The FU3 Cockpit Designer


Tutorial 3 - Editing Existing Views

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

Select the cockpit view you want to edit by clicking the Select View icon or by selecting Cockpit->SelectView from the menu.
In this tutorial we will add a "passenger" to the Trainer's right view.
After selecting the Right view in the Select View dialog, the right view of the Trainer will be displayed:

The Trainer's right view has both an inside image and an outside image.
You can choose which of these images are displayed by checking and unchecking the check-boxes in the control panel:

 

Lets say we want to modify the inside image (for example, add a "passenger")
We will first save the original inside image to a .BMP file.
With the mouse, right-click inside the View Window and from the pop-up menu the appears, select Inside Image -> Save...

In the Save Inside Image dialog, choose a location and a filename for the .bmp file and click the Save button to save it to disk:

 

Open this .bmp file in your paint program (I recommend Paint Shop Pro from www.jasc.com but any image editing software will do)
When you finish editing the bitmap, save it as a .bmp file (format should be 800x600 24-bit)

 

Back to the Cockpit Designer:

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

In the Load Inside Image dialog, locate your modified bitmap and double-click on it (or select it and click the Open button) :


After several seconds you should see your modified image instead of the original one:

Because each image has several image-sets (day, night, etc.) you also need to modify the bitmaps for these additional sets.
This is done by selecting the image-set via the control panel and following the same steps you performed to modify the day image.
(saving the night image as a .bmp, modifying it in a paint program, loading it instead of the original image)
The final result of the night image should look like this:

Your work is not done yet, see all these rectangles?
To make the rectangles easier to see, display only the inside image and the inside rectangles by unchecking the checkboxes
of the Outside Image and the Outside Rectangles:

 

Now only the inside image and the inside rectangles are visible:

What are these rectangles for?
They tell FU3 where to draw the outside world (scenery) and where to draw the cockpit art.
Because of that, if you modify the original image you need to also modify the rectangles so they will match your modified image.

The rectangle depicted in Magenta is a special rectangle - the 3D Region rectangle.
It tells FU3 where to render the outside world, so everything that is inside this recatngle will be drawn over.
Of course, we don't want this to happen to our lovely passenger so we need to tell FU3 to save her from this terrible fate.

The rectangles depicted in Blue do just that - they are the save-under rectangles.
Everything inside these rectangles will be saved before the outside world is rendered and then they will be re-drawn.
So all we need to do is add a save-under rectangle around our passenger :

Click the Edit Inside Rectangles icon or right-click inside the View Window and select Inside Image -> Edit Rects:

 

You will be presented with the Edit Rectangles dialog:

 

Click the Add Rect button, a new rectangle will be added to the list - click on its name to select it:

Now enter the From/To coordinates for this rectangle, and click the OK button:

"Wait a minute! how do I know what numbers to enter?"
To answer that, lets go back to just after you loaded your modified bitmap, the screen looked like this:

Now look closer at the lower-left corner:

The (x, y) coordinates of the mouse cursor are always displayed in the lower-left corner.
To find out the coordinates of the save-under rectangle, move the mouse cursor to the position
You want your rectangle to start from and write down the coordinates.
Do the same for the position of the end point of the rectangle.
Here's an example:

Top-Left corner of desired rectangle

 

Bottom-Right corner of desired rectangle

 

So when adding the rectangle we enter these coordinates:

After clicking the OK button, the new rectangle should appear:

You only need to add this rectangle once, rectangles are shared between all image-sets of a single view
So they also apply to the night image (and to all other image-sets).

There is also a simpler way but it may affect frame-rates:
You can remove all the save-under rectangles (the 3D Region rect can not be removed)
And then add a single save-under rectangle that covers the same area as the 3D Region rectangle:

 

 

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 edit 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)

 


Note about outside rectangles:

Unlike the inside rectangles - outside rectangles do not include a 3D Region rectangle.
This means that all outside rectangles are save-under rectangles.
In the Cockpit Designer the outside rectangles are depicted in
Red.

 

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