> Flightgear (and any other flight sim) is trying to reproduce the > experience of flying, both in terms of the flight dynamics and (to a > limited extent) "the whole experience". > > As such, many of the instruments in the virtual cockpit can be > configured with mouse-clicks on the instruments themselves. Some can > also be configured through dialog boxes. > > If FG wants to try and model the "flight experience", these alternative > dialog-box UIs must go. There are no pull-down menus on a real plane, > and no dialog-boxes. Providing them therefore breaks the "flight > experience". > I disagree with the fact that it breaks the flight experience. On the real plane, you extend your hand and twist a knob. Unless you're building an external hardware to augment your flight simulation experience (i.e., actual radio stack panel with the knobs to twist that will interface the PC), you will not have the same experience. Touchscreen might be smth, but most of us don't have a touchscreen either. Doing a mouse click on a radio knob (that is rendered to a tiny circle less than the natural size as the whole screen is less than 1:1 at the default zoom where you see both the window and the radios) is thus significantly more difficult and a more time consuming task. BTW, I am comparing it to real flight experiences. Mostly you even twist these knobs BLIND in the real life, only occasionally glancing at the frequency displays when you make the approximately correct amount of clicks, and look outside. No way to model that w/o a real knob. There is a concept of "flow" in real flying, referring to the flow of your hands around the cockpit, and the only way to train these is to do it in 1:1 scale 3D physical environment. Clicking will not give you the correct flows, because your hand doesn't move the same.
Therefore, a way to do it via keyboard shortcuts/dialogs is a reasonable compromise --- you want to be able to make it with an approximately same ease. If, however, you want to do the clicking, that's all right, too --- but please back off from the idea that everything but the clicking must go. Vassilii _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
