Highlighting
Overview
Highlighting is an experimental system on next for highlighting related animated parts of one's aircraft such as the rudder pedals and the rudder, or the undercarriage lever in the cockpit and the undercarriage itself. It also lists the properties that are used in these animations.
The intention is to enable the controls of an aircraft to be explored visually. For example one can find what controls the steering on a 777 by moving the mouse over the nose-wheel; this will highlight the tiller control in the cockpit. In practise it's easier to do this using an Extra View window so that one can see inside the cockpit at the same time as the external aircraft.
Demo video
See: http://op59.net/fg-highlighting-demo.ogv
Usage
See menu Help / Highlighting which opens the Highlighting dialogue box with an Enabled checkbox. When enabled, moving the mouse over an animated part of the aircraft such as a control surface or cockpit control will highlight the animation, plus any related animations. The dialogue box will also show the properties that are involved in the animation and information about related dialogue boxes.
Details
Highlighting currently works best with YASim aircraft - the system gathers information from YASim about associations between properties (e.g. /controls/flight/flaps and /surface-positions/flap-pos-norm). One can gather similar information from JSBSim but this is not yet working properly.
Information is also gathered from autopilot filters (on the 777 these associate /controls/flight/rudder-nul with /fcs/fbw/yaw/rudder-ratio-out).