CHECKLISTS
A checklist is a list of tasks that should be performed and validated by pilots and aircrew. Its purpose is to improve flight safety by ensuring that no important tasks are forgotten.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, checklists
are made of series of checkpoints
(tasks). Each checkpoint
is an association of a subject
(ex: Parking brake) with an expectation
(ex: Set). Typically checklists
contain different steps
(for example: Pre-flight, Before taxi...), and each step is indirectly composed of several checkpoints
. Checklists
are aircraft-specific, even if some checkpoints
are shared by several aircraft.
When talking about a step
, it must correspond to one of the predefined stepIds
, and might have gameplay implications (for example, when using the teleport function to skip some part of the flight process). Each step
is not visible in-game, but contains one or multiple pages
that are used for display purposes of the checklist
. Pages
have a visible name, and are composed of checkpoints
.
Below you can see an example of a checklist
in-game. The headings "Inside Inspection", "Before starting engines", etc... are pages
, and the "0/n" beside each of them indicates the validated/total number of checkpoints
on that page
.
It is important to note that the user can refer to the checklist
whenever they want, without any constraint. They are free to meet the checklist
expectations
or not, and in the order they want. Several helpers
can be provided to assist the user proceed through the checklist.
You can find a tutorial that explains all the component parts of a checklist in great detail and that also goes through how to create them from the following links:
XML files
Checklist
data can be separated into several files, in *.xml
format. The files are located in a /Checklist
folder, inside the aircraft-specific folder.
As similar checkpoints
can be found in various aircraft checklists
, there is a way to reference shared checkpoint
definitions using a checkpoint library XML file. These files can be written defining any number of checkpoints
and each of these checkpoints
must then have an Id
attribute to be usable in regular checklist files
. Once a checklist library has been created, an aircraft checklist
file can include the file by specifying it's path. Then, checkpoints
can be defined with only a ReferenceId
attribute, containing the Id
of a checkpoint
from said library, in order to re-use the same definition.
It is worth noting that there is a default checkpoint library included as part of the game which you can access in your own projects. This file can be found in the following locations, depending on the type of installation you have:
- Steam:
Users\[USER_NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Official\Steam\fs-base-aircraft-common\CheckpointsLibrary\Asobo_DefaultCheckpointLibrary.xml
- OneStore:
Users\[USER_NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Official\OneStore\fs-base-aircraft-common\CheckpointsLibrary\Asobo_DefaultCheckpointLibrary.xml
More information on the checklist XML can be found from the following two sections: