GDI+ gauges for Dave Maltby's aircraft

martinboehme · Post by **martinboehme** » 22 Aug 2006, 12:40

A while ago, I coded up some ADIs for Dave Maltby's aircraft using GDI+. This makes the horizon move more gradually, making precise pitch control easier. I sent the gauges to Dave for comments, and he found out that they had an undesirable dependency on a DLL that is not installed by default. I modified the gauges and sent them to him again for testing, but have unfortunately not heard from him since.

Dave, if you read this... did you get the gauges? Have you had an opportunity to test them, or have you simply not got enough time at the moment?

If someone wants to help me test the gauges, that would be much appreciated... I don't want to release them publicly without Dave's permission because they contain his artwork... and at any rate, I'm hoping that he will decide to include them in his official distribution.

Give me a shout if you're interested.

Martin

GeorgeG · Post by **GeorgeG** » 22 Aug 2006, 20:37

GDI+ gauges tend to give quite a frame rate hit don't they?

At least they seem to be the cause of it on the eurowings panels.

Post by **MALTBY D** » 22 Aug 2006, 21:29

I owe you an apology Martin.
I've had to rebuild a new disk with XP Pro (working from home now) & just couldn't be bothered sorting out the e-mails from the old disk.
I was intending to try that latest version for you but just kept putting it off.
Pure laziness, I should have made a bit of an effort, sorry.

I'd pretty much lost interest in it after finding that it didn't make any difference to the smoothness of gauges in the VC.
I have no objection to you releasing the GDI gauges as an optional extra for my models, but don't think it's a method I'm going to be using.

DM

martinboehme · Post by **martinboehme** » 23 Aug 2006, 10:38

No apologies needed... after all, it was me who was bugging you about this.

Thanks for your permission to release the gauges -- I'll try and whip them into shape and upload them to AVSIM. Getting the new gauges into the CAB files is going to be a bit tricky for the "average user", but I can probably automate that using a batch file.

George, GDI+ gauges do give a frame rate hit, but these gauges are pretty simple, and I haven't noticed a frame rate hit on my "midrange" machine (a 18-month-old laptop). I'm still looking for a few people to test this before I upload it anywhere... if you'd like to test the gauges, I'd be grateful.

I did a bit of research on the virtual cockpit issue, and it seems the framerate you get is directly related to the number of VCockpit sections in the panel.cfg file:

1 VCockpit section: 18 fps
2 VCockpit sections: 9 fps
3 VCockpit sections: 6 fps
etc.

I assume the VCockpit textures are updated in some kind of "round robin" scheme.

So the only way to get smooth gauges in the VC would be a redesign of the VC to use only one VCockpit section (or two at most). Probably doable in theory, but would take quite a lot of reassigning of texture coordinates. (Does anyone know if there's a limit on the size that a VCockpit texture can have?)

I hope FSX will bring an improvement in this area, but I'm not holding my breath...

Martin

GeorgeG · Post by **GeorgeG** » 23 Aug 2006, 13:37

martinboehme wrote:No apologies needed... after all, it was me who was bugging you about this.

Thanks for your permission to release the gauges -- I'll try and whip them into shape and upload them to AVSIM. Getting the new gauges into the CAB files is going to be a bit tricky for the "average user", but I can probably automate that using a batch file.

George, GDI+ gauges do give a frame rate hit, but these gauges are pretty simple, and I haven't noticed a frame rate hit on my "midrange" machine (a 18-month-old laptop). I'm still looking for a few people to test this before I upload it anywhere... if you'd like to test the gauges, I'd be grateful.

I did a bit of research on the virtual cockpit issue, and it seems the framerate you get is directly related to the number of VCockpit sections in the panel.cfg file:

1 VCockpit section: 18 fps
2 VCockpit sections: 9 fps
3 VCockpit sections: 6 fps
etc.

I assume the VCockpit textures are updated in some kind of "round robin" scheme.

So the only way to get smooth gauges in the VC would be a redesign of the VC to use only one VCockpit section (or two at most). Probably doable in theory, but would take quite a lot of reassigning of texture coordinates. (Does anyone know if there's a limit on the size that a VCockpit texture can have?)

I hope FSX will bring an improvement in this area, but I'm not holding my breath...

Martin

I will gladly test if you like, just let us know when you require.