Silly numbers of significant digits shown in Dev Mode UI and written to cfg files

Questions & Community Discussions
1

Why does Dev Mode insist on showing floating point numbers with a fairly ridiculous amount of significant digits, and write numbers to the .cfg files in that way? Surely the relevant precision would be two or perhaps three digits in most cases. It just a waste of precious screen space and makes reading the information harder.

One difference is physical locations, coordinates. The modeller might well know the exact locations of points on the aircraft down to tenth of an inch precision, from official manufacturer information.

But for other numbers displayed in the UI and stored in the .cfg files, three significant digits would be enough. Having numbers like 13.958436 or 41.799999 in an engines.cfg, for instance, is just silly. They could well be rounded to three significant digits. Much easier to read. And while at it, the cfg file writer could add some whitespace, like after commas in table lines and around = signs.

2

To give a concrete example of how readable and nice .cfg files can look if one edits them manually and insists on spending time on cosmetics and readability, just for one’s own sanity/amusement, here are some parts from a flight_model.cfg and engines.cfg I am working on:

; Wheels
; Nose wheel
point.0 =  1,  16.65,   0,    -7.53, 300, 0, 0.97, 180, 0.2,  3.5, 0.7, 5, 5, 0, 250, 280, 0
; Main wheels
point.1 =  1,  -0.53,   6.54, -7.53, 300, 2, 1.42,   0, 0.2,  3.5, 0.7, 5, 5, 2, 250, 280, 0
point.2 =  1,  -0.53,  -6.54, -7.53, 300, 1, 1.42,   0, 0.2,  3.5, 0.7, 5, 5, 3, 250, 280, 0

; Pure guesswork. Vaguely based on data from other add-on aircraft.
ONELINE(<<
n1_and_mach_on_thrust_table =
     0: 0:    2,
     0: 0:    0,
    40: 0.05: 0.1,
    45: 0.07: 0.1,
    50: 0.08: 0.1,
    70: 0.2:  0.3,
    80: 0.4:  0.6,
    85: 0.5:  0.7,
    90: 0.7:  1.0,
    95: 0.8:  1.1,
   100: 1.0:  1.2,
   110: 1.2:  1.4
>>)

In the engines.cfg case I run the file through a preprocessor so that I can split lines. (Running the preprocessor is a single click, or actually, a single command line command.) The preprocessor will join them up into a single line as the sim wants. This way I can have the rows of tables on actually separate rows and align them nicely.

3

But yeah, my dream is that MSFS 2030 will take care of all this and offer an actually nice GUI-only way to do these things. Maybe integrate Dev Mode into Visual Studio even? And instead of horrible textual tables with numbers one could use a graphical tool to draw the curves one is trying to express… After all, some of Dev Mode’s debug windows show information as curves, it wouldn’t be that odd if the aircraft developer could also input such data as curves.

1 Like
4

Hello @tml ,
For posts like these, you can create ideas instead, that people will be able to vote on and these will have much greater visibility.

Regards,
Boris

5

Thanks, good idea. Will do. Asking for this topic to be removed, apparently I can’t do it myself?

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