Wednesday, June 10, 2009

A Few More Manipulators

I'm not sure if these will make it into X-Plane 9.30 (we're trying to close down features, but it doesn't do much good to hold off features that help people make airplanes) but...while I was in Italy I created a few more manipulator types.

The set of manipulators let you change the value of a dataref directly with a mouse-click - the various flavors control how the dataref is changed.

These manipulators are the natural corollary to the command manipulator, which runs a command on a click.

Why have both? Commands are good, but they don't cover 100% of sim functionality (just like datarefs don't cover 100% of sim functionality).  By having both, it will be possible to control switches and buttons that are best accessed by a dataref change.

For the basics on commands vs. datarefs, see here.

The generic instruments already write to both commands (via the trigger instrument) and datarefs (via the rotary instrument) - these new manipulators provide the same functionality for 3-d cockpits.

No comments: