kind of a WIP thing.

A timestamps toggle. This prepends the game clock time when the message was played. This is probably most useful with the next option…

A save to file toggle. When active, this ensures that all radio messages received during the current mission are saved to a file on mission exit.

A way to set the number of lines that will be shown in the window. So this would let you pick 10 for example.

There’s also a slider that lets you adjust the window background transparency in real time as the game runs.

And there is also a color picker gadget that lets you change the color of the window background which can be helpful sometimes to adjust for contrast. But to be honest, this is only there as a test of functionality so I’m not sure how really useful it is…fwiw, in testing I found some shades or pink/magenta as background colors worked quite well for in-game contrast.