Kiosk like console

[Guest mrgoodspeed]

I work for an aviation charity, and for several years we have been using FS9 in our fund raising and exhibition work: we have a number of flights using models of our aircraft and operating in the locations (mainly Afirca) where our planes work. We initially looked at the FS9 kiosk mode, but found it limiting, so developed our own front end to the flights, with the flights managed using ABL code. I'm now looking at FSX and in particular how to use SimConnect to achieve better integration of FSX with our display console.This is how it works: The system is designed to operate without an attendant, so it needs to be fairly robust and reliable. The PC, keyboard and mouse are locked away out of sight, so the user only has the joystick to play with and a touch screen to select flights (etc). Initialy the screen displays a number of HTML pages in a custom browser - these pages provide info about our organisation - some of these pages link to the flight simulator, so when the user selects one of these links, I want the system to load the relevant flight sim flight/mission file and allow the user to fly the mission. Whilst the flight is in process my application monitors the program and watches for events like mission completion, crash, or the user just getting bored and wandering away! When one of these events occurs, the system should redisplay the HTML browser window and load the appropriate HTML page.We used to do this using FS9 and ABL scripts, but it looks as though SimConnect with FSX will do a much better job. I can successfuly get FSX to load the flight and I'm monitoring values like speed and position as well as hooking events like mission complete - thus I can detect my end conditions, pause the sim (thanks for help with that one) and switch back to my HTML pages.All this works nicely when FSX is in windowed mode (As it is on my development system): my app can monitor the load progress and keep itself on top until FSX is ready to go - this means the user is looking at my nice HTML pages of info about the organisation instead of staring at a black screen and the "Loading scenery" message. However if I have FSX in full-screen mode it all falls apart, it looks to me as though in full screen mode FSX is grabbing the whole display (through DirectX) and thus my attempt to keep my app visible in the window stack fails.So, I'd like FSX to stay out of sight until it's 100% ready to run, but I'd also like it to be full screen (or at least I don't want users to be able to get at the menu/toolbar/start button etc)Any ideas: is it possible to toggle the full screen setting under prog control? or am I going about this the wrong way and is there a better way to manage the startup?with apologies for long post!MRG

[Pete Dowson 558]

>Any ideas: is it possible to toggle the full screen setting>under prog control? or am I going about this the wrong way>and is there a better way to manage the startup?Better (smarter looking for sure) to get FSX to display your window for you, like the ATC type windows in FSX. I have hacked a way of doing this in FSUIPC4, but Microsoft are supposed to be providing it as a SimConnect option. If I were you I'd wait for the expected FSX SP1 update and check the SimConnect changes then.RegardsPete