Customizing FS9 vacuum systems

[ozbeowulf 0]

This may not be a perfect topic for this particular board, but here's a new trick I want to share with other panel builders. At least, it's new to me. As you would already know, the FS9 vacuum system has only one gauge with no specific engine assignment. And, in the .air file, assigning a vacuum pump to an engine is sort of weird. You can enter only one integer, unlike assigning alternators in the aircraft.cfg file by using 1,0,0,0 or 1,1,0,0 etc. So an Extra (with no vacuum system) uses 0 in the .air file; a Mooney uses 1, but a Baron uses 3. So what's up with that? And how do you configure a propliner like the B307 with vacuum pumps on the inboard engines only? I guess I was thinking about the B307 alternators in the aircraft.cfg file, i.e. 0,1,1,0 and wondering why a two-engine bird needs a 3 in the .air file entry? Then I realized that 3 in binary notation is 0011. (Lightbulb over head glows brightly) Hmmm...what if some MS programmer with a wry sense of humor used binary notation to clone the 0,0,0,0 engine mapping system used in the aircraft.cfg file? So I tried that. 0110 binary equals 6. Bingo! With 6 in the engine bitmap in the vacuum system .air file entry, I now have vacuum pumps on engines 2 & 3 only. Sometimes I wonder why MS makes us jump through so many hoops to accomplish simple little tasks. How difficult would it have been to put that in the SDK? Cheers, Glenn