I’ve made a few posts about this on various threads across the forum, but thought it worth expanding upon, for the benefit of anyone, like me, that might not have been aware of a feature of MSFS that is very useful to those of us that fly in VR.
What i mean by a “Sticky” control is the ability to “stick” your mouse cursor to a selected control and then adjust it, whilst looking elsewhere in the cockpit. This is particularly useful when flying airliners, but might also help with smaller aircraft, with things like adjusting the selected altitude, where you twist a knob on the glare-shield and have to watch the reading change on the PFD/MFD or other display.
This feature is provided via a number of control mappings that i hadn’t previously noticed, namely those in the “Cockpit Interaction” category.
The screenshot below shows how I have mapped just 3 of these controls, to my mouse. Like me, you will probably have the mouse mid button and mouse wheel already allocated, but as the previous mappings were largely to control camera movement, reusing them shouldn’t be a problem for VR users.
To use these mappings, just point at a control in the cockpit, say the altitude knob, until you see an arc-shaped arrow, and then press the middle mouse button, or whatever control/key you have mapped to the ‘primary action’ command. The mouse cursor will disappear and you will be able to look elsewhere in the cockpit, while you adjust the altitude with the mouse wheel. When you’ve done, just press the ‘primary action’ button again and you will “let go” of the control and your mouse cursor will reappear.
If you are already using these mappings, I’d be really interested to hear how you might be using the secondary and tertiary actions, if you have figured that out.
There are a couple if issues with these “sticky controls” however. Firstly, if you press the right mouse button, to zoom in, the primary action is deselected. Secondly, if you move your head in, to get a better look at a display, the increase and decrease commands appear to stop working.
I hope this will as much use to at least one of you, as it was to me. 