Virtual Cockpit

Panels & Gauges

 

Overview

 

The panels are drawn in your virtual cockpit by being applied as a texture. This texture is made on the fly by Flightsim from some information stored in the panel.cfg. So lets have a look in there. We are interested in the VCockpit sections. Here is an extract from the Cessna 172 panel.cfg

[VCockpit01]

size_mm=512,512

pixel_size=512,512

texture=$C172s_1

background_color=0,0,0

visible=0

 

gauge00=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Nav-Comm 1, 0, 0, 205, 77

gauge01=Bendix_King_Radio!Bendix-King Radio Nav-Comm 2, 206, 0, 205, 77

 

pixel_size = the dimensions of your texture (remember powers of 2 here)

size_mm = i have this the same as the pixel size

texture = this is the name of the texture that will be created

 

First things first

 

Before we do anything else we need something to draw the panel on.

This can be any object you like, but i use a plane then place it against my model.

Here i have made two planes on for my main panel and one for a radio stack

 

When making the planes/textures ensure they both ave the same ratio, for example a texture of 512x256 has a ratio of 2 to1 so your obejct will need a 2 to 1 ratio such as 20 inches x 10 inches. This will ensure you gauges are drawn correctly. Talking of textures......

 

A Dummy Texture

 

 So that we can map this 'Dynamic' texture that flightsim makes onto our objects in gmax we need to make a dummy texture with the same name as the texture flightsim will make. This can just be a blank image with (to be safe) the same dimensions as the flightsim created texture, but you can put something on it if you want to identify it easier in GMAX.

my two dummy textures

 

Once the dummy textures are made they just need applying to the objects in GMAX

applied in GMAX

 

This is all we need to do in GMAX at this point in time

 

Define the texure for flightsim to create

 

I`m going to use cfgedit to define my panels (available to download for free, from flightsim.com and many other places), you don`t have to use cfgedit (fsedit seems to mess this up though) you could write the panel.cfg completely by hand. But for easier gauge placement i would recommend cfg edit thanks to for giving me this idea.

 

Open up cfgedit then create a new panel, call it anything you like, i am going to call it temp.cfg

 

If you have not already done so then in cfgedits option menu change the fs directory to your fs2004 directory.

 

If you want a background image to your panel the select one, if not just select your dummy texture for the background. For my main panel i will have a backround

background image for my main panel

 

Next to make sure the gauges are placed right on the texure goto the properties in the window menu and change size_mm y, i use the same values for x and y as the texture size in pixels, in this case 512 x 512.

After doing that you need to place your gauges on the panel. I`m not going to go into a tutorial on cfgedit here, but its easy enougth to pick up.

gauges applied to panel

 

Thats my main panel done, but now i need to do the radiostack, so in the window menu choose add new window and as i am not going to use a background image for this window, i will use my dummy texture for the radio stack for the background image to get the dimensions easly.

Remember to set the size_mm for this window as well, because my radiostack is 256x512 pixels i am using 256x512 mm.

Add the gauges as in the main window.

radio stack with gauges

 

Now save your panel then you can exit cfgedit.

 

Open up the panel cfg you just made in wordpad or something( temp.cfg) and also open the panel.cfg for you aircraft.

 

In your aircrafts panel.cfg you need to add 2 vcocpit sections like so...

 

[VCockpit01] <-- Main panel

file=back.bmp <-- Leave this out if you don`t want a background image

size_mm=512,512

pixel_size=512,512

texture=$main <-- name of your dummy texture

background_color=0,0,0

visible=0

 

[VCockpit02] <-- radio stack

size_mm=256,512

pixel_size=256,512

texture=$radio

background_colour=0,0,0

visable=0

 

then cut the gauge sections from the main window section of your temp.cfg and paste them into the VCockpit01 section in your panel.cfg and do the same for the radiostack and VCockpit02.

 

Obviously save your panel.cfg

 

Now export your model from gmax

 

then load up flightsim and sit in the virtual cockpit, you should see something like this..

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