Someone once told me that you don't have to copy the gauges of an aircraft to the Gauges folder in FS9. That you can keep them in the Aircraft folder if you wanted to. I just don't quite remember which folder they have to go into. I think that it's the Panel folder. Anyone remember how this works? Please advise and thanks!Mark

Someone once told me that you don't have to copy the gauges of an aircraft to the Gauges folder in FS9. That you can keep them in the Aircraft folder if you wanted to. I just don't quite remember which folder they have to go into. I think that it's the Panel folder. Anyone remember how this works? Please advise and thanks!Mark

They have to go in the panel folder.

Thanks very much sir!Mark

Mark,Where you put them depends on how you want to use them. For example I have many gauges that I use in many different panels, so that it's easier to reference a commonly-used gauge from the main gauges folder. However if you have a specific aircraft with gauges that you are unlikely to use in another panel then by all means put them in the specific panel folder. Just remember that they are not then available for use elsewhere - unless you specifically reference the path to the gauge in the panel.cfg file, and that can get a little messy.Don't forget that you can references 'specific' gauges and 'common' gauges within the same panel.cfg. FS9 first looks in the specific panel folder first and uses the gauges there, and then looks in the FS9 gauges folder for the remainder after that.;)

Mark,Where you put them depends on how you want to use them. For example I have many gauges that I use in many different panels, so that it's easier to reference a commonly-used gauge from the main gauges folder. However if you have a specific aircraft with gauges that you are unlikely to use in another panel then by all means put them in the specific panel folder. Just remember that they are not then available for use elsewhere - unless you specifically reference the path to the gauge in the panel.cfg file, and that can get a little messy.Don't forget that you can references 'specific' gauges and 'common' gauges within the same panel.cfg. FS9 first looks in the specific panel folder first and uses the gauges there, and then looks in the FS9 gauges folder for the remainder after that.;)

Good advice and will be remembered...thank you. My intention on this particular aircraft was the ability to isolate its gauges in case I wanted to remove the entire aircraft. It's a flyable model that I'm using exclusively for AI purposes. So just in case it becomes to much of a frame rate hit, I could substitute the plane for another and just pull it from the sim. I also believe when an aircraft is used for AI purposes then its panel is not used as well. So the majority of the frame rate hit would come from the model and textures themselves. I'm not sure if its worth the little time I have right now to reduce everything and then test it. I have so many sceneries installed and AI aircraft it takes a half hour simply to test anything anymore...I'm up to 1088 scenery entries and 8645 aircraft variations :)Mark

Chances are I'm about to point something very obvious out but it seems to me you are not aware of the following:There are tools that scan your Gauges folder and notify you of unused ones. One I use is GaugeExplorer and it does the job for me just fine. But to be honest, Gauges are the last of my worries - right now I've got about 300MB of gauges and about 30 GB of scenery and aircraft. I do care about missing gauges but unused ones? Not worth your time ;)Also, if i understand right, that half an hour you're talking about is the FS startup, right? That's WAY too long under most circumstances and one thing that comes up right away: do your AI-only aircraft appear in the aircraft selection menu? If they do, that's what causes such a long startup time. To cure this BBQ Hide AI is your friend ;).Hope this helps a bit...

Chances are I'm about to point something very obvious out but it seems to me you are not aware of the following:There are tools that scan your Gauges folder and notify you of unused ones. One I use is GaugeExplorer and it does the job for me just fine. But to be honest, Gauges are the last of my worries - right now I've got about 300MB of gauges and about 30 GB of scenery and aircraft. I do care about missing gauges but unused ones? Not worth your time ;)Also, if i understand right, that half an hour you're talking about is the FS startup, right? That's WAY too long under most circumstances and one thing that comes up right away: do your AI-only aircraft appear in the aircraft selection menu? If they do, that's what causes such a long startup time. To cure this BBQ Hide AI is your friend ;).Hope this helps a bit...

I've never seen GaugeExplorer before...thanks for that! I also wanted to make sure about the panel folder holding the gauges because it can prove useful to me as well as others....who knows how people setup or use their sim...development maybe?The half hour bit is changing something in the sim, then loading the sim, then taking a test flight or whatever I need to do in order to see if the change I made works as expected. If it does then maybe 15 to 30 minutes. If it doesn't then repeating the process above can add quite a bit of time to the change. The sim itself takes anywhere from 2 to 3 minutes to load. It's just the process of making a complete change cycle and changing flyable aircraft textures to mips does require a few minutes in the easiest cases :)About BBQHide, I have been using it for years and have learned never to install an AI aircraft without it. Sometimes the AI developers miss changing the air file of one aircraft. So I usually just set a folder mask and run it before I put them in the FS9 aircraft folder.Good tips though...very useful...thank you!Mark