[WISH] JTac & Coalition freqs on kneeboard

[Elphaba]

Apologies if this has been mentioned, I didn’t find it when I looked.
 

I like that we can see message histories now, but having them in the ‘pause’ menu really doesn’t help when a) you need to input coords or b) you’re in a multiplayer mission. In VR especially this is a nightmare. 
 

Instead, can you please add them to the kneeboard as a page so we can see the jtac info, and all coalition assets freqs by default e.g. all the boat/awacs/tanker tacans and comms freqs without the mission designer having to explicitly put them in the briefing. 
 

We need to be able to access these whilst flying and interacting with the aircraft systems. And this is kind of a relatively simple thing that could be done quite quickly for a massive win. 
 

Thanks

Edited July 12, 2022 by Elphaba

[Tippis]

For the frequencies part, at the very least, that functionality already exists in a handful of modules so pretty much all the work there is already done — it just needs to be moved up from module-specific to universal kneeboards. If you're particularly enterprising and semi-familiar with Lua, you can probably make it happen right now by copying the existing keyboard scripts for those modules.

The tricky part is anything that is added dynamically, where there would have to be functionality to trigger kneeboard script updates at will — again, there are modules that already show that it can be done live, but it is probably a bit trickier and also involves having to add some kind of bind or menu command to handle that. This would also be required for anything JTAC-related, but for that, there would also be the added problem of figuring out which JTAC you're talking to and/or which targets are relevant to you. If not, you'd end up with more coordinates than could fit on a page and with very little to separate them (since JTAC callsigns don't have all that many options) in any slightly complex mission.

[Elphaba]

18 hours ago, Tippis said:

For the frequencies part, at the very least, that functionality already exists in a handful of modules so pretty much all the work there is already done — it just needs to be moved up from module-specific to universal kneeboards. If you're particularly enterprising and semi-familiar with Lua, you can probably make it happen right now by copying the existing keyboard scripts for those modules.

The tricky part is anything that is added dynamically, where there would have to be functionality to trigger kneeboard script updates at will — again, there are modules that already show that it can be done live, but it is probably a bit trickier and also involves having to add some kind of bind or menu command to handle that. This would also be required for anything JTAC-related, but for that, there would also be the added problem of figuring out which JTAC you're talking to and/or which targets are relevant to you. If not, you'd end up with more coordinates than could fit on a page and with very little to separate them (since JTAC callsigns don't have all that many options) in any slightly complex mission.

If the pause menu 'message history' can already show JTAC comms - then it's trivial to put that on a 'special' comms page in the default kneeboard. 

[dawgie79]

I think VAICOM interactive Kneeboard does this.

 

[Tippis]

5 hours ago, Elphaba said:

If the pause menu 'message history' can already show JTAC comms - then it's trivial to put that on a 'special' comms page in the default kneeboard. 

For just the radio message and the nine line, yes, you're probably right. The tricky bit isn't getting the information — it's keeping information out. Now, granted, since the AI JTAC has always been spectacularly brittle and inflexible and incorrectly done, it's been ages since I actually saw it used in an complex multi-target and multi-package environment so I can't recall off the top of my head if it cheats with comms as well and only magically radios to the sender, or if it actually broadcasts the message at a frequency to anyone tuned in. It's that latter issue that would require some extra fiddling in that case.

Curiously, this could actually benefit from having to do a manual kneeboard update: if the script only picked the very last transmission, the pilot would determine whether it was for them or not and whether it should be copied, as opposed to it happening automatically and creating the potential for information overflow.

Edited July 13, 2022 by Tippis