I’m scooping all suggestions up and putting them here. Current taxi arrows;
…are elevated too far off the tarmac thereby blocking view
…show through the bottom of aircraft while using them
…have no way of being assigned a simple key command
…ugly as “H-E double toothpicks“ and a complete immersion killer
They need to be redone. Having them show through the cockpit can actually disable cockpit point and click commands. They are so huge and blocks forward visibility to an extent while taxiing and having to stop the sim and go back into the main menu to toggle on and off is a royal pain.
I believe it was (is) FSX where this was implemented correctly, or at least way better than what we currently have. Why they are so huge and in your line of sight I’ll never know. Maybe even make them based on a slider which governs opacity for the user (from transparent to solid) would be a plus to which the user could then assign a hot key in which it would remain the same each and every time. The way it is now is almost cartoonish looking.
In Flight Simulator X they looked and worked a lot better. The closest arrows would move towards your aircraft’s position, and would disappear before taxiing on top of them, removing the trail left behind your aircraft as well. This is a weird regression from a system that worked well and I hope they will look into this at some point.
I don’t think the taxi ribbon needs to draw from the plane all the way to the hold point. I feel it should be just a few yards in front of the aircraft to guide the pilot to the correct runway. We’ll be able to figure out how to get there without too much hand holding. Or maybe have an option for a full or partial taxi ribbon.
I don’t really understand why they’re blue. At night you’re trying to follow green lights. So why not make them at least green? Blue indicates the sides of the taxi way, not the middle.
Or why not have the taxi route use the taxi lights: make them flashing. I can imagine during the day that might not be very visible, but at night that would be a good use of the actual lights.
So many good ideas here! I’m kinda stumped as to why we ended up getting what we have. Seems anything presented here would have been a vast improvement…que sera sera…
Since they’re an assist and we can access the VFR map in any plane, they should just go ahead and remove the ribbons completely and instead draw the path onto that map. That way you can get a situational awareness of the airport, try memorizing where to taxi and then actually do it without the ribbons disturbing the immersion. Oh, and we do need the taxiway signs on that map as well. Regardless if they’re true-to-real or not, if you don’t know the airport and don’t have access to any kind of charts where those are labeled, you’re kind left out in the open. And I’ve seen lots of airports already that have taxiways declared as Alpha, Bravo etc, but no signs at all next to the actual taxiways…
Not sure if the guide arrows can be changed in colour and size.
At night I find them unnecessarily big and bright. I know you can turn them off.
Id just like to be able to change the size and colour.
Shocking to me ( a cockpit builder ) how much really basic stuff has been omitted. It really makes me wonder about beta testing , etc . Who were the testers and what kind of input were they providing. Was anybody even listening?
I can’t speak for the testers, but one thing I have see (within this forum) were things such as night lighting. For instance, the testers have said that before the release the night lighting actually looked better, as in more realistic, BEFORE the final release. Now what happened and who made the decisions as to what was pushed through after the beta testers had done their part and the final release is up to debate I guess. Again, I’m only parroting what’s been said within these forums. I do know that besides the funkadelic taxi arrows, in so far as night lighting goes, places like NYC at night looks waaay too dark. It’s as if all of the buildings are facing a ConEd brownout. Apparently during testing it did not look this way.
EXACTLY. I’ve asked myself a number of times what these play testers were doing? Me I’ll be making a suggestion thread for toggling the aircraft labels on / off. Sometimes we can’t see the horizon for all the names in the sky.
The arrows are so huge they hide the ground. We need something more discreet. Voxatc in P3D used to show small lamps on the ground. I find this the most elegant solution as you could almost imagine it’s part of the airport.
