Panel Designers Please Help!

[Guest abent]

HI all,I recently bought a Viewsonic 22" widescreen monitor as I couldn't resist the deal. I'm not at all a fan of WS monitors and there quite simply aren't really any large 4/3 aspect ratio monitors available. I fly the LDS767 mostly and the panel background bitmap and gauges are all stretched as would be expected. The gauges are quite oval shaped. Other than that it is amazing.I was wondering if it would be a monumental task to redo the lds bitmap and panel .cfg to combat this problem. I don't even know if one would have to adjust the gauge positions if the bitmap was stretched.Anyway, I'd be interested in people's opinions on this.Thanks in advance,Adam

[Herbie63 0]

Same old story... maybe MS will support WSM in FS11...Adam, you'll have to do it on your own, unlike anyone allready has done this and is willing to share his/her work - but depending on the monitor sizes and aspect ratios it might not fit to your system.I haven't a WSM, so the following "instructions" might not be fully correct, but in general that will be the way to get things working.First of all enlarge the main panel bitmap to a size fitting to your WSM width. Which size, wich resolution? No idea. But I would start to add black (or what colour ever) area left and right of the main panel bitmap. If it has a native size of 1024 x 768 and your WSM has a max res of 1600 x 1050 those areas would need to be (1600 - 1024) / 2 = 288 pixels in width. Then do the same for the top and/or bottom.Now, the gauges won't be at the right place, so you'll need to adjust that in the panel.cfg. Probably all X-values need to be increased by that 288. Depending on the new hight you also might need to adjust the Y-values as well. I also could imagine that a new position of the main panel (at pos 2 or 7) might be helpful.The last thing to do will be to paint those added areas to make them look like the panel - which probably will be the most difficult job to do.An other option is to enlarge the existing main panel either by really blowing it up or by changing its size in the panel.cfg. But in this case you'll probably loose parts of the top and bottom.Have a look at the SDK, there you'll find usefull infos about what the different settings mean.Hope this helps a bit,Herbert

[WarpD 824]

It's not a Flight Sim problem. Honest.You can't take an image that has a resolution ratio of 3:4 and instantly translate it to 16:10. Mathmatically they have no correlation.For an aircraft to support widescreen, it's up to the developer to provide a widescreen version of their panel.

[Guest schwudde]

Adam,for the LDS763 i,ve done some Mods for 16:10 Resolutions,so please look in the LevelD-Forums.http://www.leveldsim.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=16482http://www.leveldsim.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=16717Kind Regards

[Guest abent]

Thanks so much gents for the info. Herbert, I greatly appreciate you explanation. Thanks for that!Schwudde, I'm on my way over now...Adam

[edetroit 933]

Nothing has irritated me more than widescreen TV's and widescreen monitors!...it is simply a huge con! :-madOne now has to buy a far bigger screensize to get the same size picture....TV in England is still broadcast in the 4:3 format.4:3 is a far better format for 2D panels fullstop.I bought a Viewsonic VP2130b 21.3" LCD 1600x1200 res.http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcddispl...series/vp2130b/Fairly expensive but (again another con...you have to spend some money to get near the quality of a good CRT) I absolutely love it!Let me stress again this monitor is superb! ...colours, speed, definition, size (remember you will have to buy a far bigger WS to compare screensize) and lastly looks. :) I am considering buying another as backup incase the powers that be state that we can only buy widescreen.

regardsEdaka Capt. P[/font color]i[/font color]c[/font color]a[/font color]s[/font color]s[/font color]o[/font color]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v640/edetroit100/Ed3.jpgMy FS9 Videos] AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1024Mb PC3200 DDR, 300Gb HD 256Mb DDR Nvidia 7800 GTX PCI-E, Audigy 2 ZSViewsonic VP2130b 21.3" LCD[/font color

[dolph98 24]

Adam,I know your pain. I have a 24" stretch monitor and have had to modify all my panels too. I use FS Panel Studio and Windows Paint. I dont stretch the .bmps, I add to them on the center/right section and add more goodies instead. The overall effect is that the gauges now are round. As was mentioned earlier, all original gauges have to be repositioned/resized to fit again. I did it by hand once. Once. Then I bought FSPS and it is a breeze now.I would be happy to share my 767 panel with you if I had one. I have custom panels for all my biz jets now and am happy to say that they are better than ever on a stretch screen!I attached a screenie of Ken Mitchell's excellent Aerostar FJ100 panel which I modified in such a way. I had to shrink it down to 40% to upload due to it's size...dolph