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List All Gauges via Binary Dump

Ali Cat

Ali Cat

Charter Member
Been sitting on my harddrive (which is grinding) for a while and thinking throw it out there, some may find it helpful.

1. Place "dumpgauges.exe" at a location of your choosing.

2. Open a command prompt and naivigate to that directory.

3. Type "dumpgauges" and help info will be printed.

4. Type "dumpgauges" and set a path to get all gauges.

Perhaps one of the most interesting coding projects I have every done and i have done some crazy ****. Intriquing the mix of learning PE files and what gauges.h was telling me. Lot of guess to get there and all done strictly whitehat.
 

Attachments

  • DumpGauges.exe
    40 KB · Views: 14
Many thanks Ali Cat, a very convenient tool indeed.

Do you believe it would be possible to find the tokenvars in use in each sub-gauge of a cluster gauge (such a tool exist for single gauges and could be found at one time on the free flight site, "GaugeDump" by Bruce Hellstrom)

Cheers
Martin
 
Hello Martin and thanks for your response. I had hoped some might find the app useful.

As to your question, I can think of no reason why it could not be done. All the data for the gauges are in the gauge file – somewhere. The difficulty is deducing what gauges.h is actually doing and then tracking down the values of interest per one's knowledge of PE files (executables, dll's, …).

My first reaction to your question was, oh boy, that'll take some work. But I'm also intrigued. No promises but let me look at it a bit more.
 
Martin (and everyone else, of course),

I had an eureka moment today. Per your request, I've been struggling for days now to read what gauges.h calls the element list. Study of gauges.h makes me think your tokenvars are stored there. Gauges are composed of layers of said elements, starting with the background and then what ever is needed on top. As an example an altimeter, typically, would have the gauge background (the dial), then the needle, and perhaps an adjustment knob. Each of these three would be elements.

I won't bore you with the blow by blow but, today i figured out how CFS2 links the 1st element (background) to the second. I have every reason to believe I can now get to all the elements.

A final comment. Making a guage from scratch is clearly easier than this. It is not coding. It is cut and paste, change a variable or two, and you have your gauge. I have said this before but perhaps this time I will follow through. Maybe a slide show (simple tut) of make your 1st gauge?
 
Hello Ali Cat
I'm totally conscient what I asked isn't easy, such a soft as Panel Studio (available on the Free Flight Site here: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/freeflight/CfgEdit.zip) can give you the different subgauges list, the gauges offsets, but not as I know the token vars in use.
Makin our own gauges isn't so difficult, as you say, copy and paste different values into a sample gauge can open many possibilities, I'm not a programmer of any computer language but have some success, even if as Dai Griffith predicted in his excellent tuto, I suffer often a lot, but I'm obsinate and sometimes it pays.
One can't resume how to make gauges with a few lines, but if some are interessed, I can perhaps try to help.
The first thing to succed on is having a working environment to compile the gauges, a working "gauge oven".

So, tell me if you want some explains on how to build your gauge oven, cause when it's done, all becomes possible...

Best regards

Martin :jump:
 
Hey Martin,


I just checked your posts and am so pleased that someone else is making gauges. It is very, very impressive that you have learned to make them and they look great.


On making gauges is easy, yes, that's an over simplification to the point of being misleading. As you are certainly aware, the actual mechanics of making a particular gauge are easy once one figures out precisely what is required. But when a compiled gauge does not work, yes, I have struggled many times on finding what is wrong.


As far as programming platforms I have used the open source “Eclipse” IDE. I have also used the old school method of a make file at the command prompt using the open source “gcc” compiler. Its been a while but as I remember each of these took some effort to get them to work.


I am currently using Visual Studio though I have yet to try and make a gauge. I had done a lot of work in trying to understand how CFS2 communicates with its various dll's and DumpGauges.exe was a spinoff from that effort.

Again, great work,
Mike
 
Hi Ali Cat
I'm happy to find somebody else making gauges, I know Ivan makes too gauges for CFS1 :), we already exchanged a bit but the problems we encounter seem the same, and our exchanges didn't helped.
For my own, I work with visual studio light 2008, and use the dos prompter and makefile, the dos prompter sometimes telling where I could have done mistakes. I didn't still succeeded to program a mouse drag, the gauge throwing the sim to the desk on each time, but perhaps one of these days...
I would be very happy to convert some peoples to this exercise, that can become a bit addictive, believe me or not ;)

Best regards
Martin :jump:
 
Captain,


And good to speak to you again. I have yet to download “87 Days” but I will. Again, looks great and I so like a historically correct campaign. I'm retired now but have bought a fixer upper so there are limits on my time. That said often times the nights are long so perhaps I can finish some of these crazy projects I've started.


Martin,


As to a mouse drag-able gauge, I know I got that to work on the Ju-52 panel some years ago plus the ability to drag all three at once . Unfortunately, the code was lost in a hard drive crash. As a refresher I'm going to make a gauge using Eclipse, anyway. I want to make sure I remember all the special settings I had to make. Make a throttle lever then? If that doesn't help I could always look at your code via e-mail exchange, if you are willing.

Ju-52 Panel:
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/local_links.php?action=jump&catid=46&id=4254



Cheers to all,
Mike (or Sam)
 
Hi Mike
Well, I didn't even hope such a proposition, many thanks, I'll have a look at the codes I tried to do, and if you propose to check it, it's too nice ;)

Cheers
Martin :jump:
 
Hello Mike
I compiled the code you sent, it works wonderfully, thousand thanks :redfire:

As I am a dummy programmer, I must study it a lot, but I don't desperate to one day reproduce it ;)

Cheers
Martin :jump:
 
That's great news. Sometimes, even with c, when one crosses over to a different compiler, weird things happen. I'm glad it worked out and it was fun to make a gauge again.

Keep up the good work,
Mike
 
I have succeeded in reading the token variables from gauge files (per Martin's idea). This opens the possibility of outputting a great deal of data within a gauge file. I'm assuming, if useful, the actual address in the file would also be wanted. A simple question. Would such a data dump be useful?
 
Well done Mike :applause:

It's difficult to predict hom many people will be interested, our .gau users community is shrinking drasticly.
The ultimate tool could be a window interfaced gauge maker soft, or a XML.cab to C.gau windows interfaced converter, but how many developpers will use it? I believe I remembered to have read in this forum that xml gauges from FS9 can't be read in latest versions, am I wrong? (I don't know too much about it)
may be the answer is in C gauges... Do Flight Simulator 2020 read the C gauges?

Thanks for your hard efforts
Cheers
Martin :jump:
 
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