BindControl - Keybinds and Popmenus Editor and Manager

[kenlon]

The weirdest part of the super-long saves is that it steals focus every 2-3 seconds while it's doing it, which is kinda disruptive. I'll see what happens if I nuke the ini and start from scratch.

[emersonrp]

It stealing focus is actually a vague clue, though not one that causes a light bulb yet.  Is it trying to pop up an error dialog and failing?  Just thinking out loud.  Yes let me know.  If that doesn't work, I can roll up a version that spits out spammy debug to see where it's looping or hanging.

[kenlon]

FWIW, wiping everything out and starting from scratch did in fact fix the saving issue, at least with a relatively clean sheet of binds. I'll see what happens when I get all my complex binds in.

 

EDIT: One small thing that sticks out to me as I recreate my inspiration popper bind: Combine Inspirations should really only show valid inspirations for combining. Dual/Team/Super inspirations can't be combined, so they really shouldn't show up in the "combine 3" dropdown. And depending on what's selected to combine, there's only going to be 7 valid targets (the other inspiration types of the same level). 
Though I'm not sure how you're doing it under the hood, so if it's a major pain, feel free to tell me so and I'll stop complaining. 😄

Edited September 28 by kenlon

[kenlon]

Another thing I'm noticing with Powerbinder as I'm recreating all of these: It would be really handy to have an option to take an overly long bind step and split it into two. 

Example:

Originally, I set up steps 1 and 2. Step one using acc inspirations from largest to smallest, step 2 combining small inspirations to make an acc, that will then be fired off by the next step. Because you have added the duplicate step option (thanks for that), I just duplicated those, intending to simply edit them for the medium/large versions. But combining all the mediums won't fit in one step, so simply editing the existing binds won't do it, I have to make another step and split things between them. If there was an option to split them automatically between the two steps rather than having to do it manually, it would be really handy.

[kenlon]

Adding in a bunch of complex binds has taken the save times back to being very long - the window goes to a 'not responding' state if you click in it. Once it actually finishes saving the current state of this profile, I'll attach it.  (It has a bunch of duplicated and unfinished binds because I haven't finished editing/splitting them yet.)

And it just finished.

Basic Binds.bcp

[emersonrp]

OK I have found what I believe to be the problem and I -think- it's a simple fix.  Github is rolling up v0.31.0.1-test1 for you to try out.  In a perfect world, it just makes saving that profile many many many times faster.  This is not a perfect world, and there's a non-zero chance it could crater the profile, so please please back up your profile before saving over it.  It works for me in the basic smoke test, but ymmv.  Check it out and let me know.

 

https://github.com/emersonrp/bindcontrol/releases/tag/v0.31.0.1-test1

[emersonrp]

10 hours ago, kenlon said:

Another thing I'm noticing with Powerbinder as I'm recreating all of these: It would be really handy to have an option to take an overly long bind step and split it into two. 

 

Hmm that is an interesting notion.  I'm not completely sure how the UI would work on that, although it probably would involve using those mysterious checkboxes that currently do nothing.  I'll ponder that - as far as the innards are concerned, it should be pretty easy to do, it's mostly just getting the UI and UX stuff to do the expected and intuitive thing.

 

Meanwhile, I have a -gargantuan- release in the cooker that I'm going to put out at some point once the dust settles on v0.31.  It has few visible features, but reworks an immense amount of back-end stuff to make unit testing easier (or even really possible) so as to work on avoiding regressions.  It's gonna be a little bit scary, but it's going to make my life better going forward, and includes about a half zillion tiny bugfixes and improvements I have found along the way of making these changes.

 

All that to say that if I build a new feature like this, it'll probably be on top of that new release, so it might be a little bit before we see this.  If anyone's feeling particularly brave, keep an eye on this space for me to put out a prerelease of v0.32 sometime soonish, knock wood.

[emersonrp]

1 hour ago, emersonrp said:

OK I have found what I believe to be the problem and I -think- it's a simple fix.  Github is rolling up v0.31.0.1-test1 for you to try out.  In a perfect world, it just makes saving that profile many many many times faster.  This is not a perfect world, and there's a non-zero chance it could crater the profile, so please please back up your profile before saving over it.  It works for me in the basic smoke test, but ymmv.  Check it out and let me know.

 

https://github.com/emersonrp/bindcontrol/releases/tag/v0.31.0.1-test1

 

One thing specifically to test for -- make changes to a PowerBinder or two, save the Profile, restart BindControl (just to be sure), make sure the changes you made are reflected in the PowerBinder text field -and- in the edit dialog.

 

Edit to add:  Also check a few of the PowerBinders you -didn't- update to make sure they're right, too.

 

Edited September 28 by emersonrp

[kenlon]

3 hours ago, emersonrp said:

If anyone's feeling particularly brave, keep an eye on this space for me to put out a prerelease of v0.32 sometime soonish, knock wood.

 

Hell, I'll throw my self on the unexploded refactor, whenever it's ready.

[kenlon]

. . . aaaand windows defender is flagging v0.31.0.1-test1 of Bindcontrol.exe as a virus. Again. 

[kenlon]

Still using 0.31, because of the Defender thing, but:

 

Duplicating many binds/steps for editing makes Bindcontrol grumpy. 😄

Basic Binds.bcp

Edited September 28 by kenlon
Forgot to attach profile save.

[emersonrp]

2 hours ago, kenlon said:

. . . aaaand windows defender is flagging v0.31.0.1-test1 of Bindcontrol.exe as a virus. Again. 

 

Oh Lord that's annoying and as always embarrassing.  There's a -test3 up there also where I was tinkering with build stuff.  I expect it will act not at all different but it might be worth a try.  Meanwhile, I'll... bundle another one, check to make sure github didn't change anything behind the scenes, do the whole dance.

 

29 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Duplicating many binds/steps for editing makes Bindcontrol grumpy. 😄

 

Wooooooow.  OK, well, you get some sort of prize for that.  🙂  Let me tinker around with that some and see if I can... God I dunno.  I have some thoughts on how to address that, and they're actually sorta related to the part that I fixed for -test1.  Let me work on that.  This one, I was completely aware that could in principle happen, and didn't at all think anyone could possibly get there except with a pathologically large popmenu in the popmenu editor tab.

 

[kenlon]

21 minutes ago, emersonrp said:

I was completely aware that could in principle happen, and didn't at all think anyone could possibly get there except with a pathologically large popmenu in the popmenu editor tab.

 

Well, I am in the process of building 7 binds of between 10 and 12 steps each, with over half of the steps getting duplicated. It takes a lot of work to be this lazy, you know.

Edited September 28 by kenlon

[emersonrp]

45 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Duplicating many binds/steps for editing makes Bindcontrol grumpy. 😄

 

OK, interesting.  I can't get it to do exactly that yet, though I can totally make v0.31 crash with that Profile by saving, duplicating a few binds, and then saving again.  I didn't ask what it was that you did to cause that error, was it just the duplicating, or saving, or...?  In any case, if it's saving then the -test1/-test3 version will actually ameliorate that somewhat, though there's still work to do to get completely around it.

[emersonrp]

Also fwiw, on my Windows 10 VM, neither -test1 nor -test3 trigger Windows Defender, so something's different in our configs.  The Windows Security control panel tells me that it's using intelligence version 1.437.201.0, dated today, Sep 28.

[kenlon]

I was duplicating a bind consisting of a line executing all insps of one type, then steps for combining all other possible combinations into that kind of insp. Then duplicating that first line multiple times so I could move them down in between each combination step. 

 

EDIT: I appear to have 1.437.193.0 for the AV, so I'll poke windows to make it update. 

Edited September 28 by kenlon

[kenlon]

Okay, I am deeply amused: I can't save my finished Basic Binds profile as default. (I will admit to being largely amused because in my day job I'm usually the one asking, "What the hell was that user thinking?) 😄
 

Basic Binds.bcp

Edited September 28 by kenlon

[emersonrp]

11 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Okay, I am deeply amused: I can't save my finished Basic Binds profile as default. (I will admit to being largely amused because in my day job I'm usually the one asking, "What the hell was that user thinking?) 😄

 

Heh.  I mean, pathological use cases are still use cases...  😉  Anyway, I have just shipped a -test4 up to Github.  Assuming Windows Defender plays nice, I'm 90% sure this is going to fix all of this, including the Default Profile thing, which is I believe a symptom of the same problem.  Check it out if you can.  It should save -dramatically- faster, and should not run into this "too many entities oops the window went away etc," the only small downside being that it might be a titch slower to open the PowerBinder edit dialog.  Let me know your luck.  (Edit:  but the upside to the downside is that it'll probably also open the Profile, and therefore the app, a bit faster.)

Edited September 28 by emersonrp

[emersonrp]

Oh man I have also just found a bug with Complex Binds that I need to fix before you try to write out and use those binds -- they're just not gonna work for the moment.  This is the sort of thing I'm hoping to avoid with the giant rewrite to make things more testable.  I'm on it, meanwhile, feel free to keep tinkering with those, but they're not gonna work in-game until I fix this.

[emersonrp]

OK I have just pushed a -test5, which fixes the completely embarrassing bug about "Duplicate Bind" versus getting collisions of the binds' Custom ID fields, which would cause badness when the binds were written.  Profiles saved with the bug will auto-heal when loaded and re-saved, so everything's fine once we get this out there.

[kenlon]

As I am now awake from my nap, I'll give it a try. It looks good so far - instant saving/loading, no issue saving the basic binds profile as default, and my combine binds all work in game. 

Did notice one thing: when I turn on the Combined Team/Pet Select option and set the keybinds, it doesn't unset the default "Select Teammate" binds if you already have them. 

In my case, I use Shift+1/2/3/4 for the first four, and Shift+q/w/e/r for five through eight. If I look in the in-game keybinds menu, Select Teammate 5 through 8 are still bound to Shift+5/6/7/8 (which are the defaults for the classic keybind profile). If I'm setting something through BindControl, it should probably unset the vanilla binds for the same thing to avoid confusion.

[kenlon]

Another thing, since I'm poking around with bits of BindControl I hadn't used before: The 'import saved build' option is neat, but simply possessing a travel pool really shouldn't automatically assume that you have the travel power (since just about anyone who has any sort of serious build will have Hasten, but probably not Super Speed). Only actually setting a default keybind if you actually have taken the power seems like a reasonable way to do it to me.

Edited September 29 by kenlon

[emersonrp]

56 minutes ago, kenlon said:

As I am now awake from my nap, I'll give it a try. It looks good so far - instant saving/loading, no issue saving the basic binds profile as default, and my combine binds all work in game. 

 

Ah excellent.  Keep me posted, but all of that sounds like it worked.

56 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Did notice one thing: when I turn on the Combined Team/Pet Select option and set the keybinds, it doesn't unset the default "Select Teammate" binds if you already have them. 

In my case, I use Shift+1/2/3/4 for the first four, and Shift+q/w/e/r for five through eight. If I look in the in-game keybinds menu, Select Teammate 5 through 8 are still bound to Shift+5/6/7/8 (which are the defaults for the classic keybind profile). If I'm setting something through BindControl, it should probably unset the vanilla binds for the same thing to avoid confusion.

 

This is an interesting notion.  On the Gameplay tab, there's a checkbox up in the tray section that does just that, decides whether to remove the "default" tray binds if you specify other ones, and a long-winded discussion of that behind the little [?] help button.  I feel like I'd want to surface the team-bind thing as a similar preference, because I can see either behavior foiling expectations.  The combined team/pet binds aren't -exactly- the same as just the select-teammate binds and so it might be that someone wants both behaviors and wants to assign the combined ones to a different set of keys.  In general I'm a little leery of splatting things onto keys that aren't explicitly chosen in BindControl, but I totally see where you're coming from.  I'll ponder how best maybe to make that a preference.  It's also entirely possible I'm overthinking this.

46 minutes ago, kenlon said:

Another thing, since I'm poking around with bits of BindControl I hadn't used before: The 'import saved build' option is neat, but simply possessing a travel pool really shouldn't automatically assume that you have the travel power (since just about anyone who has any sort of serious build will have Hasten, but probably not Super Speed). Only actually setting a default keybind if you actually have taken the power seems like a reasonable way to do it to me.

 

Ah this is an excellent observation.  The "a default key is automatically assigned" behavior dates back to CityBinder, and yes wants some re-examination, I think.  It would be easy just not to assign a keybind by default, and let the user dig around in the Movement Powers tab to assign one.  Assigning one as default only if the power is detected in an imported build is actually a lot more work, as I don't currently parse the import file for anything except the Primary / Secondary / Pool / etc power sets, and ignore individual power picks.  Being able to pre-set the "Has Combat Jumping" checkbox etc by examining the powers more closely seems like a win, so I'm going to take a look at this.  But I'll probably just start with turning off the default keybinds for movement powers for new profiles.

[emersonrp]

I've gone ahead and re-released -test5 as v0.31.0.1 just to have a new 'latest' release out there.  There's no change from -test5 apart from the version number.

[emersonrp]

8 hours ago, kenlon said:

Hell, I'll throw my self on the unexploded refactor, whenever it's ready.

 

Muahaha.  I'll probably roll up a -test1 of that in the next day or so.  It's extremely likely to have bugs both gross and subtle, so be sure to back up your Profiles.  The deep innards of how Profiles are represented inside BindControl have changed -drastically- and so has the logic for reading, writing, and parsing the profile files.  That said, the actual -format- of the Profile files hasn't changed, so it should cheerily read and write files that v0.31 can use.  Probably.