Hello,
I’m developing an external hardware pointing device for VR cockpit interaction. The device works well in other flight sims using an absolute mouse-style model, but MSFS 2024 VR appears to use a different interaction model: relative mouse input seems to steer a VR cockpit cursor/raycast pointer that is affected by head/view direction, cockpit collision geometry, and the last cursor/ray state.
I’m trying to determine what is officially possible through the MSFS SDK, SimConnect, Input Events, or another supported mechanism.
Observed behaviour in MSFS 2024 VR:
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Relative mouse input can move the cockpit cursor/ray.
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The cursor/ray often appears to start from wherever it was last left, not from the current view center.
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Moving the user’s head appears to change the effective interaction area.
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The visible cursor/ray does not appear to behave like a simple 2D Windows screen cursor.
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MSFS VR may show depth/ghost/double-cursor behaviour depending on cockpit collision/depth plane, which appears to be native MSFS behaviour.
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Setting my device’s internal “center” does not necessarily move the MSFS cursor/ray back to the user’s view center.
I have started testing a small SimConnect diagnostic app. So far, the first candidate camera/view SimVars I logged did not appear to track live VR head movement in a useful way, but this was only an initial test. I am also testing whether setting the Windows cursor to the primary screen center, injecting relative mouse movement, or sending camera reset actions affects the VR ray/cursor state.
My questions:
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Is there any supported SDK, SimConnect, WASM, Input Event, or DevMode mechanism to query the current MSFS VR mouse/raycast cursor position or ray origin?
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Is there any supported way to reset, re-anchor, or recenter the VR cockpit mouse/raycast cursor to the current view/head direction?
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Are any camera/view SimVars expected to reflect live VR headset/head pose in MSFS 2024, or are they only camera configuration/view-state values? For example, should variables such as
CAMERA GAMEPLAY PITCH YAW,CAMERA STATE,CAMERA VIEW TYPE AND INDEX, or eyepoint-related values change with actual VR head movement? -
Do camera reset events such as cockpit view reset have any defined effect on the VR mouse/raycast cursor origin, or are they unrelated?
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Are Input Events intended to be usable by an external SimConnect client as an aircraft-specific alternative to mouse/raycast cockpit interaction? In other words, can they operate cockpit switches/knobs without using ray hit-testing, or are they not suitable for that role?
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Is the MSFS VR cockpit cursor driven by normal Windows cursor position, relative mouse deltas/raw input, an internal raycast state, or some combination?
I’m not looking for general user-support troubleshooting. I’m trying to understand the supported API surface so I can decide whether the correct architecture is:
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firmware-only relative mouse,
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a Windows companion app using SimConnect,
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a Windows companion app using mouse injection,
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an Input Events / aircraft-specific control layer,
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or some other supported approach.
If there is no supported API for querying or resetting the VR ray/cursor, that is also useful to know. I want to avoid building around assumptions that MSFS does not actually support.
Thanks for any guidance.