Simviation Forum - My simpit's instrument panel problem?

Nov 25^th, 2003 at 11:38pm

bailey_girl Offline
Colonel
Minnesota, USA

Posts: 21

I posted this in the panel design forum as well. My homebuilt flight simulator will utilize an lcd projector to display the outside view and a basic crt monitor to display the instrument panel view. My video card supports dual monitors which will allow me to drag seperate fs9 view windows to each monitor. FS9 supports hardware acceleration for both monitors including the 3D rendered main instrument panels.
The use of dual monitors does of course lower the performance. My questions are: If stretched across my entire CRT monitor, will the instrument/guages view
cause a significant drop in performance/framerates of the simulation. Stretching the instrument panel of course drops the resoloution and makes it look sloppy.
Is there a way around this? Is there a way to design a panel that includes only the guages with nothing in between but black space? Would such a simple design improve performance? Is there a way to enlarge the guages of the panel? I will take a look at the popular cfgedit program later this week to see if this might solve my problems. Right now I know nothing about it. ???
Thanks

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Reply #1 - Nov 26^th, 2003 at 12:35pm

JBaymore Offline
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Under the curse of the
hombuilt cockpit!

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Bailey_Girl,

Another approach might be to run two or more separate programs on your PC to get the instruments on a separate monitor. The downside to this is that the more stuff running on one machine.... the more "load" on the processor and video card.

In writing VB6 code for some stand alone gauge files for my homebuild cockpit........ for testing and debugging purposes I run the gauge program(s) in a window(s) on the same screen as FS2004....all running off the same machine at the same time. It works OK.

These stand alone "glass cockpit" gauge programs are really made to be run on separate PC's hooked to a network and interfaced to FS2004 via FSUIPC and WideFS. But they WILL run on the same machine at the same time.

So you might start fs2004, use the view that is JUST the front "out the windscreen" view for the main sim....and put it on monitor A........ and start external glass cockpit gauge programs on the SAME computer and drag them onto monitor B.

See the other threads here in this forum on "glass cockpits" for more info on getting existing freeware external gauge programs. I think they are JUST what you are looking for as far as what you'll see in your cockpit. The couple of simple programs that I am writing will likely eventually also get posted here when I have them fully debugged........ outer-middle-inner marker indicator lights, master caution panel with annunciators, and etc..

best,

....................john

« Last Edit: Nov 26^th, 2003 at 7:51pm by JBaymore »

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Reply #2 - Nov 29^th, 2003 at 3:20pm

JBaymore Offline
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Bailey_Girl,

I may have found some info that would assist you in your use of a single machine to create a "glass cockpit" type setup. Check out the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_multimonitor.asp

You could move the instruments to one or more monitors and then make the panel cutouts to match. Or you might create some custom panels with the gauges you want from the "stock" instruments with something like the panel ConfigEdit program and then do the same bit with the monitors.

best,

.....................john

Intel i7 960 quad 3.2G LGA 1366, Asus P6X58D Premium, 750W Corsair, 6 gig 1600 DDR3, Spinpoint 1TB 7200 HD, Caviar 500G 7200 HD, GTX275 1280M, Logitec Z640, Win7 Pro 64b, CH Products yoke, pedals + throttle quad, simpit

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Reply #3 - Dec 23^rd, 2003 at 7:16pm

radio16 Offline
1st Lieutenant
ARGGGHHH more power

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its sad that you can't span the cockpit image across 2 monitors , I guess that would take too much thought on microsofts part to format the programme to work that way!!!! Sad

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Reply #4 - Feb 1^st, 2004 at 1:03pm

JBaymore Offline
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Under the curse of the
hombuilt cockpit!

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Radio16,

I wonder if you could do this br creating two custom panels that effectively were 1/2 the original cockpit panel?

JUst a rambling thought.

best,

...............john

Intel i7 960 quad 3.2G LGA 1366, Asus P6X58D Premium, 750W Corsair, 6 gig 1600 DDR3, Spinpoint 1TB 7200 HD, Caviar 500G 7200 HD, GTX275 1280M, Logitec Z640, Win7 Pro 64b, CH Products yoke, pedals + throttle quad, simpit

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