@Frederf:
There are more callbacks in Falcon than switches in the F-16. You’ll go crazy trying to make sense of them all because some of them are unicorn dust, completely fictional. You can even cause avionics bugs in Falcon by flipping unicorn switches. The cure is to know the F-16 as the real airplane is and then learn what Falcon buttons match real life controls. Pretend you’re sitting in the seat. “I want to press DMS left.” What keyboard key is DMS left? “I don’t have the foggiest clue but I know that’s the switch I want to press!”
This is a much better problem to have than pressing a keyboard shortcut and having no clue how you would do it in a real F-16. When I teach BMS I always use the name of the command, never the default keyboard shortcut. “Press TMS aft.” “What keyboard key is that?” “That’s your problem, not mine.” OK, I’m not that mean but you get the picture. The sooner you’re ‘thinking Viper’ and stop ‘flying a keyboard’ the faster things make sense. Also the keyboard/button shortcuts for these commands are personal and variable. At the end of the day flight lead doesn’t care how you managed to pull the trigger, just that you did. There’s an old trick when you move into a new house and are putting the forks and knives into the drawer for the first time. What drawer? Pretend you have been living there 5 years and go to the drawer to get a fork. Whichever empty drawer you open, that’s where you put them. In the same way, feel free to change the keyboard/shortcuts from default. You are much more likely to remember them if you picked it.
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The BMS Manual.pdf near page 30ish has a nice chart of the HOTAS controls and their general function, what TMS up does, what CMS right does, etc. That’s one step of the learning chain is to go from action “I want to lock the radar” to control “I have to press TMS up.” For a real F-16 pilot that’s the end of the line except the small step “Where in the cockpit is TMS up?” As a Falcon pilot your job is harder. The chain continues to “what callback is TMS up?” and then inside the .key file “what text label is paired with that callback?” Then you have to bind/memorize a keyboard key or joystick button to that control.
So you press Keyboard_AAA which commands the function with text label “BBB” which is associated with callback SimCCC which has a real name DDD which does action EEE. Whew!
To make your life more exciting the .key authors are only human and aren’t consistent with how they label callbacks. The callback is the function that cannot be misspelled. It’s the raw input into Falcon and no creativity is allowed. If you know the callback then you can open the .key file in Notepad and Ctrl-F find it and then discover what the author felt like calling it in the text label. Note that you too are a potential .key file author. There’s no reason you can’t change the text label to your preference. See fork drawer anecdote above.
This makes a lot of sense, and it’s a fantastic reply (as are the previous ones, thanks to everyone). The last part is a big deal, because once I came to the understanding that there were multi-function switches (for instance DMS) which I actually AM able to assign keys to, it became more of a struggle to figure out what exact functions are associated with which directions, and that’s a big help. Thanks!