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Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

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Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby legoboyvdlp » Tue Jun 14, 2016 3:46 pm

First of all, let me say that I'm really grateful to the Flightgear community, I learnt a lot through FG about how to fly a plane.
I think at the core the flight simulator is solid, most of the aircraft work as expected and there's good consistency on most of them.
I think though that you guys assume that since there are multiple points of view, anyone could choose any kind of setup, and so, you just create a configuration with some defaults and decide that people will customize it to what they want.
To me, this is a terrible mistake. What you guys should really focus on, I feel, is this part, where most of the settings and UI configuration is intuitive, where it suits majority of the people if not all. And then let the customization be available for minor adjustments.
I found most of the defaults hard to use, including simple things such as the steps in which the throttle or rudder increment when you use the keyboard. And with the joystick, I found the default configuration sorely lacking. I had to setup rudder trim, elevator trim, flaps, propeller mixtures...pretty much everything other than the basic flight controls on the joystick.
It took me quite a few months before I could get everything setup to fly well. I feel this is a little too much time for a typical user. I'm one of those crazy guys who won't give up until something works, but I don't expect many people to have this level of patience.
I'm sorry if I sound negative, but I just want to express where my issues are with Flightgear to help you focus on what will make it awesome for all of us :)
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Re: Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby erik » Wed Jun 15, 2016 1:09 pm

It would be nice if he or she contributed the updated joystick configuration back to FlightGear to prevent a similar comment in the future by someone who is using the same joystick.

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Re: Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby jaxsin » Wed Jun 15, 2016 1:19 pm

It would also be nice if the user decided to post the information where the ones that matter actually read it.

Reddit is a disease, don't suggest for one second that anyone should care about that place
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Re: Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby ausdkunst » Wed Jun 15, 2016 2:56 pm

jaxsin wrote in Wed Jun 15, 2016 1:19 pm: Reddit is a disease, don't suggest for one second that anyone should care about that place


HAHA don't know if you are a comics fan but their DC comics and Marvel subreddits are quite good :P
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Re: Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jun 15, 2016 5:39 pm

What you guys should really focus on, I feel, is this part, where most of the settings and UI configuration is intuitive, where it suits majority of the people if not all.


I guess if there'd be a universal definition of an intuitive UI, gnome and KDE would look the same and Windows would follow suit. The reality is that there's a couple of different philosophies and camps each with their own notion of what is intuitive.

There's also force of habit - having used the FG settings for so long, I find myself right mouse-clicking in Orbiter to change from control to view mode - which doesn't work of course. But that's not Orbiter's fault. I had a hard transition period to gnome 3 at some point, now I wouldn't want to miss it for the world.

Anyway, it's OpenSource, the majority of configs are exposed on the xml-settings - if someone comes with an idea how to set defaults and that idea sweeps everyone off their feet, I'm sure it gets implemented. But my suspicion is 'the UI is not intuitive' really means 'I personally am used to a different UI' and really has only a very tenuous connection to what other users think.
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Re: Reddit suggestion / request, crosspost

Postby Hooray » Thu Jun 16, 2016 5:19 pm

Frankly, it's ~40 lines of Nasal code to read a PropertyList/XML file and procedurally create a corresponding GUI dialog - obviously, the corresponding fields (tags) would need attributes so that they can be associated with a label, description and tooltip - but otherwise, it's actually trivial to provide a simple UI on top of the PropertyList-XML format - in fact, I once provided one (prior to Canvas) using procedurally created PUI/XML dialogs for creating/customizing -set.xml templates:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Aircraft_Generation_Wizard
Image

Image

The underlying framework doesn't care if it's creating a -set.xml file or some other PropertyList-based format (think GUI dialogs, joystick/keyboard config etc).


In other words, the system is there already - it just needs someone to adopt, and refine/extend, it.
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