About AutoFoV

This is a plugin for the X-Plane flight simulator, automatically setting the field of view based on the currently loaded aircraft.

Compatibility

AutoFoV is compatible with X-Plane 11 (from version 11.10) and X-Plane 12. Earlier versions of X-Plane are not supported.

• The Windows build has been compiled on Windows 11 using MinGW-w64 10.0.0 (UCRT)
• The Mac build has been compiled on macOS 10.15 "Catalina".
• The Linux build has been compiled on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS

Quick Start Guide

Downloading AutoFoV

You can download AutoFoV from the Release Page of its public GitHub repository. From the Assets section, download the file AutoFoV.zip for the latest version. The files labeled Source Code are not what you want.

Installing AutoFoV

AutoFoV comes in X-Plane's fat plugin format. Simply extract the directory AutoFoV from the zip file and place it as a sub-folder into the Resources/plugins folder of your X-Plane installation.

Windows 8 or 8.1 Users Please Note

This plugin has been compiled using Microsoft's Universal C Runtime (UCRT), which by default is available in Windows 10 and newer versions. To install UCRT on older Windows versions, please cf. to Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows.

Using AutoFoV

AutoFoV allows to define a custom field of view for each aircraft model (i.e. for each .acf file in your X-Plane's aircraft folder and its subfolders). To define a custom field of view, simply create an empty file in the same folder and with the same name as the .acf file, but suffixed with .fov instead of .acf, and populate it with the numeric FoV value you want to use with this aircraft (only digits 0-9 and the decimal dot are allowed).

Example

The default Cessna 172's .acf file path is

Aircraft/Laminar Research/Cessna 172 SP/Cessna_172SP.acf

If you want to customize its FoV, simply create the file

Aircraft/Laminar Research/Cessna 172 SP/Cessna_172SP.fov

and open it with a text editor. Right at the beginning of the file, place the FoV value you want to use with this aircraft. Make sure your text editor saves the file as plain text without byte order mark. A valid file could contain e.g.

65

or

65.0

to configure a custom field of view of 65 degrees.

Configuring AutoFoV

AutoFoV uses a configuration file, stored under Output/autofov/config.txt (relative to X-Plane's root directory). The file looks like this:

# AutoFoV Configuration
# =====================

# Default FoV to be used when no aircraft-specific FoV is defined
fov_default = 60.00

When run for the first time, AutoFoV will detect a default FoV from X-Plane's settings, and use it to initialize this file (if it doesn't exist already). You can adjust the default FoV value to your liking, if the detected value is not what you want.

Building AutoFoV

Prerequisites

• Git 2.14 or newer
• CMake 3.2 or newer
• A copy of the X-Plane SDK, placed in the SDK folder (same level as src)

Windows

• Mingw-w64 for Win64 (https://winlibs.com/)
• Cmder console emulator (recommended, but no strict requirement)

NB: make sure to add the Mingw bin directory to your PATH environment variable

macOS

• Xcode and/or Xcode command line utilities

Linux

• gcc
• GNU make

Get the Source Code

AutoFoV uses XPPL as a submodule. When cloning or updating the AutoFoV sources, you also need to check out the corresponding XPPL submodule.

Fresh Clone

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/daemotron/autofov.git

Alternatively, you can clone and checkout in two separate steps:

git clone https://github.com/daemotron/autofov.git
cd autofov
git submodule update --init --recursive

Update Existing Clone

git pull --recurse-submodules

Update XPPL to the Latest Version

Caution: XPPL updates must be separated from feature development, since they could potentially break existing code.

git submodule update --remote xppl

Compiling

Windows

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ../
mingw32-make

This will create a file called AutoFoV.xpl within your build directory. To package a fat plugin, place this file withing the win_x64 subfolder of the plugin's main directory.

macOS

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make

This will create a file called AutoFoV/mac_x64/AutoFoV.xpl within your build directory, ready to be packaged and shipped.

NB: The Mac plugin is a hybrid build for both, x86_64 and arm64, running natively on both, Intel-based and Silicon-based Mac computers.

Linux

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make

This will create a file called AutoFoV/mac_x64/AutoFoV.xpl within your build directory, ready to be packaged and shipped.