homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II New Views

Congratulations to the team and the testers for raising the standard of BoB yet again. I love those clouds and the Spitfire seems a lot smoother. Thanks also for the new QS missions.

I seem to be having difficulty getting the new views to operate.

I am typing this from work so forgive me if it is not accurate.

The new zoom keys activated by the shift button and from memory w,e,r,t. I cannot get these to function.

I see in the keycard that zoom functions are chorded on F9,F10,F11,F12. When I try these I get something, but not quite what I expected. Could someone confirm what keys I should be using?

What I would like to do is have a similar setup to what I have in IL-2 with FOV- and FOV+ mapped to a wheel on my throttle. I have this setup now but it is not as smooth or as quick as I would like. That is why I am keen to try the new views.

Also reading the manual I came across a reference to an instrument panel view, which I think was Shift-f. But this brings up a FPS line on the top of the screen. Is there an instrument look view or did I read this incorrectly?

Thanks,
Poyungan

poyungan..

You have an untrue keyguide. The w,e,r,t keys have no zoom function, nor Shift functions except Shift-T which is "Toggle Padlock Diamond".

The last updated keyguide can be found in the Docs folder in BoBv098. This is true except for Win Amp keys.

These (SHIFT-F9,F10,F11,F12) keys change the FOV (field of view) from within the cockpit. More to give the user a different head-eye position for instruments/sight views. They are zoom keys in this fashion, but perhaps not what you are used to.

I use an X45 and tried to map zooms (Control-Keypad - and Control-Keypad +) with less than optimal success upon my throttle #2 wheel.
What I do for in cockpit zoom is use the Shift-F12 toggle mapped to a joystick combo. (Pinkie + Fire button A switch) I usually use a default FOV of 70, but switch to a FOV of 60 when closing to target.

For placing new objects into the game, I use the mouse wheel for zoom which works well.

Confused?

Shift-F will indeed give you an FPS indicator. This a new feature from v0973.
Instrument view glance...uhmmm I think there is one, at least I have heard of such key combination. I must confess that my thumb hovers over my joystick hat switch, and if I need to glance down at the lower portion of the instrument panel my thumb just pans the hat down a bit. When I want to snap back to forward, my thumb moves 1/2 inch over to the "reset view (forward)" joystick switch.

If anyone knows what the "snap to instrument view" keys combo is, tell me. I am the Keyguide caretaker of the BDG, and duty bound to update it and report all functions. If I have been slacking and not performing this duty, I beg forgiveness to all for my failure to perform duties that are expected of me.

Maybe I have been listening to too much Hawai'ian slack key guitar music, which I love near as much as Kentucky bluegrass or Irish fiddle!

Aloha!

Bad news, folks: The manual is still broken regarding keystrokes. Poyungan is just quoting the manual. The font for the error has changed, but the error is the same (well, almost). Instead of Shift-F7...Shift-F12, it says Shift-w...Shift-y; in the last release, it just said "s w...s y". There is also reference to "c(keypad)p" and "c(keypad)m", which I believe should read "ctrl-[keypad-plus]" and "ctrl-[keypad-minus]". I am rather disappointed, as I would have though this was one of the first things to get fixed after the last release, considering how many people were confused by it. I urge the BDG to get this fixed before the CD goes out in PCPilot magazine.

Poyungan, the instrument view is "keypad enter". (In my manual it reads "keypad f". There is, of course, no such thing as a keypad f.)

Actually, I would like to get a working manual reference to the keystrokes myself, as it is really a pain trying to read it when some of the errors are impenetrable. For instance, what should "Shift-z" actually be? I believe the "Roving Cam" keys are also wrong, though I'm not sure what they are supposed to be, but I see a small-font "a", which I'm guessing should be perhaps an "alt"?

Oh, I should also mention I am using Acrobat Reader 4, which looks to be a bit old, that might be part of the problem, but I'm guessing I'm not the only person who doesn't keep all his plug-ins right up to date.

D*mn .

Sorry about that. We will make a new one asap.

For now, use the v098_keycard.jpg that is in the docs folder and ignore the keystrokes from the manual.

Manoholo! Stickman,and thanks to the others for clearing it up.

Ummmm...I hope that means "Thanks" in Hawaiian and not something like, "Your Grandmother wears Army boots!"

We have a squad member from Hawaii and I think this is what he says. He seems friendly enough.

I appreciate the update. I am sure it won't take much to change the manual.

I like to have the FOV set wide for general flying. This helps mimic peripheral vision, but renders the instrument panel unreadable. Hence my question of the snap-to-instrument view. Keypad Enter works well enough, thanks PV, but it would be better it were more of a closeup view. Can this be adjusted in the BDG file?

In theory I should be able to reach the minimum and maximum FOV with FOV- and FOV+ mapped to a wheel. I have also mapped it to a HAT and it works OK, but the control is not as precise as it could be.

In practice I cannot reach the maximum FOV with the wheel. I will need to do more testing. I will try the F12 view.

I enjoy messing around with programming the Cougar almost as much as I like flying. Previously in BoB I was plagued by freezes and CTDs which made changing settings a real chore. The latest version from the BDG seems to have stopped a lot of this but not eradicated them completely.

I have just received TrackIR and that should keep me busy for some time.

Salute!
Poyungan.

If you wanted to change the FOV quickly so that you can see the instrs then that's possible with the FOV toggle key (can't remember which that is off the top of my head). There's a 'look up' snap view that I use for the mirror (sticky + Up I think). Is there no 'look down'?

Poyungan..

That would be Mahalo!

Likely he is. Folks around here are mostly friendly to each other. I've lived in 3 other States and travelled throughout all the western United States since 1973.
I've never seen more courteous drivers. At least in my section of the city, Waipahu, which is mostly all working class Filipino, Samoan, and Japanese folk, in that order. Waipahu is looked down upon by most others as a kind of ghetto. Whatever. My kind of folks, though. Mostly first or second generation Americans.

Every day after work I go to the old, small family owned (Chinese) grocery store near home. After my purcahse, I wait to pull onto street as a line of only 6 or 8 cars start passing by in my desired lane. Never fails, but one of the drivers stops and waves me in ahead of him! I was shocked the first time this happened.
Needless to say I practice this courtesy myself now. Can't remember when I heard someone blow their horn.

I'm happy to have discovered this thread. Having recently resolved to actually read through the BDG manual, I too was wondering about some of the odd key assignments mentioned, especially the glance-at-instrument key. Here's what the 0.98 BDG manual states on my machine, viewed in Acroread6:
I created a keys.xml with keyboard mapper and looked for this assignment to no avail. Has anyone else had better luck?

I can tell you that it should read "the `enter' key on the keypad", but I don't know how it managed to come out as "f". By the way, if you have the keymapper, you can interrogate it to find out what keys are used for a command; unfortunately, you have to know the command name used by the game (and thus the keymapper), and these names are not always obvious. The name for the instrument-view key is "instview", which seems relatively obvious once you see it, but I found it out just now by clicking the "what key is this?" function in the keymapper followed by the keypad-enter key, so it told me. The reverse process is to highlight the command name in the list, and the key name appears in the middle window at the bottom. The keyname for the instview command shows as "j_enter". Then find the same key name immediately above in the keyname list, and highlight it, and the help window in the upper left tells you that j_enter means "Enter on the keypad". Of course this is hardly a satisfactory substitute for a correctly printed manual! Ah, well, hopefully one will be available shortly...

Thanks to your detailed explanation PV1, I was able to get this working nicely. The keypad enter wasn't doing anything for me, and it turns out my keys.xml didn't have INSTVIEW mapped at all. I added it and now the function works. I wish you could specify a particular zoom level it would always use, since they gauges aren't always readable if I'm at a wide or narrow FOV. Something for the wishlist I guess; it's still a big help.

I was wrong in my previous post. I don't have the keymapper utility, but rather enabled GET_KEYMAPS_FROM_FILE in bdg.txt. I unable to find the keymapper on the BDG website, either manually or using the search feature. Is it still available?

musk..

Retro's keymapper tool is at the BDG site.
-Web Links
-retro's great BoB page
-Tools

The v097 one works with v098 also.

Aloha!