Landing & taxi light on/off key bind issues

Bug Reporting Hub Aircraft & Systems
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Please tag your post with #pc and/or #xbox. #pc

Are you on Steam or Microsoft Store version? Steam

Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it? Nope

Brief description of the issue:
Is it known that some of the ON/OFF controls for external lights don’t work properly as a key bind?

I have always had my external lights set to the TOGGLE option in controls so I only need one button to turn them on or off. This works as expected.

Today I decided to dedicate separate buttons for ON and OFF for landing lights and taxi lights.

Two weird observations:

Using the C172 as a test bed, the TAXI LIGHT ON and OFF controls do nothing. Switch remains stationary. The TOGGLE control still works properly.

In the A320NX (both stock and FBW), LANDING LIGHT ON turns the landing lights off and LANDING LIGHT OFF turns them on. Loaded the B747-8 and the landing lights do not behave backwards like the Airbus. Haven’t tried a third plane yet to see how it behaves. Maybe I’ll try the CJ4.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered: See description

PC specs and/or peripheral set up of relevant: VelocityOne Flight Yoke+Quadrant

Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue: SU7 Update Beta

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On the off chance you have the Honeycomb Alpha or Bravo unit. Be aware, some lights, switches, knobs are taken over by those units as part of the software drivers for them. No mouse operation will work on some of those things if you have either of those units. I found out the hard way, thinking game was corrupted, uninstall, and then reinstall (5 days later-slow internet) and come to find out it was the HC Bravo unit block mouse on lights. Switches on those units operate them. Just a heads up in case.

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Turtle Beach Velocity One Flight. I’m setting the generic buttons on the throttle quadrant that are for general purpose use.

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There are no “software drivers” for the Honeycomb units involved here. It’s all in the default configs within MSFS. If you bind the toggle functions instead of the Set 0,1 ones, mouse operation will not be blocked, but then the hardware switches can come out of synch with the sim’s.

I use SPAD.neXt because it provides much better control. I can use the mouse all I like, but when I move a hardware switch, I check if the sim is already in the new position before I do anything.

1 Like
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Hendis56 - I beg to differ. After SU6, my honeycomb would not work. I reloaded the updated driver from their website, and it then worked fine. Again, after SU7, the same thing happened, and had to reload those drivers again. That Asobo/MS includes them in the code of the game, still does not guarantee they work. Reloading them back, fixes those issue for me.

See this link - Honeycomb Downloads – Honeycomb Aeronautical (flyhoneycomb.com)

But I was unaware of taking out bindings for knobs/switches/buttons and that would give me mouse control again. So, thanks for that tip.

However, I have decided to sell my Honeycomb and I have ordered a Virpil TM3 Unit, which will fit desk better, and offer much more control over every button and switch in each plane since I can create and program them (provided game allows) specifically. For instance, two aftermarket planes, the C-17 and F-14. Buttons in HC unit just do not work, so mouse control is easier to do in C-17. Some buttons/switches work in F-14, and some do not. But, since the AP system operation is all over the cockpit in F-14, getting it to work for me has been big struggle. Hoping the Virpil Unit will allow me to get control of all of the ones which are bindable and then can have knee boards for each plane and which switches/button do what. More like real pilot, today they use a tablet to their left and right, in the old day, it really was a knee board strapped to leg over flight suit.

Since I don’t know which and what is bindable, it’s now waiting game. Plus, we have game updates to contend with so who know how things will work by April 2022. Hopefully more button/switch control will be offered in future game updates.

For Instance, in F-14, there is a switch TO/LDG which controls many surfaces in F-14 upon landing (making carrier landings safer), in game it is not bindable, so hopefully, that can change in future updates, since DC Designs says, it’s a game thing, not something in the plane they can change, per a conversation I had with them.

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Well, I have not seen anything with Alpha or Bravo getting broken (except for some back-and-forth with the trim sensitivities) after SU6 or SU7 or any other update.
It sounds to me like you could be using the default configurations (?) and that the Honeycomb installer overwrites those because Honeycomb got tired of waiting for Asobo to fix the known issues with them. I have never used the defaults myself.

Below is a quote from the ReadMe.txt included with the LED drivers:

For the new MSFS, you don’t need a configuration tool and you only need this software to light up the LEDs, the rest can be made inside the Simulator

That’s why I wrote what I did.

As for your second reason for replacing the Bravo, investing in something like SPAD.neXt would certainly have been a cheaper solution. With that you get easy access to everything that MSFS exposes, including, e.g., the Working Title CJ4 auto-pilot panel. And the best thing is that it can show you exactly what goes on in the sim when you touch anything in the in-sim cockpit, making it relatively straight-forward to figure out how to bind the hardware buttons.

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It’s not only the Bravo, but also the size of the unit as well. It does not fit on my desk well anyplace I have tried to mount it. The CM3 will go right next to my keyboard, and be at hand, when I need that space, I can just pick up and set it aside. From that standpoint it will be a better fit.
The HC unit is well built and has worked just fine for the most part. I will have to investigate the SPAD.neXt thing you mentioned.

If Asobo would just freeze the core code, and just take an area and fix those issues, this would be a much better sim. With that said, FSX took two years to fix, and I don’t know about X-Plane. The one thing I did like about XP was every possible combination of binding could be accomplished in the configuration options screens, with the exception of the parking brake, never found that one listed, was manual from the get-go.

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Im having the same problem, my mouse is taking the light controls, im mad, as sooner i umplug the bravo, all the lights on 777 and other works