BindControl - Keybinds and Popmenus Editor and Manager

[kenlon]

About the custom binds not copying from the default: In order to have the binds carry over to new profile, you have to "save profile as default" when you make changes to it. Having set a profile as default in the past doesn't make things carry over. So that explains that. 

 

More things that have come up as I try to get my massive inspcombine binds to work and play well with others:

• It's nice that you show the bind string on the powerbinder step editor, but it's not particularly useful because you can't see the whole thing, it doesn't say how many characters it is in total, and you can't copy it out.
• Being able to change the name of a complex bind would be handy. Because every character in the name eats up more space in the written bind, I've had to recreate them with shorter names.  
• Being able to set custom paths for specific complex binds would also let us save characters - having a symlink so that it's loading "C:\cb\F1-4.txt" vs "C:\coh\default\cbinds\F1-4.txt" would save length. Actually managing the symlink and avoiding name collisions would be the user's problem. (I'd suggest a warning that's something like "FOOTBULLET MODE ENABLED, ANY PROBLEMS ARE YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT" prominently displayed in the complex bind tab when someone turns on that option. 😄 )
• Having inspcombine have an entry under add command like using inspirations by name does would be nice for those of us cursed by the typo demon, so we don't mess up our binds so much. 😄 
• When you go back to edit a custom bind, you get a tiny text window, making it easier to copy and then delete the step and recreate rather than editing.

 

Most of these only came up because, again, the stacked inspcombines I'm trying to set up are moderately absurd in length, so if you don't make changes based on my feedback I completely understand. 😄

[kenlon]

Oh, also, being able to duplicate a step in a complex bind would be nice, when we have steps that all end with the same exec of something.

EDIT: Scratch that. Being able to copy and paste one (or multiple) commands in a step to other steps would be very, very tedium reducing.

 

And why the checkboxes next to the commands inside PowerBinder? It doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Edited Wednesday at 04:06 AM by kenlon

[emersonrp]

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

About the custom binds not copying from the default: In order to have the binds carry over to new profile, you have to "save profile as default" when you make changes to it. Having set a profile as default in the past doesn't make things carry over. So that explains that. 

 

Oh, you mean that if you save "Stan" as default, then edit "Stan" further, the default doesn't change.  Yeah, that's the way it's designed, it's sorta "save this snapshot as default" which is then not editable in any real way apart from making another new profile (and therefore getting the default settings), editing that, and saving it as default.  This might want revisiting, because that means there's also no real way to examine the default apart from using it.

 

Historically, there used to be just a profile named "Default" and that was treated as a special case and automatically used as the default, but people ended up accidentally using it and therefore overwriting it, which is why we're where we are with that feature.

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

More things that have come up as I try to get my massive inspcombine binds to work and play well with others:

• It's nice that you show the bind string on the powerbinder step editor, but it's not particularly useful because you can't see the whole thing, it doesn't say how many characters it is in total, and you can't copy it out.

 

I just made some changes in the step editor dialog in one of the recent releases, and the preview of the string should now expand to fit, ie, be multi-line if the string wraps around.  Let me know if that's not working.  Having "x/255" on there somewhere to count the characters seems like an excellent idea.  And yeah, I made it completely noninteractive because I was having some strange visual problems, if I recall correctly, but it would be easy to make it just readonly so that you could select and copy from it.  I'll fiddle with that.

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

• Being able to change the name of a complex bind would be handy. Because every character in the name eats up more space in the written bind, I've had to recreate them with shorter names.  

 

On the right of each custom bind panel, there's four buttons: delete, rename, duplicate, and (newly) export.  Rename should do the trick.  It might well be that the icons on the buttons are not completely intuitive.

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

• Being able to set custom paths for specific complex binds would also let us save characters - having a symlink so that it's loading "C:\cb\F1-4.txt" vs "C:\coh\default\cbinds\F1-4.txt" would save length. Actually managing the symlink and avoiding name collisions would be the user's problem. (I'd suggest a warning that's something like "FOOTBULLET MODE ENABLED, ANY PROBLEMS ARE YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT" prominently displayed in the complex bind tab when someone turns on that option. 😄 )

 

I'll have to ponder how that might work.  TBH initially, it sounds like a lot of work, but I'll open a Github issue for it so it stays in front of me.  I agree that the extra 50+ characters off the end of every step of a Complex Bind make them a bit less useful than they might otherwise be.  I'll also mull trimming the "cbinds" directory down to just "cb" to save another four characters heh.

 

Also, if you're really starved for a few characters, you can go into the Preferences dialog, and over in the Debug tab, you can turn on "Verbose in-game feedback" to turn every "bindloadfilesilent" into a "bindloadfile" but at the cost of having your chat window full of spammy feedback every time a bindfile loads.  If you use speed-on-demand, that can be -extremely- spammy.

 

(Nothing would please me more than the Homecoming people adding /blf and /blfs abbreviation commands for those.  I think there's a request already open with them for that, but I'll go make sure at some point.)

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

• Having inspcombine have an entry under add command like using inspirations by name does would be nice for those of us cursed by the typo demon, so we don't mess up our binds so much. 😄 

 

"inspcombine" is on the todo list for sure -- I'll pop it to the top of my mental stack and see how that might work, but it shouldn't be too very hard to make an entry / command for it and reuse the inspiration picker from "inspiration by name."

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

• When you go back to edit a custom bind, you get a tiny text window, making it easier to copy and then delete the step and recreate rather than editing.

 

I'd noticed that, and I have a fix for that already on the main branch that should tag along whenever I do a new release.  It of course might break other things, but in principle it should make the little step-edit mini dialogs generally better and more correct.

 

35 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Most of these only came up because, again, the stacked inspcombines I'm trying to set up are moderately absurd in length, so if you don't make changes based on my feedback I completely understand. 😄

 

Nono, this is all *great* feedback.  I appreciate it.  I want the program to be helpful and easy for the use cases of people that are actually using it.

 

[kenlon]

2 minutes ago, emersonrp said:

I just made some changes in the step editor dialog in one of the recent releases, and the preview of the string should now expand to fit, ie, be multi-line if the string wraps around.  Let me know if that's not working. 

 

I'm using 0.29.2, which is the latest release, and the bind string preview in PowerBinder is not multi-line.

4 minutes ago, emersonrp said:

(Nothing would please me more than the Homecoming people adding /blf and /blfs abbreviation commands for those.  I think there's a request already open with them for that, but I'll go make sure at some point.)

 

I just actually made a post in Suggestions and Feedback suggesting the addition of abbreviated names for inspirations: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/60280-short-inspiration-names-for-binds/

 

6 minutes ago, emersonrp said:

"inspcombine" is on the todo list for sure -- I'll pop it to the top of my mental stack and see how that might work, but it shouldn't be too very hard to make an entry / command for it and reuse the inspiration picker from "inspiration by name."

 

 

Yeah, I suggested it because it seemed like it should be straightforward to add, given that you already have a canned window for picking inspirations. Pick what to combine, hit okay, hit what to combine to, hit okay, profit!

[emersonrp]

25 minutes ago, kenlon said:

 

I'm using 0.29.2, which is the latest release, and the bind string preview in PowerBinder is not multi-line.

 

Oh oops I was mistaken -- that's also part of the main branch but hasn't been released yet.  Sorry about that, but yes that is coming in the next release.

 

25 minutes ago, kenlon said:

I just actually made a post in Suggestions and Feedback suggesting the addition of abbreviated names for inspirations: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/60280-short-inspiration-names-for-binds/

 

Oh awesome.  I like your naming scheme for that.

 

25 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Yeah, I suggested it because it seemed like it should be straightforward to add, given that you already have a canned window for picking inspirations. Pick what to combine, hit okay, hit what to combine to, hit okay, profit!

 

I have it like 75% done already, heh.  Should just work -- it's not going to be very smart, in that it'll cheerily let you make a command to try to convert three tier 1 inspirations into a tier 3 one or whatever, but I figure that's up to the user to get right.

[kenlon]

The saving of custom binds does seem to work, but A) there's no option to save a set of binds at once, and B) there's no immediately obvious way to re-import them.

Just for the heck of it, I'm attaching an example of the inspiration-combine-and-eat bind that I've been setting up. I have one of these each for accuracy, damage, defense, endurance, healing and resistance bound to f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6 respectively.

 

You can probably see why I mentioned wanting to duplicate steps/copy and paste steps of binds.

1.bcb

[emersonrp]

3 minutes ago, kenlon said:

The saving of custom binds does seem to work, but A) there's no option to save a set of binds at once, and B) there's no immediately obvious way to re-import them.

 

(A) Yeah.  I'll ponder that, but yes it's currently one at a time.

(B) Up at the top, "Import Custom Bind" will read your bcb file and make a new bind with it.  Please do let me know your luck with that.  I tested it out a good bit, but didn't have a solid use case to play with, so yeah that code getting a real-world workout is a good thing.

 

3 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Just for the heck of it, I'm attaching an example of the inspiration-combine-and-eat bind that I've been setting up. I have one of these each for accuracy, damage, defense, endurance, healing and resistance bound to f1/f2/f3/f4/f5/f6 respectively.

 

You can probably see why I mentioned wanting to duplicate steps/copy and paste steps of binds.

 

Ooh yes I do see.  Hmm ok I'll look into that.  Will probably end up just adding a little button in with the "up" "down" "delete" buttons near each step, that just copies the step to directly below whichever one you poke.  That's gonna be a little bit of fiddling so it might be a bit, but I'll get on it.

[kenlon]

46 minutes ago, emersonrp said:

(B) Up at the top, "Import Custom Bind" will read your bcb file and make a new bind with it. 

 

Welp, I'm blind. It was right there in front of me. 

 

Also, there appears to be some way to get a bind that's too long without the UI displaying it as such:
23:03:24: Failed to write bindfile C:\coh\jump\cbinds\4-3.txt: Bind 'F4' from page '4' is 256 characters long - this will cause badness in-game!

 

Profile in question attached.

 

jump.bcp

[emersonrp]

9 hours ago, kenlon said:

Welp, I'm blind. It was right there in front of me. 

 

😄 There wasn't anything to call attention to it for sure, but yeah, my thought is that it belongs in the "ways to create a new bind" row of buttons,.

 

9 hours ago, kenlon said:

Also, there appears to be some way to get a bind that's too long without the UI displaying it as such:
23:03:24: Failed to write bindfile C:\coh\jump\cbinds\4-3.txt: Bind 'F4' from page '4' is 256 characters long - this will cause badness in-game!

 

Profile in question attached.

 

Oh this is a very good catch -- it's actually a fairly sloppy bug, in that the counter that turns the field red in PowerBinder is looking at the actual bindstring, and the "write binds" error checker is very incorrectly looking at the whole payload, 

F4 "inspcombine ......."

...including the "F4" and the space and the quotation marks, so it's six characters too long in its count.  I will fix and I'm going to do a release shortly that rolls up most of these changes we've talked about.

[emersonrp]

I've just released v0.29.3, which rolls up various little features and bugfixes.  Release notes:

 

• Rework of the PowerBinder command-edit dialogs. The underlying code
  changed around quite a bit, and there might be bugs, but the edit
  dialogs should be laid out more consistently and correctly in the
  various cases where they weren't being. Please open issues with any
  weirdness you find here, as there's definitely a chance for it.
• New "inspcombine" PowerBinder command, under Inspirations -> Combine
  Inspirations. It's very rudimentary but should work just fine.
  Getting a sensible "source" and "target" is up to the user, it doesn't
  do any sanity-checking for you.
• Changed the PowerBinder bindstring preview field to be multi-line as
  required to show the entirety of the bindstring; also it is now
  possible to select and copy strings from inside that field.
• Added "x/255 characters" counter below the PowerBinder bindstring
  preview field.
• Bugfix: the "this bind is too long" checker during the "Write Binds"
  process was incorrectly overcounting the length of the bindstring, and
  so failing on longer, but still valid length, bindstrings. This is
  fixed.

 

https://github.com/emersonrp/bindcontrol/releases

 

Edited Wednesday at 08:02 PM by emersonrp

[kenlon]

Excellent! Sadly, I'm trapped in the office today, so it'll be a bit before I can grab it and experiment. Now that my inspiration combiner binds are working, I'm planning on setting stuff up to allow me to smoothly toggle on/off combat attribute display for things.

 

 

[emersonrp]

1 hour ago, kenlon said:

Excellent! Sadly, I'm trapped in the office today, so it'll be a bit before I can grab it and experiment. Now that my inspiration combiner binds are working, I'm planning on setting stuff up to allow me to smoothly toggle on/off combat attribute display for things.

No rush, of course.

 

Hopefully you've seen that there's an Attribute Monitor PowerBinder command, but I suspect it needs some functional twiddling to optimize, so I'm interested in hearing your luck with it.  (Edit:  in fact, looking at it, I see there's no notion of "off" at all yet.  Oops.  Yeah that'll be part of the release I mention below.)

 

Probably going to be a v0.29.3.1 in a little bit here, to fix up some wee changes I want to make.

 

Thanks!

Edited Wednesday at 07:11 PM by emersonrp

[emersonrp]

OK, I have released v0.29.3.1.  Release notes:

 

• Add "Monitor" and "Unmonitor" selector to the "Attribute Monitor"
  PowerBinder command, to make it useful basically at all.
• Add little '[?]' to bindstring preview counter to try to explain why,
  in complex binds, you have like 50 more characters than you expect.
• Update the "Combine Inspirations" PowerBinder command to use
  /mergeinsp on Homecoming to save a couple of characters.

https://github.com/emersonrp/bindcontrol/releases

[kenlon]

The adjustments to the Powerbinder are just about perfect. 

 

However, something seems weird with the Peacebringer flight binds:

22:07:02: Warning: Unknown control in GetState: FlyQFly - this is a bug.

 

Attempting to toggle flight with F goes very oddly - when it does turn off, it leaves me auto-jumping in place, which is not ideal.

 

pb_flight.bcp

[emersonrp]

39 minutes ago, kenlon said:

The adjustments to the Powerbinder are just about perfect. 

 

Excellent, super pleased to hear that.

 

39 minutes ago, kenlon said:

However, something seems weird with the Peacebringer flight binds:

22:07:02: Warning: Unknown control in GetState: FlyQFly - this is a bug.

 

Oh my, that IS a bug.  Clearly I haven't exercised the Kheldian codepaths well enough.  I'm on that.

 

39 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Attempting to toggle flight with F goes very oddly - when it does turn off, it leaves me auto-jumping in place, which is not ideal.

 

pb_flight.bcp 49.47 kB · 0 downloads

 

Will be able to look at this more tomorrow, but yeah these two things might or might not be related.  In any case, I'll figure them out.

 

[emersonrp]

I've just released v0.29.3.2, which (at least to a first glance) fixes up the weirdness with Peacebringer flight.  Release notes:

 

• Peacebringer fly mode was not working well at all. This commit fixes
  at least the most egregious of the weird behavior, though there might
  still be some corner cases.
• Buffer Binds could write out broken steps if a power was not chosen
  for every buff in the Buffer Bind. Now BindControl will correctly
  refuse to write out a Buffer Bind that is malformed in this way.

https://github.com/emersonrp/bindcontrol/releases