Prepar3D Forums

As of v4.4, non-one shot triggers seem to be broken compared to v4.3 and v4.2. They now re-fire continuously vs. only re-arming after the child action objects complete. This has broken our training missions completely.

I posted on this issue almost a month ago with no replies:
viewtopic.php?f=6308&t=132424

I am happy to clarify and provide sample code to help fix this.
Please help with this, we're stuck now. It also seems there is no way to download v4.3 anymore?

Go to the Prepar3d Downloads page. Login to your account on the right. On the left, you'll notice + Legacy Client Downloads. Click the + button, and the drop-down menu should reveal downloads for Prepar3d 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.

Thanks for the report, we'll investigate this and get back to you. A sample would be helpful if you have on hand. Feel free to PM me a link to download.

Regards,
Rob McCarthy

Hi jamcd787,

So far in our testing we were unable to reproduce this issue. Which trigger are you using when seeing this issue? A trigger such as TimerTrigger or ProximityTrigger that triggers a DialogAction would only reset after the dialog ends. Can you please provide detailed reproduction steps or send us an example of this issue?

-Brad

Brad,

Thanks for your response and attention to this issue. It seems like a subtle difference, but it causes big problems.
I'll try to explain it better and I've attached a couple images to illustrate.
When we want to continuously monitor a pilot for altitude or other parameter, we create objects as shown in the visualization. What we want is to check for out of range and then trigger a dialog but not too often - for this example 10 seconds before it can trigger again.
If you deactivate the trigger, you need to activate it again later and that creates a loop that is hard to shut off since it can re-activate itself asynchronously. So, instead, we chain together the text warning, dialog warning and a 10 second delay.
In 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 this works perfectly because after the trigger fires, it starts the chain of child objects and does not re-arm and fire again until ALL are complete.
In 4.4, the trigger fires the text warning and subsequently the other children, but does NOT wait to re-arm and fire so the text gets fired every 8mS or so and the dialog repeats constantly - "return to 2000 feet, return to 2000 feet, return to 2000 feet", etc. Although we have all met instructors who do this, we prefer a 10 or 20 second delay before the next warning :-)

This is the simplest example I could send, but there are other, worse manifestations of this problem. Another remaining bug in SimDirector (all versions) is that if you enter more than one OnCompleteAction, the order of them is respected at execution time, but SimDirector itself often scrambles the order when a mission is loaded, edited and saved (even if you don't edit those objects!) I can send you an example of this too.
So the lack of preserved order combines with the above problem to cause incorrect timing sequencing of objects. For example, if an object has two OnCompleteAction children, one is a dialog that leads to other dialogs, and the other is an ObjectActivationObject, you can't guarantee the Activation will happen before or after the long chain of DialogActions, which can be many seconds later. To get around this, we re-coded all our missions to only ever have a SINGLE OnCompleteAction since SimDirector scrambles their order on saving.

Let me know if you would like further clarification. These issues are real, repeatable and troublesome - and I'm sure not hard for your team to fix once they know where to look. We are software developers too and understand the huge workload you have with P3D - it's impressive. We are happy to help with regression testing as well.

I don't currently have 4.4 installed anymore, but I can re-install and create traces and send you the .xml files in the next few days.
thanks,
jim

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjUX4w6_jSX7cW4sbrQyhj2oqsc

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjUX4w6_jSX7chHh6YZHGklfoJM

I experienced the same challenge as Jim.

I created the limits to display a Scaleform alert text on the screen to tell the student to come back to 90 knots for example.
Here is an image of the structure:


It works well in 4.3. Here is the Progress log:


Note that the timing between the "03 Warning Dialog 01" occurrences is approximately 10 seconds as regulated by the "03 Repeat Delay".

==============================
In 4.4, it appears that the "03 Reset SPD (80-90)" fires every second which makes the "03 Warning Dialog 01" fire every 4 seconds which is not useful:


One way to solve this issue in to make the triggers fire once and send the delay to the "03 (START) Limit SPD(80-90)" which creates a loop and is unacceptable.

I reinstalled 4.3 and the limits work like a charm...

Would you please fixthe multiple firings of the triggers in 4.4.

Thanks

Ray

Jim and Ray,

Thanks for the detailed explanations. We were able to track down this issue and we'll have a fix in the next release.

-Brad

Brad

Thank you!

Ray