Visible co-pilot in first person view

CptLucky8 · April 19, 2021, 11:45pm

I’m gathering in a single post some of the elements I’ve posted in different places about this topic

I’ve commented here about the “personalized avatar” 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 “only takes” 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 (we’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 “bug” vs “wishlist” forum I agree it will be much much easier once you create the VR wishlist forum we’re still waiting on, and while waiting, I’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.

Visible pilot in cockpit

I’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.

I’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 shouldn’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 you’d enter in the load & balance sheet.