[Pete's Cockpit]

The SCREEN is 4:3, the PROJECTION is 16:9, so there's lots of room to shift the whole picture up and down to get the horizon in the right place! That's what i actually said if you read it again. ;-)

If I tried projecting 4:3 onto a 16:9 screen I'd have lots of horizontal adjustabilty but no vertical adjustability!

Regards

Pete

Ah. I thought you were filling the screen horizontally with the 4:3 image on the 16:9 screen, and accepting the loss of view area. I get it now! :oops:

[Pete's Cockpit]

I had a bit of a job getting it accceptable, I must admit. I first adjusted the view zooms so that what could be seen matched what you should see based on the angle of vision, from one side of the screen to the other. I did that by using top-down view to start with to get the aircraft the right distance from a building (e.g terminal) so that the angle from both sides of the building to the aircraft's nose was the same as my seated viewing angle onto the complete screen width. Then, in normal forward view adjusted the zoom till the building just filled the width on screen. Repeated that for each of my EZCA views (forward, 60 degree left/right, and 120 degree left/right).

Thanks. I modelled a kind of solid protractor with "stations" at 30 degree intervals to do the same thing. I found that a 60 degree offset was excellent for field of view but really bad regarding distortion, like you did!

The distortion at the sides was then very noticeable on uprights when close up (like when taxiing or parking at airports). So I minimised that to just about acceptable by pointing the views slightly upwards and changing the projected image to a rhombus shape a but wider at the top than the bottom (or is it vice vera? I get confused). I also needed to get the horizon in the right place from my cockpit view (a little below eye level). All these things interact, of course so it took a whiile!

Interesting! I'll try that.

The screen is actually a 4:3 aspect screen and I'm projecting 16:9 (1920x1080p), so there's room to move the whole picture up and down a bit.

I don't follow that part. I'd have thought that projecting at 4:3 onto a 16:9 screen would allow more vertical adjustability, not the other way around. What am I missing?

[Pete's Cockpit]

Great stuff, Pete! I'm engaged in design issues around the outside views for my 767, and would be grateful for some details re. your projector setup, and the view settings. I'm trying to maximise my field of view while minimising distortion, and was wondeing if one projector might be OK with VFR flight.

Alistair

[Phantom modifier keys]

Thanks Pete. I never did find out what the cause actually was. I looked at the various places in XP where the keyboard is configured and ensured that for example the ctrl lock arrangements were off. Still the same persistent modifiers. But only within MSFS.

So I took your advice and assigned the topdown toggle entirely within FSUIPC, and we're golden, as they say over here! Thanks again.

[Phantom modifier keys]

Anyone get this? I've been noticing that my keyboard throws a CTRL keypress while I press other keys, but only after I have used CTRL-S to get top-down view. Pressing the CTRL key on its own clears the problem, until the next time I invoke CTRL-S!

I looked at the assignments in FSUIPC (v.3.96, registered) and when the panel asks for a keypress, and I press "-", the response in the window is ctrl+"-" as if I was simultaneously holding down the CTRL key. Then, if I press the CTRL key (as if trying to unstick a stuck key) the "-" key will then fill in correctly after clearing and setting. But as soon as I invoke CTRL-S back in FS9, then go back into the FSUIPC panel, the phantom CTRL is back.

So I tried re-assigning the top-down view to Ctrl-Shift-S, and then noticed that when I looked in FSUIPC at the "-"key after doing Ctrl-Shift-S for top down, it was showing as Ctrl-Shift-"-"! Even if I do Ctrl-Shif-S a second time to get back to normal view, I then have to press Ctrl and then Shift to clear the phantoms.

Anyone know what's going on, and how I can stop this? I've swapped keyboards (PS2) to no avail.

FS9.1, i5, Geforce 9500GT, 4GB, XP SP3.

[How to I get LED's to light up? - An idiot's guide]

Chris,

It is totally do-able! Obviously, since all of these third-party hardware developers manage it.

What Pete is saying, I think, is that FSUIPC doesn't support the lighting up of LEDs associated with the FS interface, unfortunately. In other words, these annunciator states are not available to FSUIPC - otherwise they could be grabbed and output to the hardware.

I came up against exactly this problem in developing my Level D 767 cockpit, which is absolutely littered with annunciators, and the solution was in the LVLD SDK, ably assisted by Nico Kaan's FSCONV program which provides the required offsets for FSUIPC which aren't supplied in Pete's original install - but these are specific to the LEVEL D 767 product!

I guess Nico's work was only possible because of the existence of the 767 SDK, so if your addon doesn't have an SDK, you will probably never find the offsets.

You could try scanning all the data from FS, made available in FSUIPC, using FSInterrogate (part of the FSUIPC SDK) and see if you can find the indicators in there, although I tried that with the 767 indicators and got nowhere. I just don't know enough about FSUIPC to say if that would work or not. I'm guessing, from Pete's admission of lack of experience in that area, that it might not be as simple as that! :cry:

EDIT!! I've just realised that Pete's admission was nothing to do with interrogating annunciator states using FSUIPC. Of course he knows exactly how we can do that! The issue is with your hardware, and his note posted before he selfishly left us to actually do something else for a short while :D was simply to say that he doesn't know how your hardware is set up to switch a light on! And of course FSUIPC will support the interrogation of annunciators, if the offset for the annunciator is known. Sorry, Pete! :oops:

Alistair

[Flight Analysis]

Pete, wow, thanks! I wasn't expecting a reply from the Man! But you're right (of course) the data is probably pretty impenetrable. I'll look at FS Recorder. Sounds like the very app.

Thanks. And you'll have heard this before, but so what. Your work on FSUIPC is just absolutely peerless, and we all owe you big time, even (especially?) those of us who have upgraded to a registered install.

[Flight Analysis]

A quick question (Couldn't find an answer using Search). In FS9, there's an option to view a "flight analysis" where the flight just completed can be viewed in plan and profile. I can't find any way of saving this data for later scrutiny. I suspect the data resides in memory because I couldn't find a temp file anywhere relating to that.

Is it possible to grab that data using FSUIPC? If so, can I assume that some external script could grab it, save it to disk, and reload it into FS later? Or wold that reload be impossible because of the location of the "analysis" routine in the FS program flow?