My experience with mouse-activated featrures in FSX is that it takes too much time lining up the cursor with the control and activating it. A real pilot knew where the controls and switches were by memory and could activate them by feel using both hands without having to look, or at least with only peripheral vision.

If you speed up the mouse movement, you inevitably overshoot the control and spend a lot of time backtracking. This might be an interesting scenario for a full-real start of a bomber using complex engine management - once. After that - trust me - you will be back to the keyboard :)

We have both worlds. I like 'em both.

You sir are a prize numpty.

Just because you don't like it does not mean its useless. Is pressing F10 to much effort for you? :roll:

I use it constantly and cannot understand why anyone would have an issue with it.

Cuz this game is full of 40somethings that are afraid of change...lol

Hmmm,strange, because i use it all the time for flying full switch and it helps me a lot.

CoD's system is excellent, it gives us the option to use any way we want and it's switchable mid-flight.

I can map time-critical controls to keyboard and stick and still not have a million different shortcuts to remember, because the secondary controls are activated with the mouse. Instead of having to think key-commands, i just think cockpits. I have those dials right in front of my face, why should i have to remember that, for example, ctrl alt B + turns the altimeter calibration button clockwise and ctrl alt B - turns it counter-clockwise?

Sure, you'll say it's not important, you can see the ground, etc. Well, it's still early days but there's loads of stuff it would be useful for in the near future, especially when trying to land in a thunderstorm when we get the dynamic weather module implemented. Radio navigation, radar equipped fighters, night flying and so on, they all require the use of extra instruments with their own controls. I'll be damned if i have to remember a bunch of extra keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease radar gain, range and what not.

The mouse-over tooltips are also very useful to check instruments in a hurry without squinting or going to zoom view.

I flew a 110 sortie yesterday with CEM and temperature effects enabled and it helped me a great deal. I would just look to the side, mouse over the little instruments in the engine nacelle and get an instant read-out of my oil temps. Then, after combat i opened the map, estimated a rough course back to base, click-and-hold on the repeater compass to turn the compass card and off we go, no need to keep the map open or try to make out the numbers on the compass card, just align aircraft icon on the compass so it points straight up.

This new sim is so complex under the hood, with a lot of stuff that's not readily apparent yet to most people, that it will take a lot of following real world methods to get any success in the long run.

What i'm saying is that to fly CoD at high realism settings you need a lot of controls, so enabling mouse interaction is the only way to go if we want everyone to be able to fly at full switch.
Not everyone has a warthog hotas but everyone has a mouse and since it's optional i don't see anything wrong with it.

It would be wrong if it wasn't an option, because then it would amount to the developer team saying "hey, we made this awesome game that you can't fly at full difficulty and expect to succeed, unless you have the spare cash to buy 4 separate controllers or build an entire home cockpit".

That's why people advocated the click-pit interface, not because it's the best but because it's the cheapest and most readily available control device to everyone. It's either click-pits, expensive peripherals or simplified aircraft modeling. The last one is not an option, the other two are and each one of us can choose between them as we see fit.

I fail to see the problem here.

Maybe I read Baron wrong but I think he's really happy that the dweeps insisted on clickable cockpits. Scarcasm get's sometimes lost in translation. I too think we have the best of both worlds. Use the clickables when you're just practicing procedures etc etc. Bind it to the keyboard or joystick for combat.

Indeed that is how I read it as well. He was kinda trying to say "I thought this was a silly idea, but in the end I wan to thank you guys for insisting because it adds a lot more than I expected."

Obviously that is my interpretation of what he said, so I could be wrong.

U and BigC are absolutly right :)


Sry if it came across in the wrong way.

Personally I love the clickable Cockpits.

The clickable Cockpits are a great Enhancement of IL2 Series and i really
hope that Luthier will increase the clickable Elements in all Cockpits. I
really love the new Engine Management and what happend if you do some
things wrong (for example Oil Cooler)

Oh...