My first thought was, “How many people have a dual seat home cockpit?”
Then I thought, “Maybe the request has to do with shifting the PIC from the left seat to the right seat.”
This was an interesting read.
Hi there Alan
Hope you are doing well, intresting as it is on this puzzle you gave us
I tried a thing or two concearning this topic i made a video about what i did
But first i must say this about my use of the sim
In general options camera setting i have set home cockpit mode to on always and atm camerashake to on
Dont know if this influence but i expect any will do
Dev mode on as for it is usefull to reload airplane in tools section aircraft selector, if make modification to the used airplane without restarting the sim
Also in dev mode i use debug > aircraft > camera blend
This will give info on which guid nr you are looking at.
Further on the own airplane camera file when open this, use search for the last four digits
of the guid to locate it in this camera.cfg.
I will return here later on but first this
Remember the view by default ctrl+1 ctrl+2 etc
Under these ctrl+ is a double ctrl+1 is normal view but press it again and suddenly you are looking at
the instruments, now here is the trick they both have their own guid
This makes it possible to give them the same point of focus to so let say outside in the distance
but not centered in the middle on the screen
In the video i made i relay the center slightly to the right and a bit downward
I do not have big tv screen
But explore with guid initialzoom to aquire rightfull zoom to fit right perspective
Than with pbh find angle in heading which fit screen on both guids heading to aquire same focuspoint so when switching between the twp ctrl+1 setting distance and zoom stay the sam outside the aircraft, which i name the world as is.
Now all you have to do is determine height and right/left offset for the cockpint dashboard
And also bank angle if desired but these last are different from eachother in the 2 guid camera settings
Now you have two eyepoints instead of one so when copilot takes over make the switch and view through his eyes from captn seat.
Hope this may contribute to what you need
Sebastiaan
Ps i made a very easy and inexpensive diy to make tool with tape and paper to reference point on the screen to where things i want but if you dont want to stick on the screen make a threadcross to pinpoint for use to allign
Thanks for you interest and effort Sebastiaan.
I think I have probably failed to help you see what I mean.
Your video shows how to swap the view from Pilot VFR to Co-Pilot.
That is not what I am trying to achieve.
I need the full instrument panel in view on a 55 inch TV screen but able to move the outside view left so that the pilot in the left seat has the correct view.
(I am not concerned about a Co-Pilot view).
I have made a couple of new images that hopefully show it better.
The first image is how it looks in MSFS when the instrument panel is FULL centre on a 55 inch TV screen.
The second image is the same Instrument panel position, but the outside view has been moved to the left. (This is a photoshop image because it is not currently possible to get this view in MSFS2020)
Below is my video toggling these two images.
I have edited my previous post from June 2023 to avoid confusion.
Cheers
Alan
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I also voted yes, because I want the ability to change the view frustum more generally (and have multiple different view frustums for multi-monitor) and this would be a step towards it.
@SeaCelery810439 had posited a question (now deleted) which I was answering, so I’ll let it stand here. In real life, there would be a noticeable shift in perspective by moving your head even a short distance towards the actual center of the cockpit (assuming the nose wheel is on the runway centerline), but only in the immediate near distance. Further away, both pilots would see the centerline more directly in front of them, because stereoscopic vision is less effective the further away something is. Our brains process the images from our eyes so that it doesn’t feel like the world becomes 2D at a distance, but effectively it does; other cues such as motion parallax come into play to make the distant world feel 3-dimensional. This is also why both pilots would see the runway as being directly ahead of them on approach, but at touchdown they would see the runway centerline aligned with the nose wheel.
While humans can perceive and experience a 3D projection on a 2D plane, it can’t replicate this particular effect, so if the centerline is to the right of your seating position at near distance, it will appear to be similarly offset at long distance as well. In commercial simulators a cross-cockpit collimated display can replicate the RL effect, because all of the light from the display is focussed at infinity by a spherical mirror and your eyes effectively focus through the mirror surface. You can’t do that with a regular monitor or projection screen.
The nearest we can get to the RL effect is with a VR headset (or 3D-capable monitor) but this suffers from the vergence problem that while you get stereoscopic images and hence depth perception, your eye still has to focus on a near plane (the screen) to see what your brain perceives as distant objects, and this is one of the roots of the discomfort and nausea that some people experience in VR, and it’s also why your eyes get tired quickly; some are concerned that long-term use of HMDs may cause eye problems.
Perhaps some kind of dynamic image shifting based on distance to an object would be ideal here, so at a distance the runway on approach is centered in your view, but by the time you get to the runway the centerline is offset as it would be in IRL. But I suspect that would be very complex to implement.
At the end of the day, having a choice is always good, so I voted for that.
I think now i get what you mean @FearlessSwan217
So if i understand correctly looking at your video and name it you want the instrument panel to be steady centered non moving on screen, like fs9 and fsx in we had the ability to undock the instrumentspanel separate window overlayed on outside looking view shifted to the left but in this version of flightsimulator rendered as one screen without the ability of moving it horizontally left or right and still be fully rendered.
Let me Rephrase in other words
So it would be nice to have a function that lock the instrument panel to the center screen fit on what eversize it need to be, but needs a lock and unlock to adjust its position to how and where ever you want it set on the screen as long as you have the controle over it to move it as if 2d flat left right up and down as in horizontally and vertically rendered as all in one.
This would be nice if they could add this under a separate function of homecockpit to make extra functionality with it
I have seen your videos with full cockpit love your setup but it is unclear to me
May i ask why you need this?
Sebastiaan
Thanks for considering my deleted post - after reading in its final version I thought it had a little disrespectful tone, which I didn’t intend. Anyway I do not experience a lack of visual realism on approaches, w.r.t. the angle of runway centerline. If I carefully slew mode at say a mile from runway threshold to what visually looks like exact center of runway from left seat, then translate to right seat, at a distance I should not (and I don’t) see any difference in the angle of the centerline but if I do the same while on the runway I do indeed see the angle changing as I translate.
What really piqued my interest was one post mentioning use of separate windows for the instrument panel. I used to do that with previous versions and find it to be far superior to a single window display. Put instruments on separate
display below the outside view. Hoping for 4 years that Asibo might return that function to FS but don’t expect they will.
No, I don’t think they will. The focus is 100% on the virtual cockpit for interaction. To be honest, the reason FSX (and P3D) still supports 2D instrument panels is that before the virtual cockpit, that’s all there was. Older aircraft usually came with 2D panels because they originated in the pre-VC era. Then instrument pop-outs became the norm, so you wouldn’t get whole instrument panels, you’d get individual pieces. Now in MSFS we can only pop out the glass displays.
I get it. Most people don’t want to do this, and aircraft developers probably wouldn’t want to put in the time and effort for a small minority of customers even if the capability existed.
For those users who want it, there’s Air Manager. It does a creditable job, but it does rely on panels being available for the aircraft you’re flying. The Simstrumentation guys and a few others do great work making panels and providing them to the community, but there are loads of add-on aircraft and the chance of panels being available for most of them is fairly small. Even a well-respected aircraft like the JustFlight BAE-146 doesn’t have any Air Manager panels (I’m still considering doing some myself).
A simple solution would be to do what P3D does - let you create any number of views from any mix of cameras (and define your own view frustums) including a ‘VC-only’ view that doesn’t render the outside world and so is FPS-friendly, and place them anywhere. Then, with a set of camera presets (or a tool like Chaseplane) you can have a set of views onto instrument panels that you place onto another display. Add touch support to the sim (it currently has no touch support at all, if you can believe that) and you’re good to go.
Needless to say, I don’t expect that to ever happen. MSFS is a mass-market sim and the market it aims at is not really bothered about any of this stuff. That’s Product Development 101, and I get it, but it’s still very disappointing.
Anyway… off topic. So I’ll stop 
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Please dont stop, it is always fascinated reading your posts
On my other sim on 2 pc with the beamer and 10 screen setup i use 2 license of the sim one for use with outside view with no instruments on a selfmade bended boardscreen
and one for use of instruments connected through your controls software, and or wideview
But mostly YC
This setup i use for airliners but i always will go back to my oldest pc flying my C172sp-Classic
Which i tweaked in its camera and flight_model.cfg and although it has fps sometimes under 20fps
I be able to maintain smoothness with it by adapt viewpoint and zoom makes it very relaxing on flight
In this simulator.
In that matter i hope that this topic can be supported and heard by Asobo and they give the ability to shift the total rendered plane with enviroment together.
while already being baffeld with what they have accomplished so far.
Thanks for all the replies, comments, and suggestions.
I will try to address them all in this one response.
Sebastiaan. My 2 seat, dual control, fully enclosed cockpit gives a more realistic experience than sitting in front of a single screen (or even a triple screen desktop set up with a single seat).
I often fly with visitors and friends and I sit in the co-pilot seat (as instructor).
My Instrument panel is on a physical dashboard - using Air Manager instruments.
so the MSFS instrument panel view on the front screen is hidden by my physical dashboard.
With my two seat arrangement, I need to set up the MSFS view so that the interior views of the plane are exactly centre of the cockpit… eg. with the left and right doors on the left and right screen.
Below is a link to some pictures of my cockpit build that should help.
Sometimes my flying friends are real pilots. When in my SIM cockpit they try to line up for a take off as they do in a real plane, it is very noticeable for them that the alignment is “wrong”. On takeoff the plane appears to them to be yawing to the left.
Once we are flying above 1000 feet it is not so noticeable.
But when they setup for a landing as they do in a real plane, they end up off-line to the right.
The following pictures are copied from my first post on this topic.
@FlyerOneZero explained it pretty well. The only comment I would add to to that is that I have created a view in MSFS that does achieve a real pilot view in the left seat. That view achieves what I want for takeoff, approach and landing.
And it does not affect the general flying either… if fact I think it looks better because there is not that appearance of the view being slightly offset (yaw).
In this view, no features of the plane itself are visible. We can only see the outside world.
The instrument panel that we can see is the physical instrument panel in my cockpit. I showed that view in a previous post here:
@SeaCelery810439 I actually saw your deleted comment (in history).
No problem. I did not think it had a disrespectful tone. I am just not sure that you have understood the issue properly. It depends what you mean by “translate to the right seat”.
Are you talking about translating the view on the MSFS monitor?
My cockpit actually has 2 seats.
If you revisit the very first post at the top of this topic, it explains the issue in detail there.
Yes. That would be great. I have not actually seen P3D in action.
You may be right that MSFS will not do anything similar, but as Xplane found out, you are only the best until someone else comes up with something better.
I am looking forward to MSFS 2024, but for my Cockpit, if P3D came out with a new version that gave us similar world graphics as MSFS I might spend my money there - (to get the camera view ability they offer).
Keep it up. You’re not off topic.
FearlessSwan217, what you want is properly called an “Asymmetric frustum”, where the view is pointing in a certain direction, but the centerline of that view is not through the center of the monitor. For example, you might have a view that would be defined from 34° left of center to 64° right of center, and 29° up to 44° down.
Unfortunately, though it has been requested many times, the typical response from Asobo is to lump any such request in with “multimonitor”, and call it done.
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Thanks for this beauttyfull inside and explanation of your thoughts and personal devellopment
In the use of your simulator it is overwelming and complex to see, and gives me the picture on where the sims limitation and boundaries are in such complex projects.
For me it is not easy to replicate your situation for i do not own a television screen that big.
and so i can not related secure enough to the zoom factor outside and relation cockpit instruments
fit for your 55inch
Sebastiaan
Thanks for that “Asymetric frustrum” definition Wayne.
At risk of duplicating what I have previously posted, I will make one more confirmation of what this wish topic is about.
The following image is the MSFS Default VFR pilot view with the pilot eye centred on the screen.
The second image is the view we want with the cockpit centred on the screen but the runway pointing in the same direction as in the first image - toward a pilot sitting on the left side of the TV sceen.
And here is a video (updated) showing the runway being translated into the correct position for VFR pilot view while the instrument panel (and cockpit) remain central on the screen.
The Asobo staff are very busy with so many requests that hey may not have time to fully appreciate the value of this request.
If just one of them had the chance to actually sit in my cockpit and see first-hand what we are talking about, I think there would be a big “Ahaah” moment.
Anyway, thanks for your detailed explanation, It is a great contribution to the topic at this stage.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
A couple of years later. . . . . . . >
I realise that my video may have confused some about what I am asking.
So I have updated my video above to show the runway / outside world being adjusted to the correct position while the instrument panel (and cockpit) remain central on the screen.
++++++++++++++++++++++
Regards
Alan
Alan,
The asymmetric frustum IS exactly what you’re looking for. You want an eyepoint properly located in the cockpit, looking in the right direction, but with the left and right side angles defined to take in the whole panel without distortion. You may be able to work this out in windowed mode, by making the center window wider than the screen, and shifting the whole window to the left.
Using BeardyBrun’s ‘Default Pilot View’ as a starting point, I scaled the image so that the far end of the runway was centered with the eyepoint, and the forward panel stretched completely from side to side. The eyepoint is shifted left and up relative to the center of the screen, so extra pixels need to be drawn to the left and above, with that entire window expanded and shifted to place the center of the view in the correct place on-screen. Yes, it wastes a lot of pixels, but that’s what MSFS can do NOW.
since the instrument panel and the rendering plane are parallel, there will be no geometric distortion. You will also have the correct parallax rendered for any non-flat items, such as instrument bezels and knobs, when viewed from the correct eyepoint. It will look odd from the copilot seat.
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Very interesting. I’ve noticed I often feel some sight picture weirdness while landing planes in the sim that I’ve flown in real life, and I always just chalked it up to cockpit/airframe geometry differences. But I think you’re on to something here!
If I’m understanding this correctly, it doesn’t just affect someone using a physical sim pit, but would also affect anyone using the standard single monitor setup; and the wider the cockpit (the larger the aircraft being simulated) the more impact this affect would have.
Hi. I am not sure about that.
Anyone using a single monitor set up would likely be using the Default VFR Pilot view for take-off, normal flight and landing, and as such this problem would not be affecting them on the same way. They would be sitting in a seat in the center of their Monitor so the pilot eye view would be exactly correct. You just have some of your instrument panel hidden off the right side of the monitor.
MSFS 2020 Default VFR Pilot view
When you translate your view of the SIM cockpit so the instrument panel is in the middle of your monitor, the runways is still in the middle with the pilot looking over the middle of the dashboard (even though that is not the normal view for a pilot in the left seat of a real plane).
But it is in this that causes you to see a skewed view if you are sitting on the left side of the TV screen.
It is a little hard to visualize it just with these images, but if you can imagine sitting in the left seat in this cockpit (move your seat to the left) you will notice that everything is “off”.
(Some of my pictures earlier in this topic help).
Cheers.
There’s nothing wrong with the default view in normal circumstances. This topic is about wanting to display the entire width of the cockpit but sit facing the left hand side of the screen, which is very much an edge case.
It also seems a bit self defeating, because while the solutions discussed would make a correct image for the left seat, it would be very wrong for the right. There’s absolutely no way to accomplish this in a way which works simultaneously for two people sitting at the same screen.
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Thanks again Wayne. Yes I understand you. But you are not suggesting it is possible with the current MSFS… are you?
But I am already in Windowed mode… with three windows, front, left and right.
Whatever zoom adjustment is made to one window happens to them all.
It is impossible to do any zooming to achieve the view required for the front TV without messing up the other windows left and right.
If you have seen pictures of my cockpit you will know what I mean.
The following post was about a different issue that I have now solved but it shows the three TV screens in relation to my seats and the physical dashboard/instrument panel.
… … … … …
In regard to your following suggestion… … … …
When you say you “scaled” the image, I can only presume you mean with graphic design software. You haven’t done it in an actual SIM with a multi-monitor set up have you?
I can only envisage everything apart from the front screen being totally distorted and out of place if you try.
Like I say, I understand your “asymmetric frustum” concept.
If, when or until Asobo come up with such controls I have to be as satisfied as I am with what I have got. My set up is pretty darned immersive as it is, beyond the usual distractions of a desktop monitor or three, so I’ll just have to keep things in perspective.
I have my triple screen alignments fairly well perfect - and I can translate, rotate, and tilt the whole 3D picture in unison for any view I want… except for being able to manipulate the direction the view is pointing - with the centerline of that view not through the center of the monitor (as you explained).
(It is just a shame such a great program like MSFS2020 did not include this feature from the outset.)
Thanks again for your input @bTdWolf . If I have missed your meaning is some way, I beg your pardon.
Regards
Alan
Thanks @BeardyBrun
To be clear, there is no expectation that the correct view for a pilot in the left seat will work simultaneously for the person in the right seat. I ALWAYS get my visitors and friends to take the pilot seat.
That is where the real experience is.
I always sit in the right seat (as instructor).
It does not matter if the view is off for me - and I do not mention it.
The view from the right seat will not affect my ability to instruct the person in the pilot seat or fly a charter for a tourist sitting in the left seat as a passenger.
As long as my guests have a good time is all that matters, then when I am on my own I sit in the left seat where the view is correct.
We accept that a simulator has limitations. Not being able to adjust the frustum need not be one of them.
Kind regards.
I still enjoy myself with this topic made my sim fit for this on scaled size for i have no 55inch tv screen setup.
But i repositioned 22inch monitor as front and 2 19inch monitors as side left and right
And set them up quickly with experimental screens
And although i know i cannot achive wanted as asked by topic author, i would like to share some
findings
Also some pictures
Biggest issue in this topic is imho our individual set of eyes and mostly adapted to life but in the Netherlands we drive on the right side so we need to be aware for possible threads on our leftside
and probably have better periphal sight on the right
I cannot tell about left driving country but i guess it works the other way around
Also i know it is not about driving a car but the similair thing is they start both on the ground and when the route happens with no hazards they end the ride there aswell save and sound.
What im trying to say is eyes are used to where they look with focus on where danger is most expected.
My photos of the setup and as explained by you said multiple times not fit for a dual seat
I have manouvred the airplane from left of the centerline to right of th centerline and the thing is
In dualseat you need two sets of eyes and still it is not correct views.
But i searched a bit further in cameras.cfg of different airplane and in the lines above
where it says ≈==========cameradefinition============
You see [ views ] see photo
I suspect this is the line we are looking for but modifiying this numbers have no effect unfortunatly
(In fs9 and fsx i used wideview, and i could modify the world with this for each window, by ading these lines together with pbh )
I think it is a unactivated line here and i believe it is there to shift the world below us to correct the changes we make with or without initial set of the airplane to get, separate the world from the airplane.
Also i think its this way for a reason for possible unwanted bug it may cause to excisting devellopment.
Well so far, unfortunatly not so good.
Sebastiaan
Looks good Sebastian. You will get more enjoyment with that set up.
Yes. I can get that view by manoeuvring the airplane on the ground. But, of course, we want the airplane in the middle of the runway. Look under the airplane and get the wheels set up in the middle on the runway lines… … then check what the view looks like in the cockpit window.
As previously mentioned:
You wrote:
Interesting thought… … … but I don’t think it affects anything to do with this issue.
Interesting again. But I doubt changing these CFG files will work.
(I would not mess around with them too much or at least back them up before editing).
I use the camera CFG files to fine-tune the 0-9 custom cockpit cameras for some views that are hard to get.
But we need the “asymmetrical frustum” adjustment as explained by @bTdWolf
Happy flying.
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