Dropdown lists for changing aircraft and controller profiles

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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42

A reminder that the Wishlist is for 1st Party only.

All 3rd Party discussions need to be out of wishlists.

Any and all 3rd Party addon support needs to be addressed off of the MSFS Forums and directly to that 3rd Party.

43

Itā€™s a little clunky and takes an age to cycle through the aircraft list and find the saved preset your plane. Letā€™s have a drop down list to select the desired profile quickly from there.

2 Likes
44

I just have a what I would think is a simple wishlist item and something that will just make things a little bit easier. Instead of having the arrows to scroll left and right for controller profiles, why not have it as a drop down. I have many profiles set up for my throttles and such and having to keep hitting the arrow, wait for it to load, and keep doing this over and over until i get to the profile I want, or hitting it fast to move several but always overshoot and have to back takes time. A simple drop down arrow that lets you select the desired profile would be a great easy addition for ease of use.

Thanks

3 Likes
45

I agree. In the mean time if you donā€™t know about it already, this app is well worth the price. I have not needed to deal with that pain since :slight_smile:

It does so much more than that too. Best utility I own :+1:

2 Likes
46

For someone like me with a lot of aircraft and devices Aircraft Manager has been a life-changing app.
You just have to be patient for the profile to chane (it only takes a couple of seconds).
The only limitation it has is the 10 profiles max but that is on MSFS side so nothing SonicViz can do about it, if this restriction is ever solved then it would be absolutely perfect.
It works really really nicely.

2 Likes
47

Hey thanks for the +ve feedback there peeps!
Glad to see it worksšŸ‘Œ

tl;dr: Itā€™s tricky.

The long boring technical excuse:
Technically I can do more than 10, but practically I have to cut it off somewhere as itā€™s quite a tricky little bit of sequencing code to do a bank switch, hence the Please Wait, which you can see you need to do in the Control Options as well when you switch individual devices/presets there but x up to 10. Nothing I can do about that, I have to work within the constraints of how MSFS does its thing.

The other reason to restrict it was to strike a balance of bank switching speed for people with a small number of controllers vs the home cockpitters maxing out.

I did make it more dynamic timing wise to speed it up, and could possibly expand the slots more but need more info about peoples setups and needs. Feel free to contact me via the support form with info on your setup anytime (itā€™s technically straying into support not discussion at this point soā€¦)

Pro Tip: If you need more than 10 now then work out the order of your usb ports/devices that Control Options recognizes and stick your most non-changing devices after #10. Thereā€™s usually at least a few devices that are constant between aircraft. See
Max Devices note @ Aircraft Manager for MSFS - Sonicviz or contact me for more info if you need. Iā€™ve only had a couple of users in this situation so far, so I hope you can see the balance Iā€™m trying to strike. Making it complety user configurable is also technically possible, but not trivial to dev/test.

The Remote Debug NightmarešŸ˜± (j/k - I managed to do this, though it did make me sweat!)
Originally it was 12 but after my remote debugging experience I decided to cut it to 10.

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[sample image from FB group]

Happy Flying.

Thanks!

48

That is quite a setup. I donā€™t even know what half that stuff is.

49

For my T16000M joystick, I have several profiles saved under the control options, for use with different aircraft/types.
Itā€™s a pain, and quite slow, to have to click left/right through multiple configs to try and find the one that I want to use for a particular flight.
If I could click the controller, and then select the appropriate custom config file from a drop down list, this would be much more user friendly.
Thanks.

50

Iā€™m a happy user of Aircraft Manager, it was life-changing for me but Iā€™m also one of those with more than 10 devices and I would love love if the maximum could be increased to 15. I think I will be more than ok with 15.
If there is anything I can do even pay a few extra $ to you please let me know. Currently Iā€™ve had to sadly stop using some of my devices as I never figured out how to make them the first 10 devices.

I currently use:

  • Mouse (takes up one device slot)
  • A Xbox controller (for drone etc)
  • One USB pad (for cameras etc)
  • A tablet via Spacedesk that appears as a touch pointer device.
  • Logitech yoke.
  • Bravo Quadrant.
  • Airbus stick.
  • Airbus throttles.
  • A Logitech quadrant.
  • One X56 stick (for fighter jets etc)
  • The X56 throttle.
  • A generic USB device I use for helis collective.

So my total is 12, with 15 it will never be an issue.

51

Hi Luis, I would suggest to add an USB hub with redirection, something like several USB channels on a single USB hub using switching capabilities. A bit like a USB matrix ā€¦
The idea, is : do we use Yoke and Stick at the same time ? In this specific case, those devices seems somewhat to be able to be grouped two by two I guess ā€¦ :thinking:

52

Thank you but I donā€™t know if I can do that and the best USB hub I can get in my country is certainly not capable of that.

53

Something like this, with individual push button for each single USB input, for activation ā€¦ all around 40.00ā‚¬

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54

I have one of those but how could it help? So far Iā€™ve been unable to reorder the devices in MSFS to get the 10 I want to configure in Aircraft Manager.

Turning off devices is a big NO NO for me. I want to have everything connected so if I want to switch planes I just switch planes and my hardware automatically changes for the plane I selected.

55

Hi Luis,

Thanks for your feedback (and to lynx33635 for the great advice), but I need to firstly point out:

As per Forum TOS ā€œAny and all 3rd Party addon support needs to be addressed off of the MSFS Forums and directly to that 3rd Party.ā€ Dropdown lists for changing aircraft and controller profiles - #42 1

Iā€™ve also explained in detail here: Dropdown lists for changing aircraft and controller profiles - #47 by Sonicviz why it is currently set at 10 devices, and this is well communicated up front in all support material, including the video title.

To summarise: It was 12 in the initial release, but in troubleshooting some user issues it became apparent that this is very sensitive to timing errors and I had to pull It back to 10 in order to be more robust and reliable for the bulk of the users.
This is the same reason there are data storage limits on some settings, as well as pages set at 80 aircraft. Iā€™m not a magician, and my hands are bound by technical limits of doing a complex UI integration with general user performance and stability being the paramount concern. Edge cases, unfortunately, are addressed on a case by case basis and sometimes you just need to use a workaround.

That said, to respond here just for reference:
Iā€™ve also replied previously via support email as to how you might workaround this, as a couple of other users with more than 10 devices have successfully done so via the same advice.

What you need to do is this:

Devices are returned by MSFS in the order that MSFS assigns them in Control Options, I have no control over that itā€™s all done by MSFS.

Itā€™s unlikey that anyone needs to change device control presets for all the devices they have every time they plane switch. There will no doubt be someone somewhere that does I guess, but typically there will always be a couple of generic control devices that remain static for general use. The workaround is to understand the polling order of your USB ports and make sure these non-changing devices are last in the device chain that MSFS detects.

  • Try plugging all12 in, then go to control options
  • Note the order of devices in control options
  • Then go to Aircraft Control Presets and you should see the 10 devices are the same order with an index added to the start from 0, which is how I order the columns.
  • That index comes from MSFS in the order you see in control options, but I add it to the name for an easy way to identify devices.
  • MSFS seems to order them on the polling order of the USB ports, so you could try swapping the last two devices it shows in Control Options with your two (or more) non-changing devices.
  • See how that works, as other users have managed to do this successfully.

Note: Hot swapping could be unreliable in terms of device polling and the resultant device order, so you need to do these changes with MSFS closed down, swap devices in USB ports, start MSFS, check, rinse/repeat till satisfied (or not - see next point). MSFS starts much faster with an empty community folder so for these tests I would have an empty community folder apart from just Aircraft Manager, as testing cycles will be faster.

If you donā€™t have any non-changing devices I would select your least used two and make some generic compromise preset that makes them generally useable across all aircraft, and set them as the last devices in the chain.

Now, this may not work because we donā€™t have absolute control over polling order, and there may be some hardware requirement (power etc) that also plays into this that makes the USB port switching workaround variable and not constant, but this is the current workaround that does seem to work for other users in a similar situation.

Hope that helps.

Again, respectfully, please note the product support rules as required by MSFS forum TOS. I have to abide by these, and in fact they make my life easier as solo indy developer.

There are many reasons for using the mandated support channel, apart from being a MSFS forum TOS requirement:

  • Keeps user info that I require private eg: email address, invoice/order numbers etc

  • Channels all support issues through a single point of contact for tracking and knowledge management. Iā€™m one person, not a corporation, and need to be efficient.

  • Makes it easy to point to the single source of truth re: Product info and support

If I need to do private real time communication then Iā€™ll invite you to my Discord as needed. Support issues are not (yet) at the level were a full time Discord is necessary, as managing a Discord server is also a time and resource commitment if you want to do it properly.

Happy Flying!

Thanks,
Paul/SV