Help some of us develop a Fasten Seat Belt switch?

[Guest CowlFlapsOpen]

Hi Folks. I promised a few folks in another forum I would pop by here and ask the experts for help. Several of us who own both the Aeroworx Beech 200 aircraft and the FS Passengers add-on have a gauge programming question:FSPassengers requires the pilot to turn on and off the Fasten Seat Belt (FSB) sign at appropriate times and penalizes pilots who forget. The FSB sign can be toggled using a keyboard shortcut but FS Passengers also supplies a .gau file that can be added to any panel. Trouble is the .gau is a pretty crudely rendered backlit button that looks completely out of place on the beautiful panel of the B200, which uses switches for lights etc. AND the Beech 200 comes with its own FSB switch already in the form of an .xml gauge on the co-pilot panel. This 3-setting switch produces a realitic "ping" sound but otherwise is strictly cosmetic.Several people would be very grateful is someone can tell us how to add the Fs Passengers functionality to the Beech 200 FSB switch or, alternatively, substitute the Beech 200 images in the FS Passengers gauge so it fits cosmetically in the panel. As you can tell, I don't know much about these things. I did poke around with FS Panel Studio and uncover the .xml behind the Beech 200 switch. It is pasted below. Would this be hard to do and how does one do it? If we can do it successfully for the Beech 200, several other folks want to do it with other aircraft that use switches. We did ask for help on this from the FS Passengers support but they seemed to have passed. Thanks!xml from the Beech 200. - - - (L:fsb, enum) - - - - - No Smoking and Fasten Seatbelts Sign Off0 (>K:TOGGLE_AFTERBURNER2) (L:fsb, enum) 0 == if{ 0 (>L:fsb, enum) } els{ 0 (>L:fsb, enum) }- No Smoking and Fasten Seatbelts Sign On0 (>K:TOGGLE_AFTERBURNER2) (L:fsb, enum) 1 == if{ 0 (>L:fsb, enum) } els{ 1 (>L:fsb, enum) }- Fasten Seatbelts Sign On0 (>K:TOGGLE_AFTERBURNER2) (L:fsb, enum) 2 == if{ 0 (>L:fsb, enum) } els{ 2 (>L:fsb, enum) }

[rcbarend 37]

I'm afraid only the designers of FS Passengers can help you here.Since FS2004 has no built-in standard variables for Seatbelts on/off, FS Passengers must use some private variable in their FSB gauge (to signal setting FSB-On to this "penalty" function).There's no way of knowing which that variable is (unless a clever "hacker" looks at all ASCII strings in the .gau file and starts guessing :-) ).If it's the bitmap that disturbs you: with a freeware tool like GauToBMP (I think made by Chuck Dome), you can replace existing bitmaps in a .gau file by your own. But since this is a very old tool, it might not work for all gauges.Rob Barendregt

[Guest CowlFlapsOpen]

THanks Rob. This is just the kind of information I was looking for. And, thanks by the way, for your Groundhandling gauge work. Made my FSD Aerostar 700 more fun on the ground. Some of us use the work by folks like you but never have a chance to thank you. Cheers!

[n4gix 4,947]

>If it's the bitmap that disturbs you: with a freeware tool>like GauToBMP (I think made by Chuck Dome), you can replace>existing bitmaps in a .gau file by your own. But since this is>a very old tool, it might not work for all gauges.Rob, it would be remiss of me to not mention that FS Panel Studio will open and extract bitmaps from all .gau and .xml files, and send them to your favorite paint program for editing and/or substitution.The only things you cannot do with .c gauges is to change the bitmaps format from 8 bit to 24 bit, or vice-versa, or change the absolute SIZE of the bitmaps...Otherwise, the process is quite simple and painless... ;)Also, since the .gau supplied by FS Passengers uses an assignable "key stroke sequence," an XML gauge should be easy to set up to monitor the event, and respond accordingly.IOW, they could have their cake and eat it too... ;)

[mgh 89]

There's a free application to extract bitmaps at http://www.vbaccelerator.com/home/VB/Utili...p_Extractor.aspIt comes with VB source code for those who are bold enough to experiment.

[Guest CowlFlapsOpen]

Okay, now this is sounding interesting! Thanks! Is there any way you can show us more about how this would work? Don't know a thing about how to program the .xml in a gauge. FsPassengers doesn't seem very interested in helping with this although presumably they could do this in a snap amd post the final guage.

[rcbarend 37]

Hi Bill,I don't have FS Passengers myself, so I can't verify my next comment :-)Can you explain to me how "monitoring OnKey events" could tackle this problem ?? Because knowing which keys generate this "Fasten Seatbelt event" isn't the problem; apperantly FS Passengers allows that to be configured, so the user already knows..The problem IMO is how to generate that "event" from a new gauge, i.o.w. what the "respond accordingly" part is :-)Or am I missing something ??Cheers, Rob