My go to view in every simulator I have flow is the basic “external view” (“circle view” in X-Plane). The control of the camera is very similar to the drone cam when it is locked onto the user’s aircraft and can be panned/rotated around it, but we currently cannot approximate this system in MSFS 2020 because you can either fly the plane or adjust the drone view, never both at the same time. Adding an option to allow simultaneous control of both the drone camera and the airplane would make the drone cam much more versatile and would give people another alternative to the locked in external camera view.
Another way to get around this would be to allow us to “unlock” the current “external view” so that it would be more like the traditional “external view” and less like “chase view.” Either way would work, and could probably be implemented as modifiers of either the current external view or the drone cam.
Here’s one other topic discussing this same issue.
X-Plane Circle External Cam? - Community / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
There is a way to fly when in drone camera mode, you have or used to have to press the c key, now yiu should have control over your aircraft again. If you press the c key again you should regain control over the drone camera again.
Hope this helps
Yes, I hoped that this would be a viable workaround, but not being able to control BOTH the view AND and the plane at the same time prevents this view from being nearly as useful as it would be otherwise. For example, if I spot an objective on the ground that I want to land near, I can’t maneuver the plane around it while adjusting the view to keep visual on the objective.
Thinking about it a little more, I think it would be better to have this as an option off the external view, to “unlock” from the plane’s rotation/heading than as part of drone view. I hoped that I could workaround with drone view like you said, but it doesn’t work nearly as well.
EDIT: Another reason to make this view off of external view, not drone view, is because drone view tends to rotate oddly when you do a lot of rotating around the aircraft.
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To bad it didn’t workout for you, i didn’t understand that the both had work together.
Maybe this video can bring you closer to your goal, he mentioned something about getting outside cockpit view by editing the camera cfg of the airplane so you will be able to fly outside the airplane and circle freely.
Hope this wil help u on thy queest.
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Yes i agree. Not only is it a pain to have an external view that tries to rotate crazily if i - for example - perform a loop, but it would be nice to have the sort of view that we can set as in the original post. Where, for example, we could set the view to look at the aircraft and a runway that is - say - 230 degrees from our position and then keep that 230 view direction until we move it ourselves. That would allow us to keep a field in view during a 3rd person circuit etc.
We can make the external view have minimum ‘inertia’ and maximum speed of movement but it still rotates annoyingly when we do as above.
