The FU3 Cockpit Designer


Tutorial 4 - Adding Views

Create a new project or open an existing one (Tutorial 2).

Select the cockpit view you want to add by clicking the Select View icon or by selecting Cockpit->SelectView from the menu.
In this tutorial we will add the Forward Right view to the Trainer.
After selecting the Forward Right view in the Select View dialog, you will see the forward-right view of the Trainer :

Of course, there are no bitmaps in this view but notice that the 3D Region rectangle is already defined.

To add a new inside image to this view, right click anywhere in the View Window and select Inside Image -> Add... from the pop-up menu :

In the Add Inside Image dialog, locate the bitmap you would like to use and double-click on it (or select it and click the Open button).

 

You should now see the bitmap in the View Window :

Note: for this tutorial I used the forward-right bitmap of the FS2000 Cessna 182 (copyright Microsoft Corporation)

 

For your convenience, a save-under rectangle (blue) is automatically added to this view.
However, you may wish to edit the coordinates of this rectangle and of the 3D Region rectangle or add additional
Rectangles in order to optimize the rendering (this may improve frame-rates).

When you add a view bitmap, this bitmap is used for all the image-sets of this view.
This means that now both the day and the night images use the bitmap you just added.
To make the night image use a different bitmap, first select the Night Unlit image-set in the control panel:

Now right-click inside the View Window and select Inside Image -> Load... from the pop-up menu :

In the Load Inside Image dialog, locate the bitmap you want to use for the night image and double-click on it (or select it and click the Open button) :

You should now see the night bitmap in the View Window :

 

Now the only thing left to do is to update the .res file :
Click the Build icon or select Project->Build from the menu.

Note that you can add more views and Build the project when you finish.

The Project Build dialog will display the progress of the .res file updating process:

This takes a while, after the update is done click the OK button.

That's It!

Close the Cockpit Designer, run FU3 and watch the results :
(If you're working on a backup of the .res file - you must first put the updated .res file in the plnpile folder under you main Flight Unlimited III folder)


 

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Cockpit Designer - Copyright (C) 2000 - 2003 Gideon Pertzov