Vote your choice - Clickable Cockpits or Not

[Blackdog_kt]

Guys, you're still missing the point. It's not about clickable cockpits, it's about having the systems modelled in high fidelity and that's not a gimmick, it's realism that will finally take us beyond the easy-mode flying we've been doing all these years.

Yes, easy mode flying and i stand by it.

First of all, WWII cockpits are much simpler than Black Shark's cockpit. Second, startup in most fighters of the time is usually all about flicking 3-10 switches. If you can take the time to study charts and practice energy retention in high altitude fights, you can surely remember the right sequence of flicking a mere 10 switches.
Third, warm-up in normal weather (which is most dogfight servers) takes less than half a minute. All you need is to idle until you get an oil temperature of about 40-50 celsius for most engines (this happens in seconds, even before you've oriented yourself in regards to where the runway is), then you keep your RPM above 1000 to avoid spark-plugs getting fouled, at which point you're already taxiing for takeoff anyway, so the engine will be ready before you'even said "hi" on teamspeak.
Fourth, the run-up procedure is not necessary unless you have random failures modelled and even if it was, all it takes in most of the cases is throttle up to X amount of RPM, cycle the magnetos and watch RPM drop, move the pitch lever to make sure it works and off you go.

Total time from start-up to take-off with realistic systems modelling and a slightly abbreviated version of "by-the-book" procedures? I'd say about the same amount of time it takes you to press "I", taxi to the runway and shove the throttle forward like we do in IL2.
Both are easy and fast, but one is more realistic and immersive.

Originally Posted by KOM.Nausicaa

Voted no. Clickable cockpits belong to a civil flight sim, or a sim that focuses on one plane / helicopter. In my opinion it's making things complicated that should be easy during combat and there are too many different planes and cockpits around.

I can agree with you if you mean that the interfacing should be easy and natural and we should have options to tailor it to our taste. I disagree if by easy you mean "not modelling things that don't directly relate to the shooting part", because in that case we're missing half of what it really was to fly a WWII warbird.

Originally Posted by Romanator21

I voted Yes.

I don't expect Oleg to make a fully clickable cockpit, nor do I want him to spend time and resources doing it at this very moment. However, I think the engine should be constructed in a way to accommodate these options when done by third party developers, or later by Oleg's team.

That said, I probably won't use the fully clickable cockpit except on pre-takeoff or post-flight shutdown or messing with my circuit breakers/electrical switches. Otherwise, I'd like a nice touch-screen monitor That will be a few years at least though.

However, since I can't have a proper fully clickable cockpit, I would like a fully functional cockpit. That means I would like every function to be accessible by keyboard and I would like every instrument to give an accurate and meaningful measurement..

That's my thoughts exactly. Download the Black Shark manual people, i think there's not a single switch or button in there that doesn't correspond to a keyboard or joystick command, or can't be assigned to one. Of course, nobody can remember all those key commands, but the important ones that you need in combat are all mapped to keyboard and stick, the rest are for start-up/shut-down and non-combat stuff things that can easily be done with the mouse, just like Romanator said he would use it. Even more so, the amount of switches on a WWII fighter are probably less than 10% the amount of switches in Black Shark, so anyone with a half-decent HOTAS will not need to use the mouse AT ALL.

The important question is not how the virtual buttons are pressed, but how well the systems of the aircraft are modelled.People who want to press their switches with the mouse can do it with the mouse, people who want to do it with the keyboard or HOTAS can do so as well, what's the problem really?

Well, i think the problem is that some simmers don't want flight sims to become more complex but instead remain more on the game side of things, and focusing on interfacing instead of on the real question is just a smoke-screen to cover this up behind a dislike for a certain user interface. Nothing against them really if that's the way they like it, i just can't see why the rest of us who want something more should be denied it.

It's not like we said "we want this on release", just make the cockpit switches animate correctly and have the correct functions and the community will mod the cockpits to work with whatever interface they want, clickpits or power gloves or HOTAS scripts.

It's not like we said "make this mandatory for everyone" either, it would be one more setting in the difficuly panel that you could turn off if you didn't like or if it wasn't practical for an online scenario.

I just get the feeling that some people are against it, simply because it would mean that they would lose the pride associated with flying "full real" when they turn off the complex systems management options. Well, IL2 full real is not exactly real, just like it's not for any other sim. What matters in any sim is trying to get as close to the real thing as possible for those that want it, while providing enough difficulty options and setttings to turn off certain features for those that don't. The thing is, times have moved on and now there's new products to compare to for the people that want the "complicated, massive, awe-inspiring machinery" experience.

I sincerely feel that if SoW doesn't have adequate modelling of aircraft subsystems, or at least the provision to add it later, it will be just a re-hash of IL2 with prettier graphics and nothing more.