What is the best way to create advanced gauges and have them work in the 3D Cockpit?

Question

I have already been successful creating many steam-type gauges by creating them in Blender, and exporting with Xplane2Blender. I was even successful in placing the Garmin 430 on my custom cockpit. I have no problem coding in xlua. But I'd like to create something that is more involved than merely animating meshes. I'd like to model a portion of the Garmin G-5 (digital attitude, speed tape, etc) instrument. I just want a two or three-sentence answer, not a whole tutorial. I'm an experienced developer.

I was unsuccessful using the 3D panel part of the Planemaker. As soon as I added my own custom cockpit object and clicked "Int Cockpit" on it (required for its manipulators to work), none of the instruments on the 3D Panel are visible. By the way, the options "Int Cockpit" and "Ext Cockpit" on the Misc Objects page of the PlaneMaker 11.30 are not documented anywhere.

I notice that lua can use openGL to draw lines and text to coordinates, but these all handle the screen in a 2D way. I need to draw on a gauge in the 3D cockpit which has its own local rotation and coordinates. Do I just need to do the calculations to draw with this anyway?

Do I need to use the SDK and write a plugin? I still don't know how to use a plugin and write to the screen of a 3D cockpit instrument.

Comments

yes this informative artical

Answer 1

Hi Quizkid,

I am not associated with Laminar Research or any other business or product mentioned below; just a flight simmer from downunder.

Have a look at a product called Air Manager.  Details can be found at https://www.siminnovations.com/

When you have viewed their videos then have a look at this site found at   https://www.youtube.com/user/srbarlow/videos  The creator the videos in this link is also one of the developers of the Air Manager software but living in the USA.

Then when you have finished those videos have a look at the following link found at  https://www.youtube.com/user/col2mab/videos  The producer of the videos operates a business in the USA building PCs predominantly for X-Plane.  Laminar Research, the developers of X-Plane,  recommends Michael's business as the preferred PC supplier in the USA to run X-Plane.

Hope this may help.

Glenn

Comments

Thanks for the info, but this isn't really what I had in mind. I'm wanting to build the gauge into the X-Plane main aircraft 3D cockpit - not in a separate panel.

The Air Manager panels have their place, and I might need it later for a much larger project I'll be involved in, but they are 2D, and require additional software/hardware.

Answer 2

I use 3d cockpit without problems