ActiveX wrapper for XDMD

[stephen]

I finally got around to dedicating some time to XDMD. I would like to create an out of proc ActiveX control to provide DMD support for Visual Pinball original tables.

I am able to create a C# out of proc ActiveX control, call it from Visual Pinball VB script, and set break points in the ActiveX control. Straight forward.

I am able to create a console app that calls XDMD to display the PinballX image (like in the XDMD Demo app, but within a console app). Cool beans.

In the ActiveX control, I created a method called Test that would invoke XDMD to display the PinballX image (I made sure the "current directory" was where all of the DLLs and assets were located).

I create the object in Visual Pinball script and called the Test method in the left flipper event handler.

Results:

A window appears in the middle of the display, but nothing was drawn (it was all white). When hovered over the task bar icon for the Virtual DMD I it said "not responding".

My Test method spawns a thread to talk to XDMD. That way I can return immediately to VP. The thread has a while loop (like XDMD Demo) and looks for "ready". The PinballX transition takes about < 2 seconds. My code loops for < 2 seconds before the XDMD device becomes ready again. That tells me the XDMD Device Render is doing the right thing, timing wise, to schedule the animations. But nothing appears.

I look at the modules loaded while running the console app and compared to the modules loaded within the ActiveX app. The ActiveX app loads all of the same DLLs. So I don't think it's a permissions/access, or search path, or GAC thing.

Does anybody have experience which might point me in the right direction? I am hoping there is a simple and obvious solution that I hadn't thought of.

[stephen]

This forum is magic. I messed with this for 3 hours and couldn't get it working. I post my question, take a break, and when I come back to it - I have it solved in 15 minutes.

I'm still not sure why it didn't work before, but I now create the XDMD.Device on ActiveX startup instead of in the object instance (which is the correct design anyway).

[unclewilly]

Really excited for this.

Vp has needed this for years