Girder 3.1 Beta 9

[Ron]

Hopefully will beta 10 be the last beta release.

New features / fixes:

* OSD updates ( multi monitor / position selection / timeout setting )
* Decent file open/save dialogs
* Small fixes left and right for the reported bugs.

Lets hear them bugs!

[Ron]

In that case: too bad, disable the plugin if you are going to play.

As a side note, it is not possible that 2.0c is worse, as the only modification is that the plugin just drops a keypress instead of waiting for it.

What might be happening is is that Girder is using some processing power to traverse the tree and do its job, but this obviously didn't change since the last release. Also this should improve with the next release as I am focusing on that now.

[Ron]

As I said before I am going to speed up girder.

[Ron]

Okay, first results show that where girder used a whopping 10-20% while processing before, it now doesn't even register 1%. This is even less than Girder 3.0 ( depending on the size of the tree somewhere at 5% i think )

So expect the next release to be less of a CPU hog.

Big lession:
XML is nice, but do not do any realtime searches on the XDOM tree. Keep a lookup table at hand.
Or only use XDOM for saving and loading, have my own lean and mean tree.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RonB on 2002-03-11 00:09 ]</font>

[Ron]

Darn, i thought this XDOM stuff would not be this slow. I now have 2 options

1. implement a Lookup table, meaning that girders memory footprint gets even larger. But easy to implement, speedup virtually the same as option 2.

2. Only use XDOM for saving and loading, keep data in own tree. Small fast and clean.

I very much prefer option 2, but this forces me to rewrite quite some code ( again :sad: ) Since I have some exams coming up, the next release might take a week.

Well just to let you guys know where I stand.

[Ron]

1. Will be fixed.
2.a The SlinkE driver is in there, I guess you used the installer, use custom install and choose addition hardware plugins. I did it this way to prevent people from having problems with outdated MFC libraries.
2.b I'll send you the source.
3. Will be fixed.
4. I'm pretty darn near sure that antirepeat works good now, it doesn't wait i can asure you, the way it works now is by noting the last time it triggered this command. Next time around it checkes to see how long ago the trigger was, if this is withing the antirepeat time nothing happens, if it is outside of the anti repeat time, the command gets triggered and the repeat time is reset. The SlinkE takes its time though when sending command ( like eternity :smile: )
5. This isn't needed at all, if you want to read your files drop them into IE :smile: or anyother tool as Mike suggested. It only adds more byte to the files.
6. I knew it, someone had to say this :smile: okay okay how about ALT ?
7. No problem

[Ron]

Quick progres report, i've removed the xdom tree from the core processing routines, the speedup is enormous and memory footprint went down.

Now I have to adapt all the routines to work with the new tree, but first studying for exams :sad:

[Ron]

Question action is gone, its now "Simple OSD"

I'll leave it to the user to make a question type of construction. It was a way ugly construction inside Girder. The same functionality can be created with the alarmtime plugin. Good that you remind me, I'll have to make an example of this.

-Ron

Progress report: Well its slow right now, but the new stuff is shaping up nicely. Still todo is the draggin and dropping in the tree. After that cleaning up and testing.

[Ron]

Steve, I found what the hell is wrong with the SlinkE driver, ( E.g. eventstring don't seem to match ). I forgot to call the plugin matching function and just did my own string match, which of course works just fine for the IRman/keyboard, but the SlinkE/RedRat/IrDA horribly fail. Will be fixed in next release.

[Ron]

Ah that is just us Dutch people don't knowing when its AM and PM. I'll correct it.

[Ron]

"Display Captions" this is the text that is displayed when you adjust the volume, some people don't like is, so you can disable it.

Colors... only one color at this momemnt. The dark color that you define is for the Volume display.


About that bug, i'll remove that piece of info.

[Ron]

Text color,.. how about the color that you specify in the font selection dialog ?

Command name as label? That is not such a good idea, I name my volume up and down actions "vol up" and "vol down" (or something) that is not appropriate for the display. I could display the comment that you specify however.

[Ron]

Volume OSD caption is now the Comment contents if there is something in there.

[Ron]

mattwire, your suggestion about the "On XX Event" has been implemented.

[Ron]

Matt, that is really specific, I would do this through stopprocessing/enabling/disabling groups or something. It makes no sense to implement this in the core.

-Ron

[Ron]

On second thought,.. You can! Well almost.

The Invert option, now triggers a command when it does not match device and IrStr. I'll change that to trigger if the device is correct but the Eventstring does not match. Et voila usefull and what you want.

-Ron

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RonB on 2002-03-12 18:11 ]</font>

[Ron]

oooh works like a charm, you are gonna love beta 10 :smile:

[Ron]

I know that the bug was related to that, my reference was to that problem :smile:

ps: you can delete double posts.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RonB on 2002-03-12 22:48 ]</font>

[SteveV]

Ron,

As usual, thanks for the fine work. Although I didn't have as much time as I would have liked, I was able to spend a couple of hours test driving beta 9. In no particular order, here's what I found:

1.) Girder autoload file (File->Settings->General-tab: Autoload checkbox) settings not "Sticking". When you first browse to the file path/name of the autoload file and select the file to be autoloaded, the Apply button is set to disabled, indicating that that Girder has accepted the change. However, the setting does not stick unless you make another change (to enable the apply button) and Click apply.

2.) Beta 9 is missing the Slink-e driver. I assume that this is because of the crash problem you reported in a previous thread(???). I did have the driver from Beta 8 and used that and was able to duplicate the crashing problem.

As an aside, any major changes to the Slinke driver? Would it be possible for you to eliminate the ir substring matching on slink-e ir strings that include "["? Occasionally the Slink-e sees a bit of IR embedded in a signal that it incorrectly recognizes as belonging to another device. Kenwood repeat codes (volume +, volume -, etc) for my AV receiver would often be interpreted as Philips RC5 codes such as htpc:rc5_23_00_brightness-up[0FF8E]. Eliminating the substring matching virtually eliminates this problem. I'd be happy to make the change if I can get a copy of the source :smile:.

3.) If the Display Registers (<F10>) dialog box is left open (it's NOT modal so it's easy to loose behind Girder's main window)<F5> "test command" stops working. Additionally, pressing the <F10> key again results in the File menu selection being highlited (similar to pressing the <Alt> key). Any chance you can make the reg dlg box modal?

4.) I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what is happening, but anti-repeat seems broken. I have a several multigroups used to switch my AV sources, launch DScaler, etc, that are triggering 2-3 times when I send an IR code via my Pronto. They were working well with 3.025 :sad:. I have anto repeat wait time set to 2000 but it seems to make litte difference. These multigroups take a fairly long time to complete. It almost looks like Girder is "waiting" during the antirepeat time and once expired is executing them again. These multigroups are a bit odd in that they have a large number of Goto's linked to other groups. Also, they are doing quite a bit of Slinke IR out.

5.) XML: Any chance of putting line breaks after the closing XML tags. This applies to the GML files and the register files. Without the breaks, the files are very difficult to read. Also, probably nothing that be be done about it, but the file size went up nearly 3 fold with the changeover to XML. My original GIR file was 721 KB. After conversion the GML file is 2095 KB.

6.) Ctrl-Drag: I saw in another thread that Ctrl drag now allows items to be d&d'd as sibling items. This is a bit confiusing since Ctrl drag is usually associated with copying. Any chance you can change this to another key combo as I suspect it will add to the learning curve.

7.) Feature Request: Ability to collapse ALL nodes. When testing, I find it very useful to monitor which groups and multigroups Girder has expanded. A "collapse all" option would allow easy reset without a what seems like a hundred mouse clicks :wink:.

Anyway, hope this helps. Feel free to ask if I've explained myself poorly.

Thanks again for all your (tireless) work!

--Steve

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SteveV on 2002-03-11 01:18 ]</font>

[SteveV]

On 2002-03-12 11:51, RonB wrote:
Steve, I found what the hell is wrong with the SlinkE driver, ( E.g. eventstring don't seem to match )

Ron, is the problem you found related to this:



...Occasionally the Slink-e sees a bit of IR embedded in a signal that it incorrectly recognizes as belonging to another device. Kenwood repeat codes (volume +, volume -, etc) for my AV receiver would often be interpreted as Philips RC5 codes such as htpc:rc5_23_00_brightness-up[0FF8E]...

--Steve

[Carmero]

Small bug in OSD setup dialog:
"Apply" button is not available when I update "Top" value.
Included keyboard plugin (2.0c) is worse than 2.0b and freezes a picture in games absolutely up to key releasing.

[Carmero]

I've find temporal solution for keyboard plugin:
I am loading 2 versions of Girder - 3.0 with only keyboard plugin enabled and 3.1 with other plugins :smile:)
Joke :smile:)

[Carmero]

I' afraid that Girder produces that "lag" with all plugins.
I've tried to configure my remote for game playing and received the same "lag".

[MMcM]

2.) If you do this, don't break matching when the target in Girder itself has the "[". I have some learned Pronto commands are set to dev:code[8] because the two don't quite agree on repeat encoding (E-Z Learn shows an extra one bit at the end). Rather than track that down, I've just put that in as the code to match.

5.) After converting my GML files, I just read them into XMLSpy and saved them back out with indentation so that I could read them in a text editor. Another advantage of using XML.

[mattwire]

What has happened to the 'Question' girder action? It doesn't seem to be there any more. (beta 9).

[mattwire]

'On Every Event'. Can we have a per plugin eventstring. So for example if I have the keyboard plugin and TaskCreate plugin enabled, I can configure a command to execute on every 'Keyboard' Event.
It could take the name string of the hardware plugin and enumerate loaded plugins on startup to deduce available events.
So, for example you might have 'On Every Keyboard Plugin Event' etc.

[mattwire]

Great, thanks Ron. For the 'Every XX Event' would it be possible to have 'but not on this eventstring'.
This would allow for setups such as 'press any key to continue, escape to cancel' - where escape would be set as the eventstring that doesn't trigger it!
Basically you'd end up with things such as:
Do on every event except this eventstring.

[mattwire]

Thanks Ron!

[Robin]

Just downloaded 3.10b9 and it looks good ...

One point - the speaking clock, is that internal to Girder ? It's just that 12:00pm (lunch time) is always spoken as 12:00am, although the 'pm' does work for other hours.

I did notice this in older Girders too ... and it's only a minor problem.

[mitko]

I like the new SimpleOSD and have a questions about the settings:
What's for "Display Captions"?
How do I use two colors for text in the OSD?

And a little bug: when used on a non multi-monitor PC when the Monitor Combo is disabled there is some unreadable charecters after "Monitor 1" in it

[mitko]

I should have thought of the Dark FG Color.
:smile:
And about the text that is displayed?
Where is taken from?
Can you make it display the name of the command instead of "Volume"

[mitko]

Yes you are right that should be better.
I use the same .gir (.gml) file even before the comment appeared that's why I have named my commands in a meaningful way and did'n use comment. But now I will if you make this option

[Sandros]

Thanx Ron,

No errors here, i'd just like to say great stuff, keep up the good work! Or as they say
in dutch: "echt te gek gedaan man!".

:smile: