Zoom in Cockpit

  • I understand that it is not possible to zoom with the mouse wheel. You want to keep that for turning knobs.

    However, why not zoom with the mouse and right mouse button? I had the same discussion with Laminar Research, and they never considered this option. I mean, it is quite simple: You look around with the right mouse button, you zoom with it. If you want to turn something you let the button go.

    Moreover, I can set an axis for zooming in FS2. But it also does not zoom in the cockpit.

    Yours, Paul.

  • Keyboard zoom is painfully slow. I put multiple strings of Z/shiftZs into gaming mouse macro button presses and that does help a bit.

    It does not seem to help with seat shifts especially to the left -although I am new to the macro thing. Moving the seat left is torture.

  • Yes, I mean I would like to zoom with mouse key pressed down. In the same way that I can look around. On my mouse, I can use a thumb key for the right mouse key, that makes it even more comfortable.

    +1, This is what MS Flight did. It allowed you to easily pan and zoom the cockpit, while still allowing wheel and mouse buttons to control cockpit instruments, knobs and levers. Very natural user experience.

  • I'm from IPACS (with the s at the end) and I'm trying to understand but I'm not quite following, what inputs should do what?

    This is our current setup:

    If I point at a button, switch or lever I can click the left mouse button to toggle the position or press the button.

    If I point at a lever or switch and hold down the left mouse button I can drag it with the mouse and move it to a new position.

    If I point at a lever and hold down right mouse button and move the mouse I can drag multiple levers at once.

    If I point at a lever, knob or switch I can use the mouse wheel to change the value

    If I point at a knob and click left mouse button I can push it in.

    If I point at a knob and click right mouse button I can pull it out.

    If I don't point at a control and hold down either left or right mouse button I can then pan the camera by moving the mouse.

    If I don't point at a control and click left, nothing happens (I immediately notice that I didn't hit a button or switch but nothing went wrong)

    If I don't point at a control and click right, nothing happens

    If I don't point at a control and click with the middle button (push scrollwheel in), nothing happens

    Now what inputs do you propose should be used for zooming?

    How do you want to zoom in with the right mouse button alone? or with the left mouse button?

    hold left mouse button = zoom in, hold right mouse button = zoom out (or other way) ??

    or click left = zoom in and click right = zoom out?
    or hold right mouse button and move the mouse to zoom?

    Consider this: We disabled zooming with the mouse wheel in the cockpit because after zooming in one step your mouse will then point at a switch or knob and if you then keep scrolling the mouse wheel you accidentally move the switch instead of zooming.

    If we had a left mouse button click to zoom in and kept spamming the left mouse button the exact same issue occurs, you zoom in once, your mouse hits a button or switch or lever and suddenly you are no longer zooming, you are interacting with that control and you accidentally cut the engine and crash.

    So that proposed solution with left/right mouse button clicks to zoom, if I understand it correctly, is not going to work, just like the scroll wheel on its own is not possible right now.

    My proposed solution to this mouse wheel zoom issue is the following:

    When you don't point at a lever or knob and use your mouse wheel you zoom in, just like in the external camera. But any interaction with the cockpit gets disabled until you wait at least one second or you move the mouse by more than one or two pixels.

    Or while you are panning the camera, holding down the left or right mouse button, you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.

  • Thanks for taking care to answer this in this complete form. I did not know many of the actions you mention here.

    You seem to worry that a user accidentally clicks something instead of zooming. Currently, there is only confusion: The user wants to look around but accidentally pulls something (Airbus?), Using the right mouse button plus the wheel for zooming would add another confusion when the user points to a lever that can move multiple levers (multi-engine levers?).

    So either (a) you disable zooming, or (b) you use the middle mouse button or another trigger button, or (c) you live with two possible user errors. (a) is not good. (b) is only good if the user can map the middle mouse button to a thumb button. (c) I think is feasible, but maybe should be an option. Zooming without any click is not good, because the user will too often accidentally zoom which is annoying especially with today's easy spinning mouse wheels.

    By the way, I also think that the reset of the current view should then also reset the zoom.

    Thanks for listening, yours, Paul.

  • Thanks for replying Jan.

    Please consider this control scheme inspired by MS Flight:

    No buttons + Mouse move = Move cursor. Show tooltip when hovering over interactive control.

    LMB over control = Interact with control under cursor.

    Wheel over control = Interact with sliding / rotating control under cursor.

    RMB + Mouse move = Pan camera (cursor changes to pan icon).

    RMB + Wheel = Zoom camera toward/away cursor (Zoom to cursor feels great as you don't need to pan first!)

    MMB + Mouse move = shift camera (head) position (what PageUp, PageDn does.)

    This way there is never a conflict between Pan & Zoom and interacting with cockpit controls.

    The summary is RMB = Pan & Zoom, everything else is interaction.

    Compare that to the current system, where merely starting a mouse pan on top of a cockpit control can have perilous results, like when I accidentally grabbed the yoke while trying to do a quick pan out the side window! More frequently I accidentally press auto pilot buttons.

    Looking at your example list, you are using RMB to move a group of controls (multiple levers).

    If you find a new way to move a group of controls, and you've freed RMB for the good stuff.

    How about... if a user would commonly interact with controls as group, such as airliner multi engine throttles, left LMB move ALL by default. Hold Shift (or some modifier) to move just a single control of that group for the rare case.