How to alter main view in WWii Fighters

Five "Ace" aircraft in a box
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Driver
Airman Basic
Posts: 6
Joined: 17 Jan 2008, 02:49

How to alter main view in WWii Fighters

Post by Driver »

I thought I would show how to move the Shockwave Mitsubishi Zero main 2D panel gauges up to the top of the screen. Helps when landing, so you can see the runway below :twisted:

Open up FS9's aircraft/zero/panel folder, in Notepad look in panel.cfg. to find the .bmp file which the main panel window uses. For the Shockwave Zero A6M5 the file would be: mini.bmp.

Open mini.bmp file in Windows Paint (save a back up copy).

Here it is:

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1) We use the capture box tool (#1) and draw a window exactly around the bottom grayish blue panel, watching MS Paint's curser position numbers (below #2) so that when we first start to draw the first number is 0, that way we have the pixel on the very left hand side (pixel 0,x) covered with the mouse pointer.

Draw the box lines all the way from left to right and then downward to surround the whole gray panel.

2) Raise the scroll bar (#3) to see the top of Paint's window and then drag up the gray panel with the mouse to the very top, once again the numbers below #2 show when the gray panel is positioned properly.

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3) If we now saved mini.bmp, the main Zero panel in FS9 would look like:

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4) So, go back to mini.bmp in Paint, use the capture box tool again (#1) to draw a box around the bottom white rectangle (where the panel used to be), and fill in the whole thing (with black color) using Paint's fill tool (#4). This should take about 5 seconds.

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5) Use the line tool (#5) to blacken the narrow white line left behind while you were filling in.

And we're done editing mini.bmp !

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The next part is easy: here's panel.cfg, the numbers for each gauge are Xposition, Yposition, Xsize, Ysize (note all the SIMICON gauges are 20 pixels high: xposition, yposition, xsize, 20)---

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We just need to change the second number for the first five and the last gauge to 0 to move them to the top of the screen.

They will line up in the holes automatically!

We can omit altering the icon gauges if we want to leave them at the bottom. Or we can move each simicons' y position values to 0, 20, 40, 60, .etc to get them also to the top (because the gauges are all 20 pixels high, ysize=20).

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Now the Zero main looks as we want!

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If we did not bother to change the icon gauges value numbers, then here is what it would look like (I wiill use the BF109 plane gauges just for fun).
:)

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Takes only a couple minutes per plane with a little practice! :)

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