The existing binding system / controls system is so overly awkward and slow. It seems like it was designed by someone who’d never had to bind controls before.
Consider looking at how other flight sims do it. X-Plane is pretty good, DCS whilst utterly bare-bones is still so much faster and easier to bind controls than MSFS.
I know it’s probably too late in the game to expect a radical change in MSFS 2024 if you’ve used MSFS 2020 as the foundation, but I strongly urge someone who has multiple controls and button boxes and who is very familiar with flight sims to be on the design team to remedy this.
I literally know of people who’ve bought MSFS and never used it because the binding is so laboriously awful.
One real annoyance with the current system is having to select ‘Start Scanning’ for every assignment.
I can’t understand why this is necessary, it should be ‘scanning’ as soon as the input dialog is opened. Like it does in absolutely every other similar interface that I’m aware of.
Some attention should be paid to naming conventions as well. It would be much more consistent - and easier to read - if the bindings highlighted above were labelled:
PARKING BRAKE ON
PARKING BRAKE OFF
PARKING BRAKE TOGGLE
PARKING BRAKE SET
etc.
This is really basic stuff, and it appears Asobo simply haven’t given it any thought.
Also, if I fold up sub sections that I’m not interested in, and I make a binding - don’t then automatically unfold them and scroll my position to somewhere else! I mean come on!
As soon as I click in a binding box it should be ready to bind to whatever button I press or axis I move.
It’s just so poorly designed and as if they never used any other flight sim before.
X-Plane is excellent, DCS is pretty good although they won’t allow you to drag columns of hardware around so you can’t group them as you would like to.
Asobo, please just do a little research and get an experienced domain expert designer to fix this.
PARKING BRAKE ON
PARKING BRAKE OFF
PARKING BRAKE TOGGLE
PARKING BRAKE SET
And beside Parking Brake Set the ever so helpful tooltip “Set the parking brake” I literally have no idea what this means in the face of having on, off, and toggle already… What? Amount of parking brake maybe (and why?)
My point being the tooltips need a more verbose rewrite. They’re supposed to clarify, not restate by rearranging the same words. Esp within the menu UI.
Subordinate to the original issue, but definitly a part of it in my view.
I couldn’t agree more, but this has been raised as early as the tech alpha in early 2020 and not much has been improved. Airplane specific profiles, hello?
Although I still have hope for 2024 The whole UI/UX needs a complete rework. Preferably by someone who is not only an artist but actually plays games like this. What we have now is clunky, slow, buggy and awkward to use. One could hope for a different version for PC and consoles.
Aircraft Specific Profiles, or just list all the controls for a category i.e. Gliders, Piston, Jet, Airliner etc..
It doesn’t help that Asobo have in-cockpit controls named one thing but you can’t find or search for the ■■■■ things because in the controls list they’re called something entirely different *(e.g. look for spoilers and pitch trim for gliders - completely different names), at least if you had everything per aircraft or aircraft type you’d be able to work it out!
It’s really like the ‘designer’ had never used any other flight sim. Ever.
And don’t get me started on the list of all inputs randomly shooting back up to the top, losing your place in the billions of options…
Yup. The current state of what is Expanded / Contracted & the chosen item needs to be persisted while the key/ button assignment is being made. I.e. once made, one returns to the menu which has the same Expanded / Contracted & chosen item view as before.
I had to put my 2c in here. I know a lot of people (myself included) complain about graphics-related matters, CTDs, and other items which I can only imagine would be difficult if not impossible to completely resolve with the current code limitations.
But what gets me is that these kinds of GUI issues and odd combinations (like the Parking Brake example above) should have been resolved over the last three years.
And the process to assign components to planes is beyond belief to me. Why they couldn’t use a drop-down box instead of this right click right click right click etc to get to the plane you want is bad enough, but they should have fixed that or at least improved it since the initial release.
I connected a homemade “button box” which I made with the electronics of Logitech 3D stick when the plastic wore out, so MSFS thinks its a stick and auto assigned all the buttons.
Just going through all of them and clearing the assignments so I could do my own was a chore.
Click the bind, wait, click clear, wait, click validate, wait and wait. Rinse repeat.
All while the list jumps about willy nilly. It’s really bad. Before that I just had to change one or two things at a time and hadnt realized how arduous it could be.
I now make copies of my profiles as a back up, incase the game nukes my assignments, which has already happened once for whatever reason.
Just started MSFS and it has reset everything, logbook, assistance options, accessibility, all bindings, including about 20 different aircraft profiles across 3 sets of controller hardware.
Bottom of the screen, something about managing profiles, and one of the sub-options is copy. Hit it and then save. Then switch back to the original profile in case the game changes anything without asking.
In the future you can use the same menu to delete a nuked profile, again make a copy of your backup and use that back up going forward.
Thats the plan. What I don’t know is, will the game ALSO my backup if this happens again. It might. So I also keep a paper copy of what I’ve assigned so I’m not sitting there saying “now, what did I have assigned there again??” Because I find that some times I can’t remember until I’m in flight and go to hit something from muscle memory.
Ahh OK. I thought you knew where you could save them as a file somewhere on the PC and then load them back into the sim if they got lost on the cloud somewhere.
The whole UI/UX needs a complete rework. Preferably by someone who is not only an artist but actually plays games like this. What we have now is clunky, slow, buggy and awkward to use. One could hope for a different version for PC and consoles.