Size of tactical display?

[Vogelscheuche]

I find that in ETO the tactical display is too small for my liking and I remember someone telling how to change this. I'm unable to find the info here now, there's just too many thousands of posts and the search doesn't yield any results.

Could someone explain how to do this again?

[Frosty]

Hey Vogelscheuche,

Try this download: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/downloads/download.php?lloc=downloads&FileID=9266

If I remember correctly, it has instructions to alter the size of the TD (as well as giving you a new one... :d)

[Vogelscheuche]

Thanks but this seems to pertain to a "bombsight"? I don't want a bombsight, I just want to make the Tactical Display a little bigger.

[noelberrier]

Look for the following lines in your ViewUI.xml (Apps Data\...) :

<TacticalDisplay BGIMage="tactical_display.dds" BGPos="0 0" BGSize="512 512" BGScale=".25" BackColor="0x1f0000FF" Mode="0"/>
<TacticalDisplayMetric BGIMage="tactical_display.dds" BGPos="0 0" BGSize="128 128" BGScale="1.2" BackColor="0x1f0000FF" Mode="0"/>

[flyer01]

I find that in ETO the tactical display is too small for my liking and I remember someone telling how to change this. I'm unable to find the info here now, there's just too many thousands of posts and the search doesn't yield any results.

Could someone explain how to do this again?

If you want the tactical display that is in the out of box CFS3 go to its main folder and copy and paste your ViewUI.xml in to your main ETO folder and over write the old one or save it somewhere. Then go to your documents and settings/(your computers name)/appilication date/ microsoft. Find your ETO file (what ever you named it) and delete the ViewUI.xml. When you start the game it will make a new one and you will see the same tactical display as the out of box CFS3.
hope this helps, flyer01

[Frosty]

Thanks but this seems to pertain to a "bombsight"? I don't want a bombsight, I just want to make the Tactical Display a little bigger.

It's not a bombsight but the TD dressed up as a bombsight to enable bombing by radar. I was hoping that you'd read through the Readme to find what you needed to change in order to make your TD bigger. I had no time this morning to give you full instructions...

But to answer your question:
Noel is pointing you in the right direction. Think of the TD as a texture seen through a 'window'. BGsize tells CFS3 the size of the texture used for the TD, eg .128x128 or 256x256 and so on. BGscale controls the size of the window by multiplying it's entry with the texture size, eg. a factor of "1,0" does nothing because 1 times Q still is Q. So any number higher than 1,0 makes the TD bigger and numbers below 1,0 make it smaller.

If you would enlarge the texture size entry (BGsize) while keeping the window (BGscale) the same, you 'll only see a part of the TD's texture. If you enlarge the window, you 'll see the texture much better (=bigger) but it's resolution still remains the same. If you enlarge both, you can have a bigger TD with a better resolution at the same time. That is what was done for the 'bombsight'. If I remember correctly it's texture (BGscale) is 512x512 while the window (BGscale) is 1,2. That would give something like 512 * 1,2 = 614,4. On my 1280*1024 monitor that 's a TD of about half the screen.

A second thing might be of importance: There are two viewui.xml files in CFS3. The first one resides in the root folder of CFS3, " Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Combat Flight Simulator 3\viewui.xml" while the second one can be found in "Drive:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Microsoft\CFS3\ViewUI.xml" - note the difference in spelling. The red one seems to function as a template for the green one, meaning that any changes made to the green one can be undone by simply deleting the file. On starting CFS3 again, the program will build a new one based on the red one. Any changes made to the red one are therefore 'semipermanent'. They can only be undone by editing it back to it's original state (of course, you can also replace it with the unaltered backup that you - as a good computer user - would have made...)

Hope it all helps - if not, let me know!

[Vogelscheuche]

Thanks guys! I've now got a TAC that I can see much better!