CFS2 Gauges – Something New?

Ali Cat

Ali Cat

Charter Member
I hate to keep chiming in on this Ju-52 panel thingy and it might be bragging but I don’t think so and besides, I miss you guys.

With a 3 day weekend I have spent the bulk of it trying to get the Sperry tapes to look like they’re circular. This is apparently easy in FS9 as it supports transparency. I just got something reasonable to work in CFS2. It’s odd and weird (and eclectic?) what made it work. But is this something new?

View attachment 32788　

If you really look while flying you’ll see the numbers and ticks of the tapes disappear (blocked) behind my shadow bitmap. It’s a flaw but it is not easy to see.

　
Improvement?
AC
 
Hammer Hammer.

Skipsan,

Thanks for the encouragement. I’m working on it almost every night and feel that I’m Beta near though I’ve said this before. Its been a lot of work but I have enjoyed it.

Bearcat,

Mostly it works very well though there are still a few issues – here’s the run down.

Working:

1. Auto Pilot for heading (controls very well).
2. The 1 light and 2 knobs in the far corners. They are engage AP on/off, AP indicator light, and AP heading adjust. The 2 knobs can be manipulated with the mouse and all 3 have good mouse tips.
3. Actual and target heading tapes slide properly (almost, see below).

Not Working:

1. AP Pitch control - there’s an issue here with CFS2 and MoparMike has spelled it out for me. I have not yet tried to crack this one and probably won’t on the first version, but clearly it can be done. Note that the popups that I’m not going to redo at this time I have integrated into this panel so you can use the AP popup to set elevation. These 2 gauges do not conflict in any way.
2. When you first click on the heading adjust knob it jumps too far but there after that it increments correctly. I do plan to look into this one.
3. Cage knob (bottom center) currently is static - does nothing.

You’ve probably read this but just in case know that the artwork is not mine. I had the redo the heading numerals as for some reason they displayed too small. And for the faked 3D effect above I added a shadow bitmap. The good news is my Gimp skills have improved dramatically though I’m far from a pro.

　
AC
 
One More,

I had both the Sperry compass & magnetic compass shaded spherical but rechecking my own research reminded me that this is wrong. Both should be cylindrical tapes. Redoing the compass resulted in the following – the order of the pic’s is FS9, then CFS2 with no shadow, and finally CFS2 with my new shadow.



View attachment 33585View attachment 33584View attachment 33583


This finishes the few artwork mod’s that I wanted. Save for the ADF, which I haven’t tried to get working but it may (I can hope) be easy. After that there are only little issues left.
　
I’m quite proud of how the compass turned out (seemingly endless trial and error) but just in case anyone might think I’m getting cocky, listen to last nights GIMP adventure. I went to bed wanting a easy way to work on an image in native format (xcf) while saving it as the target (bmp). The painters here will know this but for those who don’t, native allows one to preserve all the layers and alpha channels while these are lost in the conversion to "bmp". With GIMP I’ve been using "Save As … " but this changes the GIMP file to "bmp". The problem here is, with further edits, it’s easy to forget to re-save the image as "xcf" and thus your master source is out of date. As sleep began to take over it occurred to me that this is such a common problem that there might be a built in solution. This morning I loaded up a native "xcf" and this time actually looked when I clicked "File". It was right there in front of me all along. The "Save as Copy … " saves but does not change the file format within GIMP. Now I’ve been using "Save As .. " for months. How slow can I be!


AC
 
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