On 4 Mar 2013, at 14:54, AJ MacLeod <aj-li...@adeptopensource.co.uk> wrote:
Aha, and instantly we get a usability discussion: > Just sticking in my 2p worth... I would say I use z/Z almost every flight. > It can be useful for "cheating", as Thorsten said, but more usually as a > means of adjusting performance. Often airports are in or near very > scenery-intensive areas and reducing visibility can help a lot in making the > sim run usably for take-off, whereas once you're up and away it's nice to be > able to open the view back up again for cross-country flying. Maybe if that > happened automatically somehow this would become unimportant, but for now I > think a lot of people rely on it. Right, you need the keys because you're working around a simulator bug (frame-rate drops badly) using manual interaction. The correct fix isn't to make the workaround-UI easier, it's fix the underlying issues, by making adaptive-LOD work so we can achieve a target frame-rate reliably. > I can't believe you're suggesting removing the FoV keybinding though! I've > used that for "zoom" in 3d cockpits for about as long as we've had the > things, completely essential in my opinion. I know it's not strictly > speaking "zoom" but it works, and is very quick and natural to use, too. > > Could it be a mouse/joystick binding? Yes - but these are much harder to > remember and differ widely on different setups. You're the third person to say the same thing. But again, you don't actually want to change the FoV at all. What you're doing (and everyone else) is using this feature to look around 3D cockpits, right? In other word, our cockpit navigation UI needs some improvement :) Of course we can't remove the FoV binding while it's the only way to zoom in/out on detail in the 3D cockpits - I'd get lynched - but we could think about changing that mode more generally. In particular I've already got a local patch to change the look behaviour, which makes looking with the mouse easier (IMO of course). It doesn't (yet) help with the zoom issue, but my larger point would be that we should occasionally step back and ask what the actual use-case for features is, not simply 'I need to change FoV quickly because that's how I've been reading the text on 3D cockpits for the past 5 years' Also, usability is hard :) James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
