This one is puzzling me: I’ve read another discussion here lately with someone mentioning it. I thus launched the sim, set myself on the ground at LFPB for testing on RWY 21 with a nice view with the windsock to the right, I then opened the Weather popup and manually set the surface wind. The winsock was rotating according to the direction of the arrow in the Weather popup panel as expected.
I then decided to review what animates the Windsock and this one is easy to find. Look for the ANIM_CODE entry in the ASOBO_WindDirection_Template template in this file:
OneStore\fs-base-aircraft-common\ModelBehaviorDefs\Asobo\Misc\SimObjects.xml
You can rotate every windsocks by 180 deg in changing the code like to this:
<ANIM_CODE>(A:AMBIENT WIND DIRECTION,degrees) dnor</ANIM_CODE>However they will now point to the tail of the wind arrow in the Weather popup.
NB: AFAIK this template is only used by windsocks and shouldn’t affect any other sim object for now.
It is interesting to me you bring this one up because yesterday I decided to try our the 747 which I didn’t flown for a long time. And what strikes me is how “gaming oriented” it is designed in the controller response. Here is:
I have a long time aversion for cockpit animations which most 3rd party developers are coding on a 1sec time span. When I click a switch, I don’t want this switch to animate for a full second from off to on, I expect it to switch position instantly (or nearly instantly for the sake of animation something like 200ms is enough, at 50fps this still gives you 10 frames of animation to see it moving). Most FS2020 aircraft switches and controls animations are coded exactly the same way with unnecessary 1sec long animations.
But the other problem I’ve spotted in the 747 is that the yoke roll angle animates slowly and doesn’t match your hardware control. This is the kind of animation you’d use in older games where joysticks /keyboard only allowed ON/OFF positions and the more you keep the input ON, the more the yoke would roll. However the main problem with the 747 I can see is that it is not just the yoke roll angle changing slowly, but it is also the control surfaces moving slowly as if they were not moving per my hardware controller input, but by the dampened slowly rotating 3D yoke in the cockpit.
The same control input flaws (to me these are flaws) can be seen with steering tiler, and brakes.
This is wrong to me for a flight simulator for simmers, but I believe it is right for piloting the game with an XBox controller where you have limited input range (you can’t compare a controller 1 inch stick to a Honeycomb yoke roll amplitude for example).
These two example are really not supporting the idea of a simulator for simmers in my opinion and they might just be cosmetic, or they might just be the tip of the iceberg indicating a more profound design decision.
[update]
There is another one where you can test side-by-side the controller animation problem I’m describing above. Load the G36 and compare the animation of the mixture and the propeller levers when using a hardware throttle quadrant having both. You’ll see what I mean.