Two issues regarding smoke systems. I am attempting to make a video with the DC Designs Stearman PT-17 which has a smoke system. The smoke is fine when flying “live”. However when using “Replay” to create different views of the aerobatics, the smoke is not working. There is no longer smoke coming out of the plane that follows the path of the plane. There is a smoke stream in the air, but it’s not “attached” to the plane.
The second issue is that I can not find a toggle smoke on/off in the Controls Options. I have to turn it on/off by going into the cockpit and actually flipping the smoke switch.
Are these known issues to be fixed, or do I need to report them to Asobo? I’m thinking that surely I am overlooking something, knowing that MSFS has been out for 18 months.
There are many things with the sim that aren’t as you would expect, particularly after so much time has passed.
There are a number of controls throughout the sim’s aircraft systems that do not have an associated keybind.
If you’re a PC user and wish to explore that there are some options. I don’t tap into them myself, so I can’t give you specifics, but someone else might step in here and give you the lowdown. A forum search might reveal them, too.
I own Flight Control Replay and will give that a try to see if I can do smoke while doing replay. Otherwise I guess I will have to do “live” recording if I want smoke to appear in my video. Don’t get me started on what’s not working 1.5 years into production!
The Stearman smoke is a third party add-on feature specific to that plane, so there probably is no official control option for the smoke system. You might be able to use another third party tool like Spad.Next to bind to the event particular to that aircraft, if it’s accessible.
And the replay tool is like a Work-In-Progress/beta feature. It doesn’t surprise me it doesn’t work with custom third party features like this.
You probably won’t see Asobo address any of this until there’s some sort of “Airshow DLC” where an official plane has a smoke system, and other players are expecting to see others’ smoke in formation multiplayer. There’s a smoke switch on one of the T-6 Texans in the Reno pack, but it’s inop, and that makes me real sad.
@NixonRedgrave is correct, unfortunately effects do not show up in either multiplayer or replays at this time. There is now a smoke switch variable in the sim, so eventually it will be possible to bind a button to the smoke, but as far as I’m aware at this time it’s one of those variables that is there, but non-functional.
There is a freeware recorder for MSFS that records your flight and does show effects, so that might be of use to you. It’s available at flightsim.to.
As soon as these things become active, I will update the Stearman ( and others ) to match
Here is a video showing how one developer got around the issue of not having a controller switch for smoke. They assigned it to a rarely used light switch. https://youtu.be/JS_1Fbs3oWo
As for the issue of replay not showing smoke and other effects, I will create a post in the “wish list” section.
Thanks to all who have responded with good info in this thread! :o)
Yeah, I’m using this method to improve the wing-sweep on my F-14s when seeing them in multiplayer, and also for the DLC switch, in their forthcoming updates. But for smoke, when Asobo eventually open up the variable, everybody would have to update their airplanes again to match. Works well for now though.
I’ve tested and “Flight Control Replay” retains the effects on replay (multi-view), including aerobatic smoke. So I will use this instead of MSFS Replay to create my aerobatic video.
So to recap (from my perspective):
Use FCR instead of MSFS if need to have multiple views of aerobatic smoke.
Smoke-On – maybe sometime in the future pending Asobo provision to developers.
