P J Dunbar
January 18th, 2006, 11:24
To Hubbabuba, Ivan, Guppanui and the others,
Having recently downloaded some of Pentti Kurkinen's BF-109Gs I just wondered if he had actually built a CFS1 version of those planes equiped with a real Virtual Panel. Joe Amodea says in his Dynamic Virtual Cockpit tutorial:
The first time I remember experiencing such a virtual cockpit - with all the needles and dials spinning around in virtual flight - was inside the cockpit of the native Combat Flight Simulator aircraft. It was then that I began to covet that kind of environment, some two years and more ago now. I saw something that I really wanted to have!
While I took up the hobby of re-painting or texture art creation, I kept waiting to see the first add-on with the DVC.
But we all waited in vain, didn’t we?
“It must take some magic not available to the average wizards in the flightsim community,” I thought. Some day perhaps, sigh!
And some day is here, thanks in good measure to Pentti Kurkinen
A bit further we read:
It was there that I almost missed it. The post by Pentti, announcing that he was finishing up a tutorial on building CFS/CFS2 aircraft using a hybrid system of constructing the individual parts with AF99®, but assembling them manually with SCASM coding and compilation techniques. Within that tutorial (available on line at the above site) you will find the essential knowledge that, one weekend in November, I applied to my FSDS project, Schuftie.
Except for CFS stock aircrafts, the only real dynamic virtual panel I've ever seen in CFS1 was in Alain Breton's Bréguet 693. When he sent me a copy of this model he explained he could get to this result by designing the aircraft with Flight Simulator Design Studio as a CFS2 model then compiling into SCASM and reworking it as a CFS1 model.
As Pentti Kurkinen's BF109G is concerned, the outside is beautiful and very detailed, but as virtual cockpit I only saw that the canopy framework was textured inside as well as a polygon with a texture of the gauges and a very basically represented gunsight. Has Pentti Kurkinen made another version I haven't seen? What I've seen can't be called a dynamic virtual cockpit as we find in CFS stock planes.
So I just wondered why amongst the number of CFS add-ons that have been made (freeware and commercial all together) only one freeware designer, Alain Breton, has until now succeeded to endow his planes with real Virtual cockpits.
Now let's pay attention to one of the stock aiplanes Panel.cfg file, the Hurricane's for instance. Here is what we find in this file, concerning the virtual panel :
[Vcockpit01]
Background_color=1,1,1
size_mm=256,256
visible=0
window_size= 0.402, 0.534
pixel_size=256,256
texture=$Hurricane_I
window_pos= 0.299, 0.466
gauge00=Hurricane_1!Turn_Indicator, 1,0,65,65
gauge01=Hurricane_1!Starter, 81,110,33,33
gauge02=Hurricane_1!Oil_Pressure, 96,3,30,58
gauge03=Hurricane_1!Heading_Indicator, 1,126,61,80
gauge04=Hurricane_1!Fuel_Warning, 7,212,21,34
gauge05=Hurricane_1!Fuel, 131,201,51,52
gauge06=Hurricane_1!Engine_Temperature, 37,202,53,54
gauge07=Hurricane_1!Boost_Pressure, 192,62,59,59
gauge08=Hurricane_1!Altimeter, 128,2,65,71
gauge09=Hurricane_1!Vertical_Speed, 188,119,65,69
gauge10=Hurricane_1!Tachometer, 3,66,60,59
gauge11=Hurricane_1!Oil_Temperature, 64,142,55,55
gauge12=Hurricane_1!Magneto, 94,200,33,56
gauge13=Hurricane_1!Fuel_Selector, 125,73,55,57
gauge14=Hurricane_1!Flaps, 68, 2 ,24,57
gauge15=Hurricane_1!Clock, 72,61,47,47
gauge16=Hurricane_1!Attitude, 121,131,65,66,FORCE_TRANS
gauge17=Hurricane_1!Airspeed, 188,189,64,65
gauge18=Hurricane_1!Gear, 196,0,55,63
Those who have experienced Flight Simulator Design Studio and perhaps already created VC panels in CFS2, FS2002 or Fs2004 will understand that the first part of the above paragraph is refering to a transparent or invisible square polygon on which the VC's gauges are located. This square part which has nothing to do with the visible background of the panel has been assigned a kind of fictious texture called $Hurricane_I and it stands a little in front of the visible panel background (from the the pilot's point of view, of course)
A square .BMP having been created and renamed as $Hurricane_I ( the .BMP extension must be deleted and the lenght of the name doesn't matter as long as it begins with $) it will be accurately assigned to the above mentioned transparent square back ground part and eventualy be deleted (that's why I would consider this texture as somewhat fictious as it only helps as a reference to position the gauges in the VC.)
In the second part of this paragraph you can see the co-ordinated positions of the different gauges in the square of which size and properties are defined in the first part of VC paragraph.
I hope all these considerations were not too toilsome to follow. I personaly haven't got any experience nor practice of AF99, but I just wondered why this method could not be applied to CFS1 aircraft design.
Greetings,
Pol.
Having recently downloaded some of Pentti Kurkinen's BF-109Gs I just wondered if he had actually built a CFS1 version of those planes equiped with a real Virtual Panel. Joe Amodea says in his Dynamic Virtual Cockpit tutorial:
The first time I remember experiencing such a virtual cockpit - with all the needles and dials spinning around in virtual flight - was inside the cockpit of the native Combat Flight Simulator aircraft. It was then that I began to covet that kind of environment, some two years and more ago now. I saw something that I really wanted to have!
While I took up the hobby of re-painting or texture art creation, I kept waiting to see the first add-on with the DVC.
But we all waited in vain, didn’t we?
“It must take some magic not available to the average wizards in the flightsim community,” I thought. Some day perhaps, sigh!
And some day is here, thanks in good measure to Pentti Kurkinen
A bit further we read:
It was there that I almost missed it. The post by Pentti, announcing that he was finishing up a tutorial on building CFS/CFS2 aircraft using a hybrid system of constructing the individual parts with AF99®, but assembling them manually with SCASM coding and compilation techniques. Within that tutorial (available on line at the above site) you will find the essential knowledge that, one weekend in November, I applied to my FSDS project, Schuftie.
Except for CFS stock aircrafts, the only real dynamic virtual panel I've ever seen in CFS1 was in Alain Breton's Bréguet 693. When he sent me a copy of this model he explained he could get to this result by designing the aircraft with Flight Simulator Design Studio as a CFS2 model then compiling into SCASM and reworking it as a CFS1 model.
As Pentti Kurkinen's BF109G is concerned, the outside is beautiful and very detailed, but as virtual cockpit I only saw that the canopy framework was textured inside as well as a polygon with a texture of the gauges and a very basically represented gunsight. Has Pentti Kurkinen made another version I haven't seen? What I've seen can't be called a dynamic virtual cockpit as we find in CFS stock planes.
So I just wondered why amongst the number of CFS add-ons that have been made (freeware and commercial all together) only one freeware designer, Alain Breton, has until now succeeded to endow his planes with real Virtual cockpits.
Now let's pay attention to one of the stock aiplanes Panel.cfg file, the Hurricane's for instance. Here is what we find in this file, concerning the virtual panel :
[Vcockpit01]
Background_color=1,1,1
size_mm=256,256
visible=0
window_size= 0.402, 0.534
pixel_size=256,256
texture=$Hurricane_I
window_pos= 0.299, 0.466
gauge00=Hurricane_1!Turn_Indicator, 1,0,65,65
gauge01=Hurricane_1!Starter, 81,110,33,33
gauge02=Hurricane_1!Oil_Pressure, 96,3,30,58
gauge03=Hurricane_1!Heading_Indicator, 1,126,61,80
gauge04=Hurricane_1!Fuel_Warning, 7,212,21,34
gauge05=Hurricane_1!Fuel, 131,201,51,52
gauge06=Hurricane_1!Engine_Temperature, 37,202,53,54
gauge07=Hurricane_1!Boost_Pressure, 192,62,59,59
gauge08=Hurricane_1!Altimeter, 128,2,65,71
gauge09=Hurricane_1!Vertical_Speed, 188,119,65,69
gauge10=Hurricane_1!Tachometer, 3,66,60,59
gauge11=Hurricane_1!Oil_Temperature, 64,142,55,55
gauge12=Hurricane_1!Magneto, 94,200,33,56
gauge13=Hurricane_1!Fuel_Selector, 125,73,55,57
gauge14=Hurricane_1!Flaps, 68, 2 ,24,57
gauge15=Hurricane_1!Clock, 72,61,47,47
gauge16=Hurricane_1!Attitude, 121,131,65,66,FORCE_TRANS
gauge17=Hurricane_1!Airspeed, 188,189,64,65
gauge18=Hurricane_1!Gear, 196,0,55,63
Those who have experienced Flight Simulator Design Studio and perhaps already created VC panels in CFS2, FS2002 or Fs2004 will understand that the first part of the above paragraph is refering to a transparent or invisible square polygon on which the VC's gauges are located. This square part which has nothing to do with the visible background of the panel has been assigned a kind of fictious texture called $Hurricane_I and it stands a little in front of the visible panel background (from the the pilot's point of view, of course)
A square .BMP having been created and renamed as $Hurricane_I ( the .BMP extension must be deleted and the lenght of the name doesn't matter as long as it begins with $) it will be accurately assigned to the above mentioned transparent square back ground part and eventualy be deleted (that's why I would consider this texture as somewhat fictious as it only helps as a reference to position the gauges in the VC.)
In the second part of this paragraph you can see the co-ordinated positions of the different gauges in the square of which size and properties are defined in the first part of VC paragraph.
I hope all these considerations were not too toilsome to follow. I personaly haven't got any experience nor practice of AF99, but I just wondered why this method could not be applied to CFS1 aircraft design.
Greetings,
Pol.