A simple clickspot or FMGS menu option, done. Why the hesitation? Frames? Well, it’s optional but brings a lot of immersion to the sim. I take a co-pilot over 1000 clickable circuit breakers.
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Sorry, but I could not disagree more. Why do I need to see some low poly schmuck in the right seat? I don’t have a body, so neither should anyone else. As a long time flight simmer, I am quite satisfied with my incorporeal existence.
And to trade high fidelity aircraft systems for it? Perish the thought. 
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I need my Juanita in the right seat, i feel lonely without her.
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same for passengers boarding the plane and visible in the cabin.
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I always wondered why they tend to “model” (whatever that means) 1000 clickable circuit breakers. Why would I want to click a CB on or off? It is like you are not study level if you do not “model” the CB.
Anyways. Anything that could impact FPSs or personal preference will never be standard, that is just game design basics. However having a clickspot somewhere could be great. Co-pilots are visible from the outside view by default some times, even when they are not there in the virtual cockpit, inside.
I mean, it is an interesting topic to discuss I guess, at least a bar discussion taking some beers. That could end up been hilarious.
My personal preference is Co-pilot off, I don’t like how they look, squarish faces and their mechanical movement. I save some FPSs too
At the end of the day, not a single 3rd party dev or even MSFS will invest time in NPC like human models the kind we see in other games. They will always look like they have taken a couple of photos to some of their employees and UV mapped his face to some random human model.
Lets face it, they are great at software development and squarish building modeling, but when it comes to realistic human models, it is way out of their desirable skillset. At the end, why would they invest so much time and money developing good looking 3D humans? probably half of the people fly with them disabled.
For me, Their mechanical movement and bad texturing takes all immersion out.
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I would take 2000 clickable circuit breakers and even more system depth over any stupid-looking low polygon figurine on the other seat 
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Failure recovery. Say your autopilot wants to kill you and refuses to turn off normally. You can pull the circuit beaker as last ditch to disable it. But if the plane doesn’t model such failure, then it’s basically checklist practice.
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Does it ever happen? I mean, the AP refusing to turn off
Sure. With fatal crashes.
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Really? I mean, when does any AP refuse to turn itself off? Just out of curiousity
Does it refuse to turn itself off due to Pilot ignorance or by a system failure?
Both to my knowledge. And also “why not both” I guess.
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The 737 has an additional lever to disable the autopilot should should it do strange things + yoke movement deactivation. The pilot models are ok imho, their hands should just rest on their laps and Juanita could use a little more hair but we share that issue. Dunno which GA aircraft has it but they added even passengers with lots of different faces and clothes.
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That is why i am Milviz fan now. They give you the option. Best of both.
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I would like a body.
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I absolutely agree and I think it is time we also see passengers.
It would make a huge difference if you could see actual passengers through the windows instead of sitting in an abandoned plane all alone, without a single human.
3d objects can be switched on and off so they would not eat fps for people who dont want them.
As to the work of modelling, would pay for a passengers DLC. Boarding etc would of course be too complex so that is probably not on the cards, but it should be really easy to model more avatars to the 6 we have now and place them on some seats.
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The Leonardo Maddog came by default with a copilot sitting in the right seat, and I couldn’t get to the menu option to eliminate him fast enough. I want my flight decks to be absolutely empty - the presence of a virtual human creeps me out.
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Any aircraft with some android in the flightdeck is a complete no no for me. Makes it feel like a toy and does nothing other than block the view.
PS re the passengers, flight deck door remains closed and locked.
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Hi,
I see you posted this in Third Party Addon Discussion. Are you only referring to third-party aircraft?
I’ll repost from another thread we just had about visible copilots.
I simply remove all avatars, because they just get in the way of me panning from one side of the cockpit to the other looking out of all windows at the beautiful scenery below, like an excited tail wagging dog on a car ride.
I agree with this. I know there’s two sides of the coin about this. And both have valid and understandable arguments. We have users that dislike how the pilots are modeled and would rather have an empty cockpit to have better visibility and there are people like me that having a slightly underwhelming pilot model is still better than having an empty cockpit. It’s definitely more immersive for me to have another pilot sitting next to me because it’s unrealistic to fly a big airliner, all by yourself.
That being said, to cater to both these preferences, I’d say a default switch is needed. Two switches.
Pilot visible in captain seat ON/OFF, and Pilot visible in F/O seat ON/OFF.
Then the model themselves need to have 2 parts, a body and a head. The head needs to be tied to an LOD. That at a certain range of the camera, the head disappears leaving only the body. That way, we don’t have clipping of our camera with the pilot’s head.
Then as far as the aircraft is concerned, there needs to be a requirement to provide the positioning of the pilot and copilot model within the cockpit’s 3D space coordinates. And the default MSFS engine will either render or hide the pilots according to those coordinates.
This way, aircraft developers don’t need to bother with getting model rendered and affecting their aircraft codes, they just need to enter a field on where the pilots model would render without actually need to render them at all. And it’s up to the users whether they want to render the pilots or not through the switch in the settings.
We can also have the pilots set up as a separate SimObjects. That we can have developers and modders to create their own pilot models and install it as a content addons. That way, for those who dislike the default low-poly model, can have developers to create their own model both for the body and the head and let the MSFS engine render them.
Win-win for all.
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