Newbie Help

[timhowarduk]

Hi - I've watched the videos but have the following questions. I'm trying to run Solo mode with Approach option.

1 - on a laptop with a touchpad, I can't make the drag to vector, or middle click to link aircraft on radar with aircraft on strip work. Is there any solution to this, other than plug in a mouse?

2 - is there anywhere a list of what is accepted in the Text Chat box, particularly given the problem 1 above? I can't find this in the quick reference or the user guide, sorry if I am missing the obvious. e.g. What do I type to instruct a plane to change altitude seeing as I can't use the touchpad?

3 - once I get a plane to line up to intercept the localiser and clear the ILS/Visual approach, obviously I need to handover to TWR. But I can't see how to do that.

Huge thanks in advance for any tips!
Tim

[timhowarduk]

Ok - found a mouse, and problems vanished. Thanks anyway!

[mickybadia]

Hello,
Thank you for appearing as a solo mode user! MP sessions are indeed visible on live maps, unfortunately it is quite impossible to evaluate the reach of solo...

Anyway, it is good if your problems were solved. But for others' use and in case, I'll follow up anyway.

1 - on a laptop with a touchpad, I can't make the drag to vector, or middle click to link aircraft on radar with aircraft on strip work. Is there any solution to this, other than plug in a mouse?

As far as I know, touchpad does not mean no button, and buttons disabled usually mean tap-for-click. Click and drag (and drop) is usually emulated with tap and retap and drag (and release). Middle-click without middle button: click both left and right buttons. On Mac, something like Ctrl+click or Squiggle+click whatever they call it.

2 - is there anywhere a list of what is accepted in the Text Chat box, particularly given the problem 1 above? I can't find this in the quick reference or the user guide, sorry if I am missing the obvious. e.g. What do I type to instruct a plane to change altitude seeing as I can't use the touchpad?

The first section of the quick reference gives you exactly that (text aliases). You will find it in the help menu. However text chat has no effect in solo mode. Read the related feature note for how to instruct AI planes.

3 - once I get a plane to line up to intercept the localiser and clear the ILS/Visual approach, obviously I need to handover to TWR. But I can't see how to do that.

You must drag the linked strip onto "TWR" in the handover pane, which in my opinion should be docked right under the strip racks. Also see video 6 of the tutorial (accessible directly from the help menu too).
EDIT: FYI, the timely handover expected is when the aircraft is in the TWR range configured in the airport-specific rules (options menu).

[timhowarduk]

Thank you in turn for your reply. I think it is great being able to practise skills in solo mode and it is a lot of fun, the idea being that I get enough confidence to eventually participate in MP sessions.

If I can take a moment to respond - having tried on two laptops, the normal control interface seems to simply not work if using a touchpad. NO combination of touch, tap, click, drag allows the vectoring to work. The only combination that seems to work is the Ctrl - Right click (from memory) to draw a free vector line. That isn't a huge issue if you have a mouse handy but it might be worthy of developer investigation at some point.

Funnily enough - dragging a strip down to TWR was something I tried as well, and using the touchpad to drag it gave a very strange message (it wasn't the timely handover message, something different about strips), whereas using a mouse to do the same operation worked fine.

Essentially what I'm saying is that I suspect laptop users are having a tough time right now, it almost feels like Qt5 is not translating the touchpad to mouse like other programs do.
Thanks again for your help. When I get a bit better I'll be back asking the best way to make a start in the MP world!