Visible pilot in cockpit

For added immersion, a pilot body for each plane would be great. DCS has this in some of its planes and its great. Add a key command to hide pilot body for those hard to reach buttons that are sometimes hidden by the body.

Bonus points to include pilot head shadowing - you move your head in VR and the head shadowing is based off this new head location/position

Yes, Iā€™D like to see the pilotā€™s body in cockpit, but the more important to me to see my passengers.

Copilot also please, new to the game it took me a while to understand the copilot was handling the radio :slight_smile:

Cheers

i would like to see my hands and body, and co pilot, AND the option to turn them off and on individually.

4 Likes

you can turn that option off in the settings if you with to control the radio yourself

Glad Iā€™m not the only one who would like to see this. Shouldnā€™t be too hard to do. Maybe its the sort of thing modders could do. Be great to have a co-pilot too. Really add to the immersion.

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Iā€™ll take the opportunity to post the following and extend the lifetime of this topic by 30 days while at it.

For those wondering about the ā€œPilot Bodyā€, you can experiment what it is about:

[TIP] Add a copilot to your aircraft (and passengers too!)

1 Like

Hello,
Thank you for your post. The Bugs & Issues section is for reporting things that donā€™t work. Wishlist is for feature requests. I have moved your post into Wishlist.

Please note that there is a very similar post in Wishlist for a visible co-pilot:

I assume that you are specifically asking about the pilot in the left seat, and therefore I am not merging it with the other topic. But please tell me if I got any of that wrong.

Iā€™ve commented here about the ā€œpersonalized avatarā€ wishlist:
Please give us personalizable pilot avatars! - #6 by CptLucky8

However I agree this topic and this one are the same:
Visible co-pilot in first person view - Self-Service / Wishlist - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

NB: one is asking for copilots, the other for pilots, but it is essentially the same feature: allow the user to selectively display a pilot and/or a copilot in the cockpit view (in addition to the outside view which is already implemented).

The topic about personalized avatars is slightly different but connected as well: once you have the feature for displaying pilots/copilots, beyond the stock 3D models, it would be great to also be able to providing our own models and/or textures replacement at least.

As it is demonstrated in this topic though, this feature ā€œonly takesā€ Asobo adding a GUI button for enabling displaying the stock pilots/copilots because it is already there, coded in the simulator, no new code to do nor any tests (weā€™ve ample demonstration it is working already without any side-effect because it is intrinsic already to the way the simulator is displaying the 3D models as they are defined in a node tree in the model file).

As for the ā€œbugā€ vs ā€œwishlistā€ forum I agree it will be much much easier once you create the VR wishlist forum weā€™re still waiting on, and while waiting, Iā€™ll continue posting VR wishlist items into the VR bugs forum because there is no other VR distinct place to post so. It is even more important to clearly separate these VR wishlist items now that they are also separating them in the Q&A.

Nevertheless in this specific pilot/copilot topic, it is not just VR.


Iā€™m also writing the following for the record (so that information gets easily referenced by Asobo):

FS2020 is hard coding PILOT_1 and PILOT_2 and there is no provision for any other number of PILOT_# in the code. I understand it is designed like this because there are only 2 pilots in an aircraft, BUT:

  • There are aircraft (older) with 3 cockpit members.
  • You could even want to have 4 (with the jump seat).
  • Hard coding these things in the simulator code, while at the same time the 3D model object file supports any number (tree node) makes strong coupling and limits creativity.

Iā€™d suggest Asobo revising the hard coded PILOT_1 and PILOT_2 references and make them dynamically created, in any number, so that modelers could provision any number of pilots and passengers. It shouldnā€™t change much in the code except updating a vector of people models, instead of an array of 2.

Beyond simple visuals for screenshots, the suggestion above would open the door to making the aircraft reflecting in 3D exactly what youā€™d enter in the load & balance sheet.

3 Likes

You are correctā€¦they are seperate wishes. Iā€™m referring to you inhabitating the body of the pilot in command. DCS has a good implementation of this.

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Actually if youā€™re adding a pilot like in the screenshot Iā€™ve posted above, and you place yourself over but slightly in front of, in order to make the pilot glasses and head out of the view behind you, it is very convincing, especially in VR.

Do I understand correctly your request is very similar, except the pilot body would move / self-adjust, so that the body stays aligned with the position of your head (in 2D or VR this would be the view point position in space)?

Well in DCS from the VR perspective you inhabit a body without a head (you canā€™t see your own head anyway). When you look down you see your body. The legs move when you move the rudder/brakes. Arms move when moving throttle and stick. Note - if you take your physical hands of the stick and throttle that this is not modelledā€¦your virtual hands remain on the stick and throttle.

If you look at another plane (say in multiplayer) you see the full pilot with head. The pilots head moves in sync with the actual players head movement and shadows the cockpit accordingly.

2 Likes

This would be cool if it were an option. We could activate this with co-pilots in the model config or the Aircraft config, perhaps, if the model featured the linkā€™s for pilots in them, so this could be done.

On my plane, I leave those config points out which the sim needs, but on the prototype builds, I had them in there. You have to have a ā€˜view pointā€™ in front of the pilot, or you locate in face and the animated movements of his face around your view makes it unuseable. But, what if you could turn on just the co-pilot? These pilot models are so well done.

Have you followed the link Iā€™ve posted above? because I believe the answer to this question is already there.

If this is going to happen then Iā€™d also like to see the pilots mouths animating whenever responding to ATC. The pilot pair already glance from side to side on what appears to be a random basis so a small addition of lip synced animation should also be possible? Now that would be immersion!

There is a separate Wishlist topic for that, if interested:

You can now download the copilots for all the aircraft from flightsim.to as a package. 700 folders with aircraft livery, and scenery. Unzip ( I suggest you unzip in a separate folder) then pick and choose what you want. Donā€™t place too many folders in your Community folder or else it will take ages to load the Sim.

I second this!

I must say that not seeing your legs is quite immersion breaking. For me using the pilot avatar in DCS, after a while something changes in the head and the brain accepts the pilot body as its own and it does so much for the immersion. The most common comment I get from people trying MSFS in VR is ā€œI dont have any legs!ā€ then ā€œor hands!ā€

Coming from a cognitive neuroscience standpoint/background - the issue with not perceiving oneā€™s body in VR is a good recipe for immersion/presence disconnect. Of course there is the issue of matching VR body movement with the sim, but if you look at any decent racing sim there is a body, legs move as pedals are depressed, the hand moves to the gear shifter when shifting gears. and so on. It would be at least interesting to have this as an option for the sim.

At a minimum, show the lower part of the pilotā€™s body so that there is someone sitting in the seat. Then start figuring out how limb movement could be implemented when setting throttle levers, moving the yoke and so on.

I really hope this is implemented to some degree.

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yes! If it can be done in dcs it can be done in msfs. I dont understand why there is no pilot body in VR in the first place. There is no reason not to, and itā€™s extremely unreal to not have a body. Since the sim is trying to be as real as possible, having an invisible pilot is surely a very strange decision!