Is it possible to assign mousewheel to control knobs in the VC etc? At the moment I think my mouse zooms in and out.

Ryan,

 

I think that would be a great idea. Controls are a little hard to manage as they are and this would, I think, make them more intuitive. There are several different ways of operating controls in X-Plane and it is probably a function built into each individual aircraft.

 

John

Hmmm... yeah I thought the clickspots were bad in FSX with TIR... in XP they are almost impossible. Sometimes the + and - doesn't make any logical sense (sometimes they are reversed)... and in turbulence basically I can't click right on the spot. Ideally I'd have a hardware panel with tactile feedback. But that's not feasible right now.

It's not possible at the moment, and it's a much discussed topic with people converting from MSFS to the XP world.

 

Laminar Research has been staunchly against it so far, stating that it's not natural to use a mousewheel to adjust knobs when it's more frequently used to manipulate "scrolling" views (eg: your browser window), and thus should be used for views only. Plus, they state that many Mac users don't have a scrollwheel mouse, and such changes would break their cross-platform compatibility.

 

It's a disappointing nuance of the X-Plane world.

 

(I believe 3rd party aircraft devs could implement scrollwheel knobs in some form or fashion, but the base simulator does not afford that capability)

That's dumb. Mouse wheel for me Is closer to turning a knob than clicking a knob to simulate a turn lol.

 

The click spots are horrible in the stock aircraft VC's.

It's not possible at the moment, and it's a much discussed topic with people converting from MSFS to the XP world.

 

Laminar Research has been staunchly against it so far, stating that it's not natural to use a mousewheel to adjust knobs when it's more frequently used to manipulate "scrolling" views (eg: your browser window), and thus should be used for views only. Plus, they state that many Mac users don't have a scrollwheel mouse, and such changes would break their cross-platform compatibility.

 

It's a disappointing nuance of the X-Plane world.

 

Never mind people converting from MSFS... I've never owned or flown it other than briefly at a friend's place, so I had no preconceived notion how it "should" be done. And yet, scroll wheel to turn knobs was so much more obvious than the manipulator gymnastics X-Plane uses. My main computers have been Macs with scroll wheel mice (or touch equivalents) for over 10 years. Many Mac users also don't have extended keyboards with keypads, but they didn't worry about that too much when they added the (very useful) Quick Look feature.

 

In a blog post one of the developers said scroll-to-turn-knob is bad from a user interface and immersion perspective. My rebuttal to that is that you can only "immerse" so far if you don't have dedicated flight instrument panels, and the click-drag or click-hold is *worse* since you don't do that to knobs anywhere in real life. Any worries about accidentally scroll-turning the wrong knob are easily solved by requiring you click on the knob to temporarily "lock" the scroll action to it, then click again when done to unlock. Also, you're flying heavy metal by yourself with no copilot to dial these in for you, so not only is your sim-workload already higher than in real life, the click-drags or click-holds adds far too much time, long enough that ATC starts repeating instructions at me.

 

I've dabbled in XPlane for almost a decade, before finally jumping in whole hog with XP 10 (i.e. got good enough hardware). It's been my only civilian flightsim. This frustrates me enough that I usually bypass the cockpit knobs completely and type them in on my iPhone using the X-Mapper Pro app, further taking me out of the all-important immersion. If it annoys me, imagine what potential MSFS converts must feel.

More info here for the "manipulator gymnastics". Hehe, that made me chuckle! :biggrin:

 

http://developer.x-plane.com/2012/04/manipulators-and-the-scroll-wheel/

 

Rhydian

Mouse wheel for me Is closer to turning a knob than clicking a knob to simulate a turn

 

And for me its the same fingers as if I were turning knobs. Gotta be an Apple mind-set!

This is just wrong in my opinion... from the blog:

 

Making the mouse wheel zoom and manipulate (e.g. if you are over a knob it manipulates the knob, otherwise it zooms) risks surprising results. A user who wants to zoom might accidentally “bump” a cockpit knob, something that’s pretty frightening to a real pilot."

 

What's more frightening is tuning the damn radios on Pilot Edge.... one milimeter to the right and I'm back on the minus direction. Even when pausing Track IR these clickspots are miniscule. Just make an option to disable mouse zoom and enable clickspots. Done.

 

If we make the option a preference (e.g optional mouse-wheel on knobs) so few users will enable it that authors won’t be consistent in adding support to their cockpits, and the system will never get momentum. (We can’t just add “mouse wheel automatically” because the sim doesn’t know how much one click of the wheel should change a given dataref.)

 

In a world of eye candy and virtual cockpit users, this is so far from the truth. I would bet that most XP10 users don't have hardware to manipulate their freqs. It's common sense to use a mouse wheel to turn knobs. You have one large clickspot for the outer and inner knobs that the user can turn with the mouse knob, up is plus down is minus.

 

I like the night scene in XP10, but this DAMN no-mouse wheel thing is extremely frustrating... I'm glad I'm not alone in that thinking.

As an update to my post above^ I've only now discovered the mouse button hold and drag feature. This is worlds better than the left click right click but its only implemented in certain planes... like the altimeter setting on the Sbach 300... If I could do this for all radios it would be wonderful.

Ryan, I feel your pain.

 

This is how I addressed the issue. One of these can be used for many different things, but works very well when you need to tune radios, heading, speed, v/s bugs, etc. What's nice...no soldering.

 

http://www.leobodnar...oducts/BU0836X/

 

To go along with this you will need some of these.

 

http://www.ebay.ca/i...=item51a79ed8ae

 

You could also add some push buttons or toggle switches, make a mini panel to your liking. It's easy to configure in Xplane, no different than any other USB device. No more fiddling around with the mouse.

 

Might give you some ideas?

 

Glen

Yeah thanks

 

Well I stumbled upon this site... which has a free comm1/2 stack for use on iphone or ipad...

https://www.remoteflight.net/remote-flight-comm

 

Ive got IP5 so the free version works alright. Oddly enough, even the click spot on this app isn't well designed. But so far it's a lot better than the stupid clickspots in XP10.

 

There's another app but they want $20 for it... no way...

 

http://www.ipobjects.com/products/airtrack/comms

Thats ridiculous. I use scroll even for switches, in both FSX and DCS.

Ryan, I feel your pain.

 

This is how I addressed the issue. One of these can be used for many different things, but works very well when you need to tune radios, heading, speed, v/s bugs, etc. What's nice...no soldering.

 

http://www.leobodnar...oducts/BU0836X/

 

To go along with this you will need some of these.

 

http://www.ebay.ca/i...=item51a79ed8ae

 

You could also add some push buttons or toggle switches, make a mini panel to your liking. It's easy to configure in Xplane, no different than any other USB device. No more fiddling around with the mouse.

 

Might give you some ideas?

 

Glen

 

Very interesting! But there seems to be an issue where X-Plane won't pick up on variable rotary signal speeds from this board: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=44196&p=595112

 

If I'm reading it right, this means there's no advantage to using a rotary on this board, over assigning a knob's increase/decrease function to a custom keystroke or joystick button (in the respective Advanced tabs).

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Very interesting! But there seems to be an issue where X-Plane won't pick up on variable rotary signal speeds from this board: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=44196&p=595112

 

If I'm reading it right, this means there's no advantage to using a rotary on this board, over assigning a knob's increase/decrease function to a custom keystroke or joystick button (in the respective Advanced tabs).

 

Thoughts?

 

Hmmm... Difficult one. I'm going to buy an E37 dual concentric rotary encoder and a BU0836X board from Leo Bodnar soon. I'll have to see what's up with this. I find it odd, because Emuteq sell a g1000 using x-plane software that relies on the same hardware and presmably functions without problems.

 

http://www.emuteq.com/G1000.html

 

That post is from March 2010 and I wonder what he got banned for?

 

Rhydian