2 hours ago, zmak said:

A car isn't 3 dimensional. There is never a time you wouldn't look into a turn in a car. Flying however being yanked away from your instrument panel can be disastrous 

Yanked away, what 90 degrees suddenly?  Come on, have a little imagination!  And yes, an assignable cancellation/snap return view solves your worst concern in this regard.

Not sure what you mean. doesn't need to b 90 degrees, even 10 degrees will totally screw up an instrument approach.

even trying to keep a straight and level turn on a sunny day is difficult when your reference to the horizon is yanked away  and your now looking out into space at angle that you can not reference back to your instruments because...well....you cant see them !!

Never mind zmak!  Think DEAD ZONE!

22 hours ago, Noel said:

the more the yoke is turned the farther the turned view, 

As the yoke returns to neutral so does the look.

So, if you're slipping, you have to look sideways instead of straight ahead where you are actually going and need to look?

This is silly...  use head-tracking and just look wherever you want to look anytime you want to look.

Right now I use mouse-look.  If my hand can move the mouse, so can computer code, and it can be done 'just right', just like my hand does now.   Of course you need to build in scaling, dead-zones, snap-back to forward VC look capabilities, etc.  But as i say, if I can do this w/ my hand this can be duplicated w/ some code and can basically be synced steering on the ground or in the air, and even those two attributes can contribute to which scaling applies.   You might code it to ignore 'steering-look' if there is > x amount of slip, etc.   You  might code it to ignore 'steering-look' when the degree of turn is < x, etc.  I'm sure someone with a little imagination and trial and error could improve on mouse-look.

I think ChasePlane (CP) does and it's a great utility for switching camera angles/positions. Excellent for setting up VC views and there are dozens of preconfigured cameras available from the community which can be downloaded directly in CP with preview!

I still don't quite understand why TrackIR is not an acceptable solution to the problem of "I want to look in the direction I'm going..." (if my understanding of the problem of this topic is somewhat correct).

With TrackIR you just turn your head and look. It's that simple, and it is a very flexible and natural solution...

13 minutes ago, JacquesBrel said:

I still don't quite understand why TrackIR is not an acceptable solution to the problem of "I want to look in the direction I'm going..." (if my understanding of the problem of this topic is somewhat correct).

With TrackIR you just turn your head and look. It's that simple, and it is a very flexible and natural solution...

Depends, if your flying long haul then TRACK IR can be annoying.. But if your in heavy weather looking for a remote strip in Alaska then it's a winner. 

38 minutes ago, JacquesBrel said:

I still don't quite understand why TrackIR is not an acceptable solution to the problem of "I want to look in the direction I'm going..." (if my understanding of the problem of this topic is somewhat correct).

With TrackIR you just turn your head and look. It's that simple, and it is a very flexible and natural solution...

Thanks I'll look a little more into it.  I was hoping to avoid adding any new hardware, headsets, anything like that, but still it sounds like it might be worth a look.

24 minutes ago, zmak said:

Depends, if your flying long haul then TRACK IR can be annoying..

I can see that for sure because quite frankly I'm always bouncing in and out of my seat leaving the room, and come back in 20 minutes to an hour to do whatever needs done.  I use FSCaptain.

55 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

I think ChasePlane (CP) does and it's a great utility for switching camera angles/positions. Excellent for setting up VC views and there are dozens of preconfigured cameras available from the community which can be downloaded directly in CP with preview!

Thank you Matthew I will look into it for sure.  The other thing I would appreciate is the ability when in spot view to zoom the outside while not having that simultaneously zoom the aircraft.  That used to be present in a former version of FSX where I think you could hold the Ctrl key down and zoom the outside only.

On 2017-07-24 at 10:16 AM, Noel said:

Thanks zmak, I googled that and ended up reading that its motion is too robotic, whereas Ezdok 2.0 is more natural, so at least there are some options.

Totally untrue. Opus is far better than ezdok in my opinion. Especially for realistic weather influenced camera shake effects.

56 minutes ago, Noel said:

Thank you Matthew I will look into it for sure.  The other thing I would appreciate is the ability when in spot view to zoom the outside while not having that simultaneously zoom the aircraft.  That used to be present in a former version of FSX where I think you could hold the Ctrl key down and zoom the outside only.

With ChasePlane you can configure zoom on a per camera basis.

ChasePlane also has camera shake effects for turbulence, engine thrust, ground speed etc. It is really very powerful and convincing.

I setup a wing view, behind the engine of the PMDG 747 v3 which "shakes" depending on engine thrust, really impressive effect when your lined up on the runway for takeoff and hit the TOGO button for takeoff thrust, view starts subtly shaking as the 747 thunders down the runway.

Matthew is ChasePlane buggy per se?  I'm currently using P3D 3.0.  After my current box dies, and I just replaced the motherboard w/ a refurbished one of the same model ASUS P979X WS, I will go ahead and buy P3D V4.x.   I have very little bug tolerance, and everything has been rock solid and predictable now for years and I value that a whole lot, so I'm basically very cautious on bringing something I'm not yet familiar with.

4 minutes ago, Noel said:

Matthew is ChasePlane buggy per se?  I'm currently using P3D 3.0.  After my current box dies, and I just replaced the motherboard w/ a refurbished one of the same model ASUS P979X WS, I will go ahead and buy P3D V4.x.   I have very little bug tolerance, and everything has been rock solid and predictable now for years and I value that a whole lot, so I'm basically very cautious on bringing something I'm not yet familiar with.

I've only used ChasePlane with P3D v4.   I think its still in Beta so your threshold for "bugs" may be exceeded by this.  

BUT I've had very few problems with it... IMHO it's well worth the money even though it's still in beta.

The ability to set up cameras on a per aircraft basis and quickly switch between those cameras using keys or joystick/yoke buttons is fantastic.

Eg I've set up about 5 cameras for the VC of the PMDG 747 and being able to quickly switch between them using the 1,2,3,4,5 keys on the keyboard is a blessing.

Not to mention the various "eye-candy" cameras I've set up for the external views, like that behind the engine view I mentioned in my previous post.

This Youtube video by Matt Davies (author of PTA) is a good review of ChasePlane!