Beginner Tools requests for FMS. - Feature suggestions for new pilots.

[Scott Mark]

First of all, many thanks for the efforts that have gone into FMS. It's pretty amazing.

If you want suggestions for new features, I say that eye-candy is dandy, but I'd much rather learn to fly well than to see a crashed plane break into pieces in a realistic fashion.

I'd be looking for things like:

dual-rate simulation on selected joystick channels. Please, oh please.

"replay from here" option. Press a key, try something (like a landing). If things aren't going well, press another key and try again. You'd have to checkpoint location, heading, airspeed and probably other stuff like fuel supply.

"initialize from saved location" - same as the above feature, but be able to retry from a crash, so you can concentrate fully on your task instead of having to hit the right key just before the moment of truth.

"load position" - also the same as above, but you load it from a file. People can go through a course of sorts: shooting a landing. recovering from spin at altitude, low inverted flight near runway, etc, etc. You'd need to tell the pilot roughly where to set the throttle, and then let them try to control the plane back to stability.

trainer cable - I like my location, but my plane is oscillating! Please put my aircraft into controlled level flight and let me take over again.

chase plane always above model. When the chase plane is below the model, it's nothing but blue skies ahead. Kind of pretty to look at the clouds, but I'd much rather get a look at the ground for a reference point. I think that I spend a lot of time circling, looking for the runway. It's usually at the center of my circle, and I just can't see it!

some kind of heading indicator. When I look at a plane (especially the semi-transparent tiny ones) I have a hard time telling if the plane is flying toward me or away from me.

a "quickie sheet" describing a model, maybe while browsing to load. I think (but I'm not sure) that on version 7 I flew two 3-channel models. Both were controlled by elevator and rudder, but one used channels 1 and 2, and the other used channels 1 and 4. Probably not a problem for you experts, but right now I'm stuck using a Microsoft joystick (twist for rudder) and it was very hard to figure out what was going on. I sometimes can't tell if a model has an engine or not. Size/weight of the model.

Some way to turn a gas engine back on after shutting it down!

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Yep, I'd love to see some other things, but I think they're less realistic to ask for:

visibly moving control surfaces. I don't know if these would help, but it might point out just how much I'm overcontrolling.

stall indicators? I don't know if it's set up so that the whole model stalls, or if just one wing can stall. But this might require adding information to the .par files to indicate what part of the model should flash when it's stalling. Or whatever. This one's hard to say.

glide path indicators for landing! stall warning! Any aids for landing for beginners. Flaps.

And, of course, movie mode, so we can record a flight (complete with the joystick locations) and we or others can play it back and learn. Or play it back and "take over" the flight where we wanted to.


Thans for listening. I know it's quite a list

Scott


When I first played FMS I had to laugh- I did a fair amount of modification to a program called "dogfight" that shipped with Silicon Graphics IRIS machines. We were happy to get 20 frames per second. FMS is handing me 130. It's because of this that I think there's room for extra computation, especially if the features can be turned on and off.