Dev diary

Cockpits you can actually reach

In a flat-screen flying game you click a switch with a mouse. In VR you reach for it, and if it's ten centimetres too far away you lean, stretch, and lose the feeling that you're sitting in a real aeroplane.

Early on, a few of our cockpits had exactly that problem. The engine switches in two of the planes sat under the panel where you had to lean right forward to press them, and in another the flaps lever hid behind the throttle. Playtesting found it straight away.

Built around the hand

So every cockpit was rebuilt around one idea: switches go where your hand already is. MASTER, IGNITION, START, the lights and the horn now sit in a switch box beside your seat, the way many small aircraft group them, and the flaps lever and parking brake stand right next to the throttle.

We also check it automatically. Every time the game is built, a test measures the distance from where your hand rests to every switch in every plane, and the build fails if any of them is more than 60 centimetres away. It has already caught one of our own mistakes: a new flaps lever we placed a little too far forward.

Bigger levers, clearer labels

Small aircraft have chunky levers you can find without looking, so ours do too: a 13 cm flaps lever with a flap-shaped grip and a gated plate marked UP, 1 and FULL, and a red T-handle for the parking brake.

And the seat starts a comfortable metre from the panel in every plane, so the dials are sharp and everything falls to hand from the moment you climb in.

Blue skies, from the WingGlide hangar

P.S. If something in a cockpit feels out of reach to you, tell us. That's exactly the kind of thing we want to fix.