1624 replies to this topic

[TehLurv]

TehLurv - can you describe in more detail the state the system is in after the game exits and PinballY is "stuck"?  E.g., what's on the screen, which process is in the foreground, anything else that might be going on.  I assume you've already tried the various Close Window possibilities in the settings, not just Kill Process - and even if you have, it might be worth looking closely to see if there's any noticeable difference in the behavior with the different settings, again in terms of the screen display left over and which process has control.  Any differences might point the way to a solution.  Since you mentioned that Steam is involved, it might be worth going through your launch setup for the game again, since Steam adds its own complications by having its own launcher involved, adding a third process to the mix.  It might be that PinballY is targeting the wrong process for the Kill Process/Close Window operation (targeting Steam instead of the actual game process, or vice versa), or that the Steam process is the element that's refusing to exit when asked, or something like that.  These things are obnoxious enough when only two processes are involved...

Hey mjr, thanks for the response. I did some more troubleshooting and took notes on the problem. PinballFX and PinballM are the only Steam games with this issue, XenoTilt, Demon's Tilt, & Zaccaria Pinball all respond to the PinballY exit button and return control back to PinballY.

 

I troubleshooted with just PinballFX. I launched the application from within PinballY and once it finished loading and I confirmed it had focus by moving around the menus with the controller buttons, I check the windows that were open with Alt-Tab:

• PinballFX Backglass
• PinballFX Dotmatrix
• PinballFX main window (running in borderless window mode)
• DOFLinx
• PinballY (the PinballY playfield window was the grey screen with a "LOADING..." status)

I then pressed the assigned PinballY "Exit Game" button. Nothing changed with PinballFX (no windows closed or focus lost), but when I check PinballY I do see the status message on the playfield window changed to "Exiting Game". At this point, I exited PinballFX by choosing "Exit Game" at the settings menu, however PinballY's playfield window is still a grey screen with the message "Exiting Game". The application does respond to some commands. I can press the button I have mapped to "Information" and get the Information pop up box. If I try to right-click and open the Options menu, I receive the message "This operation can't be performed while a game is running".

 

After I closed PinballFX, the only windows left open when I Alt-Tab are:

• PinballY
• DOFLinx

I don't have DOF enabled in PinballY. I tried closing the DOFLinx window to see if that would free PinballY with no success. I then tried ending all the Steam processes in Task Manager to see if one of those was holding up PinballY with no success.

 

I ran through the "Terminate By" options again (except for PinSim) and didn't notice any changes to focus or behavior of FX or PinballY. I tried increasing the timeout from 2500 to 25000 and defined the Close Win name as "PinballFX".

 

I tried the above steps again with the following changes:

• PinballFX set to window mode
• PinballFX set to window/borderless window with Cabinet Mode off (only open windows when I Alt-Tab prior to pressing "Exit Game" was PinballFX & PinballY)

Lastly while PinballFX was set to window and Cabinet Mode off, I tried pressing the assigned PinballY "Exit Game" button at the same time I clicked the close window button on the PinballFX application window, but PinballY still hung on "Exiting Game".

 

I tried enabling all the log options and checked the generated text file, but nothing in there jumped out to me as being related to closing the application.

Edited by TehLurv, 22 November 2024 - 02:12 AM.

[mjr]

TehLurv - thanks for all the added detail.  I'm afraid that doesn't shed too much light on it for me either.  My guess is that the thing that PinballY is waiting for is the Steam launcher process, which is probably window-less, so it's not showing up as a desktop object.  It should show up in Task Manager, so you might be able to confirm that by finding it in Task Manager and killing it manually, and see if that ends the PBY wait state.  If so, the question would then be why Steam isn't exiting when the game exits, which I'm not sure how to investigate.

 

> I tried enabling all the log options and checked the generated text file, but nothing in there

> jumped out to me as being related to closing the application.

 

If you check the Table Launch box in the Logging options, you should see a bunch of messages about launch and termination - look for "table launch:" in the log.  It would be good to confirm that you can see those, since I'm thinking that I might need to add some more logging to help get to the bottom of your issue, and that would kind of pointless if you're not seeing what's already there.

[Carny_Priest]

Check this thread. There is a specific process that must be monitored: PinballFX-Win64-Shipping.exe. And there will be something similar for Pinball M.

 

https://vpuniverse.c...llx-front-ends/

[TehLurv]

Check this thread. There is a specific process that must be monitored: PinballFX-Win64-Shipping.exe. And there will be something similar for Pinball M.

 

https://vpuniverse.c...llx-front-ends/

Thanks Carny_Priest! I changed the process name in the system settings from PinballFX.exe to PinballFX-Win64-Shipping.exe and that did the trick.

[mjr]

Great!  I'll have to add that to the help in the list of setup recipes for the widely used games.

[leprinco]

leprinco - I haven't heard of DOF double connections like that before.  If anyone else is running into the same thing, it would be good to know, maybe you can compare notes and see if there's something in common between your systems. 

 

There is one odd little detail in the log you posted that I'd like to confirm isn't just a cut-and-paste artifact:

 

DOF (DirectOutput): initializing DOF
clientDOF: creating DOF COM object (a23bfdbc-9a8a-46c0-8672-60f23d54ffb6)

 

See how that "initializing DOF / client" is split across two lines?  Is that actually what it looks like in your log file, or is that just the way it got rendered after pasting into the forum post?  If you're actually seeing the extra newline inserted there, it makes me wonder if you've got something weird going on with multiple PinballY processes running at the same time, both trying to write to the log file at once.

 

Thanks, for answering and no it is not copy paste. This is really how it behaves, pinballY starting twice. And very oddly, I see two DOF sequences as well in DOF log.
So PinballY starts, "initializing DOF" in PBY log; DOF lights blink, DOF state it is successful but then new PBY initilizing DOF then another sequence DOF sequance on DOF log, connecting to Wemos a second time but this time failing as the port is already busy with first connection

My DOF takes many time to initialize, maybe 15 seconds, so can this be PBY does not receive proper ack on time and retry a DOF init sequence ? 

[mjr]

> Thanks, for answering and no it is not copy paste. This is really how it behaves, pinballY starting twice.

 

So I guess the next question is: is there any chance that PinballY actually IS starting twice?  Two processes launched at the same time?  Maybe try monitoring Task Manager while it's launching and see if you see two processes appear for at least some interval.

[leprinco]

> Thanks, for answering and no it is not copy paste. This is really how it behaves, pinballY starting twice.

 

So I guess the next question is: is there any chance that PinballY actually IS starting twice?  Two processes launched at the same time?  Maybe try monitoring Task Manager while it's launching and see if you see two processes appear for at least some interval.

I am 100%sure it is not started twice
And it also happens when PC restart and PinballY starts automatically; 
Also I have one window

Edited by leprinco, 26 November 2024 - 08:52 PM.

[mjr]

leprinco - I'm afraid I don't have any other guesses about what to look at.  This isn't something I've encountered before, and I'm not coming up with any theories about what could cause it.  If you want to try looking at it under the Visual Studio debugger, I could point you to some places to set breakpoints to try to diagnose it.

[leprinco]

leprinco - I'm afraid I don't have any other guesses about what to look at.  This isn't something I've encountered before, and I'm not coming up with any theories about what could cause it.  If you want to try looking at it under the Visual Studio debugger, I could point you to some places to set breakpoints to try to diagnose it.

Thank you, I am there too, installed visual studio and try to debug... Will keep you posted if I find something

[mjr]

> Thank you, I am there too, installed visual studio and try to debug...

 

Great!  What I'd suggest is setting a breakpoint at the very beginning of DOFClient::Init() in dofclient.cpp, to find out why it's getting called more than once.

[DJO Maverick]

This may or may not be related to the issue being discussed recently, but I'm observing that my PBY fails to terminate DOF when exiting back to Windows. The menu light pattern continues, which I'm guessing is not intended?

[TehLurv]

One minor annoyance I've noticed with my setup of PinballY is after starting up the application it freezes for a few seconds when I first scroll to a table entry that makes use of video. It only happens that first time, so I assume it's PinballY kicking off the video player. Some of my listed tables only use images and other use video loops, so what happens is I'll fire up my virtual cab, start scrolling through tables, then everything freeze up when I hit a table with video.

 

Easy enough workaround for me would be to give every table a dummy video of a static image or something, but maybe there should be an option to move the video player loading to the startup of PinballY rather than load it on the fly?

[Thalamus]

Currently working on a cab rebuild. Close to getting there, but, PBY is giving me headaches. Since this is a re-build, everything should be up to the latest version.

My cab pf a 4k 120hz tv, My backglass 1920x1080 60hz monitor. Both connected to my 4070 Super over HDMI. The backglass via a DP to HDMI converter as 4070 has only one HDMI output.

 

I have planned to make every table that is worth it, to use the new *.ini system for POV. I really hate seeing stretched tables

 

So, I started on a simple, random game, in order to find my baseline - create a proper *.res for EM with black background. And here is where I'm stuck. Capture of pf on its own looks great, backglass, not so much. It looks like some of the PF bleeds/pushes the backglass to the right.

 

Captured :

https://photos.googl...m1BTEpmd09JU2NR

 

 

Outside of PBY :

https://photos.googl...FNIazF1RGtwQ2hR

 

I have a feeling that it might be related to the newest db2s server, as the format has changed a bit.

 

If someone is on 3840x2160 and 1920x1080 - and don't have this problem, could share their screenres.txt with me ?! Any other tricks ?

 

Oh, and btw. if someone is having sound issues with beta 10, try to delete/rename VLC64 and copy over the whole folder from a beta 7 release.

 

Solved :

 

If anyone with as poor eyesight as me attempts to do upgrade. Double check what resolution you actually did set. I scrolled past 3840x2160 looking for 120Hz. What I actually set was 4096x2160. God, I must have spent a whole day debugging without seeing this error. Odd thing though, the B2S_ScreenResIdentifier.exe fooled me. It generated 3840 x 2160. So, be aware of that !

Edited by Thalamus, 18 December 2024 - 04:12 PM.

[DJO Maverick]

I really like PBY, but there's one minor issue that his kept me from fully transitioning to it as a Frontend: difficulty in getting PinVol invisibly launched with it. I shell my frontend, so startup group isn't a solution. Since Microsoft in their wisdom made it impossible to launch minimized from command line, it can be solved with a .lnk set up that way (as you point out in PinVol instructions)... But PBY won't let you run a .lnk as a startup program. Workaround is to use a .bat, but then you get the momentary flash of the cmd window during that process. I could make an AHK script and compile it as an .exe so PBY will play with it when I get a minute, but it's just a pain to have to make a workaround.

It would be great if next version had ability to launch .lnk as startup program, or, to connect it to PinVol in some other way to silently launch with it.

Thanks for your work.

[mjr]

... after starting up the application it freezes for a few seconds when I first scroll to a table entry that makes use of video.

 

Yeah, I've noticed that as well, and I think you're right that it's libvlc loading DLLs.  libvlc used to be lightning fast at loading, but it seems like its loading time has gotten pretty noticeable lately.  I guess all programs get slower with age, alas.  It might be worth seeing if I can get it to pre-load everything during launch, although I'm not sure that's really possible; libvlc is extremely modular, with dozens of DLLs for different codecs and filters and so forth that it loads on demand as they're called upon.  So I'm not sure there's any way to get it to load everything all at once, short of starting up an example of every possible video and audio type that it knows about, which would require starting dozens of streams.  That might be a cure worse than the disease.

[csdf28]

Any chance you can add a  'delete table' option? I'm aware that we can hide tables but

A. I'm anal about these things and like to keep my tables folder clean with just one version

B. The hide tables feature has a bug whereby if you hide one version of a table, the other version also gets hidden the next time you restart PinballY. Once you unhide it PinballY will remember but it's a pain  

C. Manually deleting entries from the database text file is tiresome

[TehLurv]

Any chance you can add a  'delete table' option? I'm aware that we can hide tables but

A. I'm anal about these things and like to keep my tables folder clean with just one version

B. The hide tables feature has a bug whereby if you hide one version of a table, the other version also gets hidden the next time you restart PinballY. Once you unhide it PinballY will remember but it's a pain  

C. Manually deleting entries from the database text file is tiresome

You can do that through the "Delete Game Details" in the Operator Menu. It'll remove all the database info for that table. Then just remove the table file from the table folder and it should be gone from PinballY.

[DJO Maverick]

Having an issue where DOF does not shut down when exiting PinballY from the Exit PinballY option. Lights continue to run as if it is on. Has anyone else encountered this or know a workaround to shut it down cleanly?

[csdf28]

Having an issue where DOF does not shut down when exiting PinballY from the Exit PinballY option. Lights continue to run as if it is on. Has anyone else encountered this or know a workaround to shut it down cleanly?

This happens to me if I run through the PinballY menus too quickly.