I’m not sure if these will make it into X-Plane 9.30 (we’re trying to close down features, but it doesn’t do much good to hold off features that help people make airplanes) but…while I was in Italy I created a few more manipulator types.

The set of manipulators let you change the value of a dataref directly with a mouse-click – the various flavors control how the dataref is changed.
These manipulators are the natural corollary to the command manipulator, which runs a command on a click.
Why have both? Commands are good, but they don’t cover 100% of sim functionality (just like datarefs don’t cover 100% of sim functionality).  By having both, it will be possible to control switches and buttons that are best accessed by a dataref change.
For the basics on commands vs. datarefs, see here.
The generic instruments already write to both commands (via the trigger instrument) and datarefs (via the rotary instrument) – these new manipulators provide the same functionality for 3-d cockpits.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.