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Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Controlling your aircraft, using the autopilot etc.

Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby meows » Sun Mar 26, 2017 12:31 am

For the last week I have spent hours upon hours of reading, and While the Hud is a wonderful tool, I have to say there is a terrible need for just a few I hope are simple fixes.
The radio stack., The Navs. and Hdg, Only the most important pilot usable instruments on a aircraft. need to be clickable in a POP UP.
Right now with the cessna default aircraft while there is a 2D popup with SHIFT P. it is unusable!
I need a way to SEE and adjust these things. :D

Sorry to invade your day, I really like FlightGear. I tried it many many years ago but it was way over my head so I went back to my Windows 98 and Fightsim for win95.
Thank you for your time.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby meows » Sun Mar 26, 2017 12:35 am

sorry I forgot the stats.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Thorsten » Sun Mar 26, 2017 7:02 am

The radio stack., The Navs. and Hdg, Only the most important pilot usable instruments on a aircraft. need to be clickable in a POP UP.


Out of curiosity, why do these things need to be clickable in a pop-up? For years just zooming the view in to what I want to adjust with the mouse wheel has worked perfectly fine for me (and about everyone else).

Personally, I think any form of pop-up tends to break immersion into the sim, because while focusing the view on some detail is close to the natural way of how we interact in a real cockpit, seeing a pop-up is not something that occurs in reality. So I wouldn't spend my time coding clickable pop-ups, I much prefer the clickable 3d cockpit.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby stuart » Mon Mar 27, 2017 7:57 pm

Try pressing F12, which will bring up the radio controls, if you don't like the virtual cockpit.

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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby meows » Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:12 pm

-Stuart :: Try pressing F12, which will bring up the radio controls
Thank you Stuart. That is a most excellent suggestion.

For years just zooming the view in to what I want to adjust with the mouse wheel has worked perfectly fine for me

Thorsten:: For years just zooming the view in to what I want to adjust with the mouse wheel has worked perfectly fine for me

Well I did not know the mouse wheel could do that, I will try it with the mouse. So far all I did was crash trying to set the Heading, by the time I press the x key then scroll with the mouse to what I want to look at. I would be crashed on the ground. And right know I have 7 wrongful death suits pending in sim court. So I was in hopes there was a better way.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Bomber » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:03 pm

To me its this... there are some action you don't need to look to do...

Like changing gear on your car.... turning the windscreen wipers on, you just do them... there's no need to focus on the object to make it happen.

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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Thorsten » Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:35 am

To me its this... there are some action you don't need to look to do...


That's what keybindings are intended to solve. But I assume that if you need to set a frequency, you need to look at what that frequency is (or at least I have to look).

by the time I press the x key then scroll with the mouse to what I want to look at. I would be crashed on the ground.


... which is probably why in real life you wouldn't do things like dialing in a radio frequency in a high-workload situation but when you're in trimmed, straight and level flight. Lots of pilots have died for real when they were distracted during the wrong moment.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby stuart » Tue Mar 28, 2017 11:54 am

One of the things we're adding for the next release are "tips of the day" which will display on the loading screen. I've already added information about pressing F12, and I'll add one about mouse zooming as well (thank Thorsten!). This will hopefully make it easier for new users to discover things like this.

Re: changing radio frequencies. Much to my embarrassment, IRL I infringed a control zone in the summer while distracted, partly from re-tuning my radio while in a high-workload situation...

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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Bomber » Tue Mar 28, 2017 12:10 pm

Yes I understand what keybindings are for and in the whole they work...

but it's the tactile feedback that a pilot receives back that is sometimes missing.. and this could easily be resolved with a small transparent graphic that appears whilst the equipment is being used.

Say for instance the trim wheel.... a pilot doesn't look at it... he reaches for it, from the indentations on the wheel he knows it's current position and adjusts it, knowing it's new position...

Same with the undercarriage... is it up or down, should I look at the handle or just reach and and feel what position its in.... in fg it'd be nice to simply double tap the undercarriage key and for an unobtrusive graphic appear and then fade away..

Anyway it's just a thought on how I'd look to improve this side of the sim if I had the time and wasn't busy on flight models.....
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby dilbert » Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:54 pm

"x" brings the panel closer and shift "x" sends it further away enabling more of the cockpit and panel to be viewed. Right click
and movement of the mouse enables you to alter your view direction. Thus, you can easily make your instruments comfortably visible for normal flight (the HUD is more applicable to planes like the F14,15, and 16.).

Regarding the 172 radios: The knob adjusts the right hand frequency and the little white button swaps it to become
the active frequency, just as in the real airplane. If you're temporarily having a problem losing control while finding and adjusting the radio, you can always toggle "p" to pause and resume the simulation, and the radios will still tune.

Regarding drop down menus: there are some 400 available airplane models with varying degrees of completion and sophistication. With some ( the F14 comes to mind) you can do everything and get every indication -hook , gear up or down, etc.- in the cockpit. With others (the Ercoupe comes to mind) you may have to tune the VOR using the drop down radio menu.

If you don't already have it, strongly recommend a four axis stick with hat switch on top. The fourth axis enables twisting the stick for control of the rudder, and the hat switch enables rapidly looking about. Welcome back and Best Regards
Last edited by dilbert on Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby wlbragg » Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:03 pm

but it's the tactile feedback that a pilot receives back that is sometimes missing.. and this could easily be resolved with a small transparent graphic that appears whilst the equipment is being used.

That's not a bad idea for some items. A transparent overlay of and instrument that can be manipulated. Kind of a ghost, like if you were reaching by feel to do something. How easy to implement, don't know!
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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Bomber » Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:29 pm

Another issue that ran and ran over at Targetware was the obtrusiveness of the window bars, they're simply unrealistic... Why ? because in reality they disappear, along with glass reflections..

If you model window bars and glass reflection as though you're sitting there staring at these items then they're correct... however in real life we don't stare at them, we look past them and as such these object become ghosts.... don't believe me ?

Next time you're driving your car hold the steering wheel at the top and stick the index finger up into your eyeline and see just how semi-transparent it actually is when looking at the car in front.... the same way the window bars would when focusing on a plane dodging your bullets in front whilst dog fighting.

These things can be solved... but first you have to recognise they exist.

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Re: Newbe to FlightGear. but not to Flight sims

Postby Thorsten » Wed Mar 29, 2017 6:52 am

Another issue that ran and ran over at Targetware was the obtrusiveness of the window bars, they're simply unrealistic... Why ? because in reality they disappear, along with glass reflections..


Actually neither disappear in reality - but as you say they're out of optical focus and out of mental focus when flying.

There's limits to what rendering can do. Unlike the wavefronts of real light from a 3d scene which have phase, intensity and polarization information per wavelength, the screen can only offer you pixel intensity for three different colors, and the intensity range it can do is fairly limited.

So a screen won't ever give you focusing on different distances, it won't give you response to polarized glasses, it won't ever blind you with glare,...

Trying to mimick these with rendering is... tricky. To some degree you can, but it gets subjective.

The whole discussion is actually far from new, I've had it years ago on the mailing list with regard to mock-up glass reflections and dirt where I felt they're far overdone in some planes. Partially in response to that I wrote the glass shader, which handles that much closer to reality - most of the time scratches or fogging is very mild, unless the sun shines right through them, which is when they start to glare (try this with a car with frost on the windshield, and you'll know). Same with reflections - most of the time they're hardly noticeable, until they are (bright lit object in cockpit reflecting against night outside).

It's conceptually quite possible to selectively fade bars etc. into alpha so that you can look through them, but personally I'd find this wildly unrealistic on the screen and much prefer to let my mental focus undo them. Same with scratches etc - some people really prefer them rather heavy on their planes, others just do not.

If you're into that kind of tricks, I guess you can do lots of them by learning how to configure effects and animations - I'm guessing we have most of what's needed ready to go. Personally, I believe perception compensations should be very mild if any in rendering and usually I consider them bug rather than feature.
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