> *Please* don't drop the z/Z key binding. This is one of the most > useful and direct controls we have to affect the visual experience. (...) > It's fecking difficult to operate a mouse/menu/slider while using a > joystick > unless you are ambidextrous > (which I'm not)
Can anyone please explain to me why one needs to change visibility manually during flight so often? We're trying to create a simulated experience. Which means that for me there are things which I adjust before flying, i.e. I set the airplane, the location, the weather, the environment, the time,... And there are things which I can adjust in-flight - there's the throttle, levers for gear, flaps, various buttons, where I look and what I focus on. But the simulated environment in-flight largely is what it is if you aim for realism of the experience - if the weather deteriorates, I have to deal with it. If the visibility drops below VFR conditions, I have to change my plans. Conceptually, I understand that key bindings make sense in the context of a simulator standing for things I can do in-flight in the cockpit, because I may need to be able to perform these actions quickly or while I'm doing something else (like controlling an airplane). In many cases, we do not have a keybinding, and performing a real possible action ends up being awkward - you need to mouse-click something while flying on, or you even need to open an menu. Changing visibility magically is not of this group, it's not a realistic option which you could perform in a real cockpit. I understand that visibility needs to be manually controllable for setting up specific training conditions. But this doesn't need to happen in-flight all the time and can be from the menu. I understand that visibility has a role for memory management, but that doesn't need to be done in-flight either, memory management can be done much more efficiently by setting a max. visibility value once and just store it. You can't micro-manage memory consumption by adjusting visibility all the time because a) you'd need to have an open system monitor to see memory occupancy and b) you'd need to know in advance how much memory the next tiles to be loaded will have. About the only reason why I can see one would want to adjust visibility often in-flight is 'cheating' - you just take a quick look in bad visibility where you are. This is fine, it's a simulation after all, we have AP support for planes which have no AP in reality and an in-built GPS - but why do we need to support that with a key-binding? The question to me is not 'Do some people use it?' The question we should answer is 'Given the alternative between a key binding to change visibility and assigning a new key-binding to a function you can actually perform in a cockpit, isn't the second option better'? For instance assume we would assign z/Z to changing the NAV1 frequency or the heading of the AP - these are functions which I perform basically all the time when I don't do pure VFR and it's rather awkward to open the menu or hit a tiny clickspot. Personally, I think reserving key binding for things which you can really do in a real cockpit is not a bad concept. And I would really like to understand why some people think it's necessary to change the visibility so often that a menu option doesn't work for them whereas I need to change my NAV frequencies in the menu (while flying the plane with the mouse... I can do this with just one control device) * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
