We went through a lot of pain, trying to get the “External” view in our aircraft correct. There’s actually a documentation bug here, and some unexpected behavior.
The docs state that a “CHASE_PLANE” camera in cameras.cfg controls the External camera. This is actually incorrect, cameras.cfg doesn’t have any effect on the external camera.
The only parameter which controls it is wing_span in flight_model.cfg, which determines the camera radius.
Is there actually a solution to this issue? Absolutely the single most irritating thing about this sim is the fact that I can’t get an external view similar to what we’ve had for the last 25 years. This forced super-wide cinematic sort of camera is horrible.
I don’t want to look at the top of my plane anymore. I don’t want the sky to take up 2/3 of my view anymore.
Would be nice, I prefer the external viee like fsx or X Plane.
Last year we tried to get the topic discussed, but it was in vain.
I nowadays simply set the zoom to 70 and leave it there. Otherwise it looks horribly distorted and makes me nauseous if I look at it too long.
This also happens in the cockpit btw when you use fisheye zoomout to somehow see the entire cockpit at once. Then looking around does no longer look right and the world around you behaves like a spherical mirror (like in that Black Hole movie with Maximilan Schell), very nauseating. I therefore now set zoom to a fixed value (for the cockpit this is possible through the UI) and I practically don’t zoom anymore, only using saved fixed views.
TLDR: I no longer assign zoom and set the values to correct ones, like 70 for external and 50-60 for internal, and leave them there.