Handling incorrect state of "sim" vs "controls"?

[pilotjohn]

How are folks handling launching the sim into a state that does not agree with current control settings? Large, full-motion flight sims will pause the sim until you put all switches etc. into the right state for the loaded scenario. Are there any plans for such functionality, or is this up to us to implement (through some Lua for example)?

I'm building a rig (in preparation for MSFS2020), with a custom panel that I expect to have lots on "ON/OFF" style toggles. This means that the toggle state may not be in the position that the simulator is in when loaded (e.g. battery toggle is on, but should be off). In large flight sims this is handled by a pause and prompt to get the controls into the right state. Otherwise, if for example, you're starting some in-flight challenge, and everything is off, you'll be in for a surprise.

[Thomas Richter]

Hi,

FSUIPC doesn't know your hardware and so it doesn't know any state of your used hardware. If you use i.e. Joystick controller based hardware like Bodnar cards then those would have to raise events as FSUIPC doesn't poll constant controllers. So it depends on the software/driver that the hardware uses to communicate with FSUIPC/WidFS.

Thomas

[pilotjohn]

45 minutes ago, Thomas Richter said:

Hi,

FSUIPC doesn't know your hardware and so it doesn't know any state of your used hardware. If you use i.e. Joystick controller based hardware like Bodnar cards then those would have to raise events as FSUIPC doesn't poll constant controllers. So it depends on the software/driver that the hardware uses to communicate with FSUIPC/WidFS.

Thomas

So are you saying that if a button is in an "ON" state, FSUIPC won't trigger an "ON" event unless there's a state change (e.g. that button goes from OFF to ON)? If so, that's mostly good, meaning that the aircraft's state won't change unless that button is touched first. I suppose this would be fine and  there's not need to get the panels into the "correct" state.

[Pete Dowson]

2 hours ago, pilotjohn said:

How are folks handling launching the sim into a state that does not agree with current control settings? Large, full-motion flight sims will pause the sim until you put all switches etc. into the right state for the loaded scenario. Are there any plans for such functionality, or is this up to us to implement (through some Lua for example)?

Who is  "are there any plans ..." addressed to?

You must realise that there's a huge variety of hardware folks use, with an equally huge variety of interfaces and driving software. How is any "functionality" to be engineered for all that when it isn't known how to detect all such switch states?

No, this sort of thing has to be planned and implemented according to the specific build of your cockpit.

In my case I always load up "cold & dark", and when ending the previous session i always turn all the hardware switches and selectors to match. It isn't too hard -- make a checklist if you wish, but I always know how they should look so it has fast become semi-automatic for me.

I did think once of programming it, but it simply isn't worth the hassle, especially if like me you have a real hodge podge of hardware from different sources connecting in different ways to different networked computers using different drivers. And much of it handled directly by ProSim rather than FSUIPC in any case.

Pete

 

[pilotjohn]

1 hour ago, Pete Dowson said:

Who is  "are there any plans ..." addressed to?

You must realise that there's a huge variety of hardware folks use, with an equally huge variety of interfaces and driving software. How is any "functionality" to be engineered for all that when it isn't known how to detect all such switch states?

No, this sort of thing has to be planned and implemented according to the specific build of your cockpit.

In my case I always load up "cold & dark", and when ending the previous session i always turn all the hardware switches and selectors to match. It isn't too hard -- make a checklist if you wish, but I always know how they should look so it has fast become semi-automatic for me.

I did think once of programming it, but it simply isn't worth the hassle, especially if like me you have a real hodge podge of hardware from different sources connecting in different ways to different networked computers using different drivers. And much of it handled directly by ProSim rather than FSUIPC in any case.

Pete

 

I figured this was likely not on your roadmap, but maybe someone already hacked together something. I think with event based triggering it's less of (or not) an issue. With generic buttons and switches this seems semi-feasible, but you would need a well defined mapping from event sent to sim, to state of switches/system, and that will get unwieldy. This is a nice feature in large sims though. 🙂