{"id":2360,"date":"2023-01-30T10:14:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T01:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sonicviz.com\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2023-03-28T06:19:51","modified_gmt":"2023-03-27T21:19:51","slug":"location-manager-for-msfs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonicviz.com\/2023\/01\/30\/location-manager-for-msfs\/","title":{"rendered":"Location Manager for MSFS – Development Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Location Manager for MSFS – The Challenge of Enhancing the UI\/UX<\/h1>\n

Following on from my previous post about Aircraft Manager for MSFS \u2013 Development Overview<\/a> , here is a short overview of how the development of Location Manager panned out. To recap what the problem is: MSFS is like an interactive earth simulator, enabled by flying around complex mini-simulations in the form of aircraft across the whole history of flight. The two methods for currently managing locations in MSFS are show below.<\/p>\n

\"Inbuilt<\/a>

Inbuilt MSFS method 1 for location management<\/p><\/div>

\"Inbuilt<\/a>

Inbuilt MSFS method 2 for location management<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no way to save and\/or favorite locations in the sim itself. While you can save locations outside MSFS in all sorts of ways (OneNote, LittleNavMap, Excel, etc) it’s not the most convenient of methods if you want to build up a log of world exploration discoveries for easy access within the simulator. This isn’t the same as loading a saved flight plan either. There are many use cases where you don’t actually want to use a flight plan, but just go to a location and start flying from there. So the intent here was to derive a solution to solve this problem.<\/p>\n

Step 1 – Validate the Technical Approach<\/h2>\n

In development, it’s more efficient if you can leverage past knowledge and skills so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Having just completed Aircraft Manager for MSFS<\/a>, I’d climbed the learning curve on both the MSFS UI framework as well as some Javascript solutions to integrate into that. So it seemed logical to ask, how could I apply that to the unique problem of location management? First off, just as in the previous post, I needed to validate some technical issues before diving into the prototyping stage. This was a very different project from Aircraft Manager, as that relied mainly on the inbuilt aircraft database supplied by the sim. In the case of Location Manager for MSFS, one of the big issues here was we needed to develop a robust way to save locations with associated user data via the inbuilt MSFS UI storage system. There were also unanswered questions as to how robust this storage system is in terms of how much data can be safely stored, on both PC and XBox. I have received some advice from one of the Asobo devs on this (thanks!) but still need a little more clarity, so need to keep an eye on this. In summary, some of the biggest technical issues to be validated were:<\/p>\n