I hate to break a long silence with an unhappy note, but here you have it: http://pc.ign.com/articles/947/947737p1.html?RSSwhen2009-01-23_103300&RSSid=947737 Yes, the studio is closing and development on Flight Simulator 11 is being "indefinitely...

One issue that we've seen internally is that some of our needles sometimes appear jagged on our analog gauges. If it's been a while since encountering this issue, we may not remember that gauge bitmaps need to be at least 4 pixels wide in order for the...

I just noticed today that our EH-101 has 3 generators (one for each engine), but we only have switches for turning two of them on and off... thus you can never turn off the third one, which means that as long as that third engine is running, the electrical...

I like this video because it demonstrates what I expected to see in FS when I started using it years ago: the ability to walk around and into an airplane. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly0eo2cuT6g

At least, I thought it was pretty good. ; ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r2CIE-0rWk

It looks like a common mistake made by people creating XML gauges is to use too many percent signs (%). For example, I saw this in a 3rd-party gauge recently: %{if} % (On)%{else} % (Off)%{end} The underlined percent signs are unnecessary, and the...

In the XPack SDK we added more documentation about the enumerations relating to the GPS, but it looks like we left out some, too. Some people were investigating what each meant based on trial and error, but I think I can help out a bit here. For example...

Based on the lack of references to "process_shared_event_out()" and "GAUGE_HEADER_FS1000" in a popular search engine and the fact that I've gotten a few questions on the subject, I'm guessing that the understanding of how to share data between two instances...

Let's say you're posting to a forum and not getting responses from the person or people who you think should be responding. If you think that voicing your concerns in an aggressive manner to that person in front of a hundred or so of their colleagues...

Someone was asking about this earlier today, and now that we're not busy getting XPack out the door, I finally have time to answer it. We made some changes to the XPack code base to allow this. And we added a flag to gauges.h: IMAGE_ERASE_ALWAYS...

I've gotten some questions about Shared Cockpit over the past months, and I believe that a response is well overdue at this point. I plan to cover the topic in several posts, focussing on the aspects of shared cockpit that apply to 3rd party add-on developers...

http://www.gizmag.com/go/8132/

Did you know that ctrl-k will disable/enable your joystick in Flight Sim? I didn't. I can imagine accidentally hitting that key combo and then having a heck of a time trying to figure out why you can't control the aircraft with your joystick. There...

IIRC = "If I remember correctly". And I thought it might have something to do with IMC . :)

Because the app refers exclusively to the path in the registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSPerfDrv\ImagePath. And Don't forget the \??\ before the path name (although I don't know what that's for).

When you realize that a P-51D is also known as an F-51D sometimes. P = "Pursuit" F = "Fighter" And I thought that someone else was confused!

It came to my attention recently (i.e. a few minutes ago) that the panel system seems to set the tooltip units to either DEFAULT or METRIC, never ENGLISH. It looks like the EnglishId for a tooltip in an XML gauge never gets used. It looks like this behavior...

On Sunday night I went out to dinner with some friends in the hip Capitol Hill neighborhood (much hipper than my neighborhood). Anywho, after dinner, I noticed that the documentary about art and video games called 8-Bit was showing for its last night...

I attended GDC 2007 the week of March 5-9; it was my first time there and was pretty excited about it. I tried to attend a variety of sessions, from the very technical (some of which were way over my head) to the general (those that were part of the game...

Bollywood loves Flight Sim! I'd recommend watching at least to the halfway point... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQD4xs_M3rQ&mode=related&search =

So, our friend Rafael dos Santos pointed out to us last week that there was a bug in the rnor function that can be used in XML scripts (in both gauges and modeldef.xml). He noticed that 4.0 rnor should be 4.0 , not 0.86 as FS returns. The problem is...

So, you'd think that STRUCT EYEPOINT DYNAMIC OFFSET might have something to do with the camera position as set by SimConnect_CameraSetRelative6DOF(). But you'd be wrong. FSX doesn't actually have any way to query for the current camera position from SimConnect...

The Flight Simulator SDK describes a method of using FAILURE_RECORDS to fail gauge elements via an enumerated list of failure types (freeze, zero, and no_draw). See the "Programming C Gauges" section of the SDK for detailed information. But what if...

Someone e-mailed tell_fs over the weekend asking if the G1000 in Flight Simulator (deluxe edition) had a bug: they couldn't get glideslope information. It is indeed possible to get glideslope information using the G1000. Do make sure that "LOC1" is visible...

It's been over a year since I mentioned text in XML gauges (an area where we don't do a good job of documentation) and a while since I posted anything truly useful on this blog, so I guess it's about time... A coworker and I were looking at some XML...