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Pause should disable flight controls

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Pause should disable flight controls

Postby strnbrg » Sat Dec 19, 2020 4:33 pm

It happens a lot, that I hit 'p' to pause, but I forget to hit tab to get out of the mode where my mouse works the flight controls. I'll do something now with my mouse, and then when I unpause, the plane instantly goes into (at best) a stall and (at worst) an uncontrollable spin at overspeed. Maybe it would make sense to have 'p' automatically switch the mouse from flight-controls mode to plain old pointer mode?
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby wlbragg » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:11 pm

This is something that might be best discussed on the dev mailing list.

Or maybe suggested through a ticket.
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby The epic chicken » Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:39 pm

i strongly disagree with pause should disable flight controls
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby wkitty42 » Sat Dec 19, 2020 6:18 pm

maybe hitting pause could switch the mouse mode to normal mode and then back when pause is hit again to unpause?
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby strnbrg » Sat Dec 19, 2020 7:34 pm

Exactly.
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby Johan G » Sun Dec 20, 2020 7:45 pm

I agree with wkitty42 and strnbrg. I think one rarely is trimmed neutral enough that pressing "5" would save the situation (if that even works with mouse control).
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby Thorsten » Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:12 pm

Maybe it would make sense to have 'p' automatically switch the mouse from flight-controls mode to plain old pointer mode?


I don't think the mouse is in any way special internally - the fun thing about it is that it has no real absolute physical position, only a relative one. But you can e.g. move a joystick when unpaused, and it's rightfully registering as 'being moved' then (you'd alter the neutral position if that would not happen).

You can of course add to the p Key binding to switch the mouse mode - however, how do you switch it back when unpausing? If you do switch it back, you're back where you were before, the mouse might register 'something'. If you're not switching back, I can already see the bug reports 'plane can't be controlled any more after unpausing'. I for one would find the latter highly confusing...

I guess the take-home message is that a mouse is not the best of input devices for a flightsim, and it requires you to acquire certain habits to be able to fly because you need it for multiple purposes - moving controls, pushing buttons as well as controlling the rest of your computer. What the habits are is highly specific - but I've never run into the problem you describe despite mouse-piloting since I run FG .

So my suggestion is - change the key binding to your liking in your own private setup, see if it meshes well with your habits, don't expect anyone else to prefer the same way as you.
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby cgdae » Mon Dec 21, 2020 1:05 pm

I have often seen this problem where pausing/resuming results in loss of control due to mouse movements moving control surfaces while paused, and i think it would be good if we could figure out a way to avoid it.

Compared with a joystick, i guess the main problem is that there is no concept of a central position with a mouse. But also the mouse has different modes so it's common to move it while in the wrong mode when paused, and this interacts badly with the general lack of feedback for movements of flight surfaces when paused.

I'm not sure that simply changing mouse mode when pausing, then resetting when resuming, is a good solution, because the user might change mode manually while paused, so any automated mode change on resume could be confusing.

Maybe we could instead try to disable all mouse-derived changes to control surfaces while paused?

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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby cgdae » Mon Dec 21, 2020 5:27 pm

Here's a small patch to fgdata that disables mouse control of flight surfaces when paused (or replaying), and so fixes the "loss of control after pause" problem:

https://sourceforge.net/u/cgdae/fgdata/ ... 7c61232be/

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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby cgdae » Mon Dec 21, 2020 5:29 pm

The epic chicken wrote in Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:39 pm:i strongly disagree with pause should disable flight controls

Could you explain why you disagree?

Thanks,

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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby Hooray » Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:03 pm

wkitty42 wrote in Sat Dec 19, 2020 6:18 pm:maybe hitting pause could switch the mouse mode to normal mode and then back when pause is hit again to unpause?


If FlightGear tries being that "smart", it should probably at least be shown in the form of a corresponding log message and/or tooltip, and include a boolean property/option so that people can easily disable that behavior if they don't want that - otherwise, I can see us (5+ years from now) "debugging" weird bugs, where the mouse stops behaving as expected after someone accidentally paused the sim :lol:
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby The epic chicken » Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:35 pm

cgdae wrote in Mon Dec 21, 2020 5:29 pm:
The epic chicken wrote in Sat Dec 19, 2020 5:39 pm:i strongly disagree with pause should disable flight controls

Could you explain why you disagree?

Thanks,

- Jules





i pause flightgear move the controls so when i unpause the control surface intantly go to the desired position
which helps when you have alot of lag
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby cgdae » Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:55 pm

The epic chicken wrote in Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:35 pm:i pause flightgear move the controls so when i unpause the control surface intantly go to the desired position
which helps when you have alot of lag


Just to be clear about this, are you talking about the main flight controls - elevator, ailerons and rudder?

And do you use mouse movement to adjust them while paused, or something else such as the arrow keys or a joystick?

If the answers to the above questions are both yes, how can you see whether you've moved the surfaces to the desired position? for me, the control surfaces don't move when paused, although the joystick does move [this is of course without the patch i posted earlier]. Perhaps this is dependent on the aircraft.

I guess i'm not understanding how one can make an accurate change to flight controls while paused, using a mouse.

Thanks,

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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby Thorsten » Mon Dec 21, 2020 7:22 pm

Again - could we please stop trying to impose something that some people desire on everyone? I strongly disagree with any change to the current behavior that's not opt-in (and yes, I've also used the ability to move controls during pause for debugging purposes because I couldn't pull and hold a joystick).
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Re: Pause should disable flight controls

Postby Hooray » Mon Dec 21, 2020 7:57 pm

Indeed, many of our power users/contributors do use such functionality for a variety of purposes, and reasons. Thus, something like this should be strictly opt-in, and maybe configurable via properties/CLI, and exposed via the launcher. And if it is enabled/active, it should definitely display a corresponding log message telling people what's going on and how to disable that feature
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