It has been raised by our users that “TOGGLE WATER RUDDER” keybind is unavailable in FS24 for helicopters.
It seems that keybinds have now been classified by type of aircraft. This creates a problem, as often times TOGGLE WATER RUDDER (among other keybinds) is used for various misc functions: eg. On our helicopters, it is generally used in our custom mission systems to release or pick up objects.
I suspect other keybinds are also affected. Please avoid making these sort of changes, as in many cases aircraft depends on these “small workarounds” to support functions beyond the capabilities of MSFS, and it creates both frustration for us and for the end users.
Yes absolutely agree… there’s an essential art-form of adopting unused MSFS events so that users can assign key-binds to things core developers have no knowledge of.
It might be the current situation where Asobo adds new keybinds each time for some new core sim aircraft / challenge / activity possibly masks the challenges faced by 3rd-party developers.
For gliders, where the use of transponders is really not important compared to interacting with otherwise-unsupported gliding interactions, of course we re-purpose e.g. the xpndr +/-1, +/-10, +/-100, +/-1000 keybinds/events. Luckily for us those are still included in the events ‘permitted’ in the glider controls settings. We could safely use the new helicopter events but the UI prevents that.
As another example (of many) it is also crucial we use the external lights keybinds/events (taxi lights, logo lights, landing lights) even though gliders don’t actually have landing lights, because those values go through multiplayer and a major part of gliders approaching the home airfield is the significant ballast dump effect - being able to see that for multiplayer gliders is far more significant than wheel up/down or flap settings. Overall we have many needs/uses for keybinds in gliders that aren’t known in the core sim at all but I don’t believe the answer is to explain at length every requirement and expect Asobo to add more hard codes into the supported events.
My suggestions to make the events/keybind system more generally useful:
add many (e.g. 100) general purpose keybinds / events to the available list (e.g. EVENT_1, EVENT_2, or whatever). No assumptions what developers will use them for. Make those events available to all aircraft. It won’t be the chaos one might think - conventions will rapidly arise on the use of those events within aircraft classes and the existing events will remain definitive for their intended purposes.
For each custom event design in an associated L:Var e.g. L:EVENT_1 which will be set to 1 on the event occurring. This will be useful because MSFS API support for L:vars is broader than the support for events, e.g. event support across the various API frameworks is patchy.
Make the config files supporting the events/keybinds a documented part of the system and within those drop the all the constraints built into the new controls settings UI. It’ll be a lot easier for us to circulate a suggested default keybinds file for gliders than to dance through hoops with each individual pilot how to set up custom controls/keybinds in the current controls UI. Given the fragile state of the controls UI it might be generally useful to put a bit more emphasis on the controls settings file(s) anyway.
The trend on digital panels is to define L:vars which can be set to 1 to ‘trigger’ the corresponding interaction, e.g. a button might be a single L: var (L:nav_button_1_push) or a knob a set of L: vars (L:nav_knob_1_up, L:nav_knob_1_down, L:nav_knob_1_push). The user interaction sets the var to 1, and the sim code handling the interaction resets that to zero. It would be good if this (or an equally flexible alternative) was recognised as part of the core sim. Obviously the hardcoded events/keybinds can’t come close to supporting the interactions needed on a modern panel but there are many cases where simmers are programming controllers for those interactions.