FSX-SE Did anyone ever find a solution - repeat button "slowdown"

[JonP01 104]

I have seen numerous people complain about this issue over the years but the threads never seem to go very far - so presumably the complainants ended up living with it as I have. But with Winter here down under coming I use this time each year to further refine my FSX setup, add more scenery and fix anything up that is less than perfect that I discovered over the year.

About the only really significant annoyance I have still remaining with FSX that might possibly still have a resolution is - as the title says - a "slowdown" of the repeat button repeat rate after a certain period of time has elapsed when running FSX. The only solution is to save the flight, close FSX and start it up again. And this can often cause problems with complex add-ons where saving the flight does not really save everything like it does with simple, stock aircraft.

This issue seems to only effect movement of the controls pertaining to throttle, mixture and prop rpm. What will happen is that when you start the flight, the "speed" of the response to pressing the associated button is fine (as I have it setup, thus how I intended it to work) but at a certain point in time during the flight, the response slows down to less than half the speed it used to be. This is incredibly annoying given that at the time when you need throttle response to be as fast as possible (final approach and landing), you have a very sluggish throttle that simply does not respond quickly enough.

As I say there has been quite a few discussions in the past about this and many solutions or theories offered - but none of the solutions or suggestions ever worked. My theory is that it might have something to do with the FSX engine prioritising certain things - and when too many non-essential things get "piled" up by the FSX engine and don't get processed, the engine seems to start cutting corners and not doing things correctly anymore. Examples of this are ever increasing blurries, wind shear that goes completely nuts with 180 degree shifts, ATC messages that start to "lag" behind or no longer make contextual sense etc - things people have complained about regularly in the past. Most if not all of these problems go away when more processing power is thrown at the sim, or things turned down (the latter not really an option any of us like).

I did notice that as I built more powerful machines, the issue with the slowing throttle response tended to not appear 100% of the time or took longer to appear - these days it can happen within about an hour to 90 minutes. And I also notice it tends to happen when (of all things) ATC gets heavily caught up firing multiple messages to a large number of aircraft at once (including my own when I might get half a dozen instructions within a minute). This suggests my "priorities" theory might be correct.

Anyway, I just thought I would check to see if anyone ever found a solution, though I suspect short of running FSX on a state of the art 2023 machine with an ultra fast processor (or turning things down or off to the point where it is no longer is a decent simming experience), this is likely one bug / issue that I have to live with (just like the other things mentioned as well as the mouse slowdown, etc).

[Luis Hernandez 568]

Hello Jon. It's nice to see someone hanging on to and (more importantly) enjoying FSX 17 years after its release (or 9 if we count since the release of the Steam Edition). I keep it for my laptop; for my desktop, I completed the transition to P3D. I have some questions:

1) Which edition of FSX do you use? The boxed one (either Standard, Deluxe or Acceleration) or FSX-SE?
2) If you don't have FSX-SE, have you tried using it? Sometimes you can get it for just $5.
3) What are your system specs?
4) And if I understood correctly, you aren't using any levers for throttle, but buttons?

[JonP01 104]

It is FSX Steam running on Windows 7 with a Ryzen 2700X and Nvidia 2060 Super GPU. Yes - buttons only for throttle, prop and mixture.

[MaDDogz 242]

Hey mate, I don’t have a fix, but you should consider getting a controller of some kind. Even a cheap stick/throttle will massively improve your enjoyment. 

[JonP01 104]

I use a Logitech F710 gamepad and it is excellent for what it is - so all control surfaces are allocated to the joysticks for instance but the remaining primary functions such as flaps, trim, throttle and prop go to the remaining buttons. I have mixture as two of the keyboard keys since that is one of the least frequent adjustments when actually flying. The only reason I never went to a full setup with rudder pedals yoke and throttle quadrant is because my simming machine is primarily for sim racing and that requires a pretty hefty permanent setup. If I ever stop racing (I will when either age catches up to me or this machine and the racing wheel dies) then my plan was always to get the full setup for flight simming only. And probably P3D instead of FSX so long as I can still get all my scenery and aircraft onto it. I would be curious to know if this issue ever found its way into P3D but I guess 99% of people who use it have proper yokes, pedals, throttles, etc.

Edited May 26, 2023 by JonP01

[Luis Hernandez 568]

On 5/26/2023 at 12:07 PM, JonP01 said:

It is FSX Steam running on Windows 7 with a Ryzen 2700X and Nvidia 2060 Super GPU. Yes - buttons only for throttle, prop and mixture.

How did you assign the buttons? Via FSX or FSUIPC?

Maybe I never saw this issue because I used FSUIPC for these assignments. 

[JonP01 104]

FSX - I do not use FSUIPC.

[JonP01 104]

Well this really is turning out to be a mystery. Now that the antipodean Winter is upon us down here I've been doing a lot of experimentation and testing. Bottom line is that this problem is definitely an issue solely related to FSX and nothing to do with any particular game controller, keyboard, OS setting, etc. And even more interestingly, I've discovered that it happens precisely one hour after I begin a flight! To prove it is not external to FSX, if I shut down FSX and try another application, the buttons (and button repeats) work perfectly. And they also work perfectly (again) if I close FSX then re-start it!

I even tried using external software to create button repeats commands so that all I had to do in FSX was nominate a given button with no repeat rates whatsoever. Yet after precisely one hour, FSX still halves the rate at which the throttle (prop and mixture) move!

Bottom line is I have no choice but to live with this but I would really be curious to try P3D to see if this bug is still there after all these years - might well be considering the tiny number of people who have repeat rate button allocations to functions that normally require controller sliders.

[JonP01 104]

Having spent even more days on this I am now 99.9% convinced this is either a bug or an intended "resource saving" feature of FSX since it only effects FSX and does not effect any other application at the same time it effects FSX. And since my system is a bare Windows 7 installation with nothing but FSX and Race07 on it (and now, JoyToKey - see below), there isn't anything on the machine to cause this other than FSX. It also "resolves" by shutting down FSX and opening it again. Further, it does not matter whether you allocate a key virtually (using any program designed to emulate or map any device to a key), an actual hardware key on the keyboard or anything else. It still happens.

So long as that particular key (or joystick button) input relies upon either the operating system, mapping software or FSX itself repeating the initial input quickly, this bug / feature will hit after precisely one hour after after the flight has started (not the actual flying time itself - it actually begins from the moment you leave the user interface and are in the aircraft). No one minute less or one minute more. 3600 seconds precisely. And the reason I say it might still be a bug when it hits at precisely the hour point is because FSX might be doing something else at precisely the one hour mark behind the scenes and whatever that is might "break" the button repeating functionality.

After trying about 6 different ways to get around this, the best compromise I have found is to use JoyToKey to map the game controller buttons to keyboard keys only (so that no buttons are ever assigned within FSX - only keyboard keys). Then assign a virtual button repeat rate within JoyToKey equal to the frame rate of the sim (in my case 30 fps - half the screen refresh rate).

This does not stop the half rate "bug / feature" occurring but at least completely eliminates the normal lag associated with button presses followed by the automatic repeating (the combined slow down and initial lag before the repeating begins to take place is just too much of a problem when precision control is needed when landing). Although this delay can be changed with Windows Filter Keys (and associated registry entries), you can't really get rid of that initial lag altogether since it compromises normal keyboard input too much - but with JoyToKey you can make the lag zero. That at least gives me instant throttle response when I need it the most - I just have to be mindful that when the hour mark hits, my throttle is going to move at half the speed it used to even though it does now respond instantly - unlike before!

There obviously will never be any fix to this now, other than buying a proper piece of hardware that has throttle, prop and mixture levers. I do have my eye on the Virtual Fly gear as a long term wish list item.

Edited June 23, 2023 by JonP01