MutleysHangar.com +
by John Allard
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Back to Basics is a regular monthly feature in the Ocala Flight Sim Club newsletter, the Gosport. B2B first appeared in the April 2011 issue and is ongoing. This article is from that series, re-posted here.
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In casting about for a topic for this month’s B-to-B I was thinking of what I struggled with, was baffled by, was late coming to the table for, with respect to Flight Simulator. This particular topic was reinforced for me on two recent occasions when I was doing something on a FS screen with other OFSC members present and was stopped with a, “Wait – what did you just do? How did you do that?” What I had done was simply right-click the FS screen and make a view selection from the resulting pop-up. It can be done in much less time than it took to type this sentence.
Like so many things in FS, once you’ve learned how to do something it seems simple and intuitive. It’s easy to forget that it may be hard-won knowledge that you struggled for lack of, before you learned how. Views and FS View Windows were like that for me, for quite a long time after I was using Flight Sim. I can’t honestly say where I learned it, eventually, but life would have been better if someone had shown me earlier in my FS “career”.
Though all of this and more is available under the View pad of the FS top-line menu in both versions of FS, the easier way to access it is with a right-click in the window area of the main FS screen, above the panel if you’re in a cockpit view.
Main Screen Point-of-View
First, we’ll look at Point-of-View selection for the main FS screen. The graphic below illustrates what pops up when you do that.
It’s pretty obvious that there is a big difference between FS9 and FSX in this department. The FSX pop-up has a series of fly-outs that appear when mousing over the main pop-up menu pads. Though the FS9 menu is more basic and doesn’t have the fly-outs and submenus that are provided by FSX, almost all of the underlying functionality is still available in FS9 by different means and methods, mainly under Views in the top-line FS menu bar. There are a few things that FSX will do here that FS9 cannot but the basics are the same.
In FS9 there are four primary view options – 2D Cockpit; 3D Cockpit, Spot View and Tower View. Most FS users are probably aware that the “S” key toggles through them. The right-click pop-up adds the option for a fifth point of view, the Top Down, which is not in the S-key toggle sequence.
It’s similar in FSX but the four toggled views from the “S” key are Cockpit, Outside, Tower and Aircraft view. As in FS9 there are other options available from the right-click pop-up menu. That’s really all there is to the selection of main screen views in FS.
View Windows
Both versions of the sim also provide the option of opening one or more additional windows, each of which may contain any of the optional points of view. These overly and cover part of the main screen. You can open as many as you can find a place for, the main difficulty being what is covered up by them.
These view windows can be quite useful. I know for instance, that some folks find it helpful to have a top-down view open when navigating near an airport or on cross country flights – they can be zoomed in the same manner as the main screen, by clicking on the view window to give it the “focus” and then using the “+” and “-“ keys to affect the desired zoom level. Sometimes it’s handy to have a small spot-view (outside view of your own AC) from behind while taxiing or while on approach to a landing, or a view from the side at touchdown to help judge the flare.
With either sim, this is accomplished by selecting “New View” from the Top-Line Menu -> Views menu pad. The same options are available as from the right-click option, plus a few more. The new view window will come up in a small size and can be dragged anywhere on the FS main screen and may also be resized by dragging edges or corners. Closing the additional view window is accomplished by a right-click and selecting “Close Window” from the pop-up.
If you’re blessed with a second monitor, right-clicking on an open view window and selecting “Undock Window” from the pop-up adds the typical windows Title Bar and border. Once that’s done, the new view window can be dragged by the title bar to another display, a truly broadening capability for serious flying. Using that method, all manner of pop-ups, including various viewpoints may be arranged to your liking on the second display, leaving the main panel and window unencumbered by pop-ups. It should be noted, however, that FS must be running in Windowed Mode (with a title bar and blue border) if an undocked window is to be moved to a second display. If FS is in Full-Screen mode, other windows cannot be dragged off it.
If you’re unfamiliar with any of this I recommend you open an FS session and play around with shifting main FS views and create a few view windows. Get a feel for how it all ties together and you’ll find some new FS tricks in your toolbox. Best of all, it’s built-in – no add-ons are required for any of this.
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This regular monthly feature will focus on some of the more basic topics of Flight Sim flying. Suggestions for topics are appreciated – e-mail John Allard at allardjd@earthlink.net
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