Panels - Realism at Night

[budsurf 0]

Hi All, continuing my quest to improve the realism while flying at night, (See "Lighted Panel Notes" - Notes on how to add a lighted overlay to an existing panel window), one thing that always bugged me - you toggle one of the view windows at night and the realism is instantly killed because of the bright white cursor on the screen. Eventually it times out and goes away but the damage has been done. It's difficult to remember to move it to the edge of the screen prior to switching views. The fix? You can access your mouse cursor through control panel and select a less intrusive cursor, or better yet, use the nifty freeware utility, IconArt - from: http://www.conware.org/ and make your own cursor.I'm using one which is a medium grey color with the inside of the head of the arrow transparent. IconArt will make/edit Icons AND cursors. Then I used the freeware utility Resourcehacker to extract the other cursors, the hand, plus and minus, and the closed hand, which live in the Fs9.exe file (be sure to first backup in a safe place). I made these cursors a medium grey also and reinserted them back into Fs9.exe with Resourcehacker. Depending on the background color of your favorite panels, one could even have several Fs9.exe files stored somewhere with different colored cursors! Incidentally, resourcehacker is also great for extracting bitmaps from .gau files for editing. Have fun! Aloha from Hawaii!

[budsurf 0]

Update: I found a nifty little utility called "cursor hider" at: http://www.softexe.com/cursorhider.html?reffer=CHVery nice, it hides the cursor in one second (adjustible), and the cursor doesn't reappear when you change views. Aloha!