F/A-18C UFC Option Cueing showing incorrect characters

[damien022]

When using the Helios F-18 UFC, the character representing the "Active" selection for the 5 screens on the right is showing a 0 or a 1, rather than blank and :

Space characters on the top left screen are shown as _

[derammo]

either a bad merge when I recently integrated BFB's work on that or maybe the encoding is actually changed in DCS. Recommend testing with 1.4 first to rule out DCS actually changed it.

[BlueFinBima]

DCS handling appears unchanged for UFC_OptionCueingx. This looks like 2087-2091 have been changed to a "Lua" boolean somewhere which suggests that the issue is in the Driver file. As for the spaces, again the handling by DCS seems to be unchanged. (checked with DCS/2.5.6.54046).
I checked master and this is what I'd expect in the ExportsFunctions.lua and the UFC. Not currently in a position to test with Helios unfortunately.

[derammo]

when you say unchanged, does that mean you tested it with 1.4 and 1.4 works correctly with the current latest DCS OpenBeta?

just asking because that's the first thing I would check otherwise :)

[derammo]

oh I just saw your comment about you can't test. never mind :)

[BlueFinBima]

I meant that the results from parse_indication(6) at 2.5.6.54046 are nothing peculiar.
It is almost as if UFC_OptionCueingx are going through helios.textureToString rather than helios.ensureString, but none of the code I looked at had a change like this.

[BlueFinBima]

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=4500814&postcount=225 also reporting the IFEI nozzle indicators not working.

[Denver29]

Hello

I confirm I have the same problem with UFC option cueing with 1 and 0 instead of : and blank.
I also encounter problems with the UEFI nozzle needle that doesn't move

[Denver29]

And i also notice a problem with the HUD symbology in the main DCS view that became very wide and almost unreadable whereas DDI and AMPCD viewport in helios profile are very thin but quite readable.

[BlueFinBima]

@Denver29 HUD symbology is definitely unrelated to the previous problems you describe. Happy for you to open a new issue and include screenshots to demonstrate the problem.

[BlueFinBima]

UFC cueing bug is caused by the optional "format" argument of helios.send which is not equating to nil when not specified but is picking up the count from the gsub in the caller.

[derammo]

@BlueFinBima I added the optional argument to support some existing ExportFunctions.lua. I did not anticipate that there were calls out there that were erroneously sending extra arguments. Sorry about that.

@BlueFinBima could you explain or comment why the cueing is changed from character 200 to the exclamation point in the second file?

[derammo]

also: during any review that I did, I would not have noticed that gsub returns two arguments which are then sent on. ugh. nice debugging!

[BlueFinBima]

It was not easy to debug. I hate debugging Lua. I did briefly consider also checking for "%" in the formatting string because of the subtlety of this problem.

The value of 200 still works, but harks back to the days when I was mapping character codes in the exports. The code to map "!" to the 200 is already implemented in the textdisplay dictionary for the field, so that mapping change was just cosmetic. If I recall, this was another improvement you guilted me into doing.

[derammo]

I won't use optional arguments in Lua again. This is really unsafe stuff. There is nothing in the code that would tell you that two arguments are being filled from two return values of the previous call. If I had been aware this was a thing in Lua, I would have just ported the ExportFunctions code instead of making an optional argument to keep the old code working.

[BlueFinBima]

Missed Damien's comment about spaces "Space characters on the top left screen are shown as _" which is generated by helios.send(2094, string.format("%7s", helios.ensureString(li.UFC_ScratchPadNumberDisplay)))
I have not seen this problem myself, but it will not be fixed by the option cueing fix. Hmmm....

[BlueFinBima]

@damien022 I was not able to reproduce the underscore problem in the scratchpad. Any thoughts?

[BlueFinBima]

BTW @Denver29 & @damien022 please let me know if you want the fix for the option cueing and IFEI nozzle needles and I'll make it available.

[Denver29]

If it's not too much work for you sure i would love to hace that problem fix!!
Thanks

[BlueFinBima]

@damien022 please open a new issue if you continue to see the underscore problem

Closing this issue because the cueing problem has been fixed.