ATC MENU FILTERING
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Dear Members of BMS community
We have right now an internal debate about the ATC call menu.
Since 4.34 , The ATC menus have been filtered so that only the available useful options can be used , depending on the situation.
This was done after i watched many youtube videos were players were a bit lost in the different options.
For instance
For TOWER frequency
On GROUND, only the “Request Departure” call is available
In AIR , all other calls are available BUT the “request Departure”Another option would be to remove entirely those filters and let the players do “bad calls” sometimes , which would probably not be answered anyway by the ATC
Argument for it beeing : in real you can talk and make mistakes
So hence the poll :
Thank you for your contribution
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@mav-jp We advocate for realism. As we would say among our wing, if you make a bad communication, check, correct and speak. Without filtering, please.
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@viper-0 but using menus for ATC is not realistic on the first place and not all of the menu items are as intuitive as actual comms. Voice control like Voice Attack with @SemlerPDX’s profile is the more realistic option and will still allow you to screw up. If I have to actually resort to the menus these days it’s because something funky is going on and the filtering is then handy.
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Same here if you opt for realism go for a Voice Tool and don’t use menus at all.
In terms of usage removing the filtering I see it as just disatracting new users and see no real value for the old guys -
We understand both points of view and we support you guys, we hope that the community dictates and mainly the bms staff
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While I’m all for realism, the reality is that in real world, if I make a bad call on ATC (like calling departure “approach” or “tower”, the ATC personnel will respond and give me the instructions they were going to if I had called them correctly (they’ll also use their correct callsign and if I’m paying attention I would pick up on that and correct on my response).
So for me, having filters doesn’t take away the realism. Just because I “fat finger” a menu command doesn’t mean I would really do that in real life.
Thanks for the filters!
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The ATC menu has a lot of similar calls on different pages, like “Say Again” for various parts of ATC. I think the filtering helps not have to fiddle around too much with those, whereas in reality they’re not something you can make mistakes with.
Ideally speaking having an option to have the filtering on or off is the best solution, I think. It doesn’t really impact anything except your own gameplay even in MP so there’s not any harm to it. If I had to pick one or the other I’d keep the filtering, though.
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@zeus said in ATC MENU FILTERING:
While I’m all for realism, the reality is that in real world, if I make a bad call on ATC (like calling departure “approach” or “tower”, the ATC personnel will respond and give me the instructions they were going to if I had called them correctly (they’ll also use their correct callsign and if I’m paying attention I would pick up on that and correct on my response).
So for me, having filters doesn’t take away the realism. Just because I “fat finger” a menu command doesn’t mean I would really do that in real life.
Thanks for the filters!
This.
I don’t have any IRL flight experience, but I did a boatload of comms when I was in the Navy (pun absolutely intended). Yes, you can (and do, especially while new) make mistakes: say the wrong thing, address the wrong person/watchstation, use the wrong circuit, etc. However, somebody will be all to happy to correct you when that happens, because proper communications are extremely important.
If it were possible to implement something similar in the BMS ATC system, then that would be the best possible immersion. But IRL, nobody listens to a communication and goes “Huh, that was wrong; guess I’ll completely ignore it and do nothing. Hope it wasn’t important.” But, IMHO, the filtering is the next best thing for providing that feedback that you would get IRL, and I found it very helpful while starting out.
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@snake122 said in ATC MENU FILTERING:
… If I have to actually resort to the menus these days it’s because something funky is going on and the filtering is then handy.
I agree - handy to have these menus showing what CAN be utilized to cut down on the TMI and help simplify this one aspect of the sim.
@Snake122 If any of the radio menu lists change, with CORE finished now it will be a painless config file edit for AVCS and patched automagically next time users load VoiceAttack and initialize AVCS4 BMS.
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I don’t think “realism” is the right lense to look at the filtering feature. There is no keyboard comms menu irl, period. Whoever is going for realism, will be using voice recognition or human AWACS/tower. Whether the menu is filtered or not does neither increase nor decrease BMS realism. In the end, typing Q-1 instead of asking AWACS for a picture will never be realistic nor immersive. It is simply a UI
workaround for not having voice recognition or human AWACS/tower.Therefore, I think you should just leave the filtering in as it help new players. Imho even removing it is time that could be spent more meaningfully elsewhere. What some members suggested, i.e. making filtering on/off a setting sounds like overkill and a waste of resources.
It MAY make sense to enable all commands, but display the filtered entries in a different color to simply indicate that these aren’t useful in this particular moment. That, of course, adds the complexity you would need to add to cover “wrong” radio calls. While that may be a thing irl, I believe it is not a much needed feature.
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Hello an option can be to highlight the major commands and keep the existing ones.
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Keep existing. Could filtered, aka ‘Assisted Comms’ be an option? If that is even feasible and or/easy to implement…
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@zeus said in ATC MENU FILTERING:
While I’m all for realism, the reality is that in real world, if I make a bad call on ATC (like calling departure “approach” or “tower”, the ATC personnel will respond and give me the instructions they were going to if I had called them correctly (they’ll also use their correct callsign and if I’m paying attention I would pick up on that and correct on my response).
So for me, having filters doesn’t take away the realism. Just because I “fat finger” a menu command doesn’t mean I would really do that in real life.
Thanks for the filters!
Filters ON, also for me!
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I vote keep the filters!
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I vote “keep it as it is”.
It adds readability and help certainly young users no accustomed to them.
Besides, IRL, you do not mistaking “Request departure clearance” with “Inbound for radar vector” … if so, it is time to see an neuronal specialist. -
I voted to keep the exisiting menu filtering. Mainly because, in my opinion, it helps to standardise what can be communicated to different freqs, (Tower, Ground, Awacs, etc). IRL if an Aviator makes a wrong call, ATC (in most cases) will respond to sort out the wrong call. ISL (in simulation life) I think that this responce would be very sparce, or not be answered at all. Thus it will not help the sim Aviator to understand his mistake.
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@viper-0 said in ATC MENU FILTERING:
@mav-jp We advocate for realism. As we would say among our wing, if you make a bad communication, check, correct and speak. Without filtering, please.
I agree: voice communication.
It would increase realism
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In any cases I suggest not to removes “lines” or “menu pages” depending on flight phases.
If we do so, it will break any Voice Activation software.See what I mean?
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I’m not sure I understand what the suggestion is:
- Remove unavailable options from the menu?
- Leave all options and sorting as is but don’t “grey out” the options even if the call is unavailiable?
If its 1, then I would vote against since it will make voice comms software useless. If its 2, then sounds good! Although this will increase the amount of questions “why does this not work?” among players.
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Apparently this new forum structure doesn’t provide a ‘polling’ option.
I think the arguments FOR continue filtering outweigh the arguments against filtering.