OK kids. It's time to grow up.There are many who have a great amount of fun just flying around.
I do it so often that I could hardly complain about it.
But if you like instrument flying you have three choices.* Get in a plane
* Get a divorce and build a full cockpit mock-up with 3D projectors
* Get the most out of what you can afford. Saitek, in my case.
Sorry, you could also have the 2D panel fill up most of your screen, just so you can read the instruments.
ORIf you do have the Saitek Panels, your probably wasting you money by using their, VERY limited, drivers.
In the past there were a couple of options that you had.
SPAD, was the best choice, which lets you have much better control over the Saitek Panels.
There was a separate program that complimented
SPAD called
FSUIPC.
And while
SPAD was free,
FSUIPC was not.
Unfortunately, most flight simmers don't want anything that they have to pay for.
But if you've already bought a few Saitek Panels, then you might as well spend just a little bit more.
So now we have something a little different, it's called
SPAD.neXt.
It has two sides, one free, and one paid.
The free part is as simple to use as
SPAD, but more powerful. This part may be all that most people need.
The paid part is something that goes FAR beyond
SPAD. It's simple to use, but you don't absolutely need
FSUIPC to get the most out of it because it can use
SimConnect.
SimConnect is what's already built into
FSX/
Prepar3d. It's not very user friendly for most people, but a great many programs use it.
FSUIPC is capable of using
SimConnect, but can do much more, and do it fairly easy.
SPAD.neXt is capable of using both SimConnect and/or FSUIPC.BTW -ignore that word - OFFSET. For now, just think of it as
"select an option"..
In a previous post, elsewhere, I tried to show how simple it was to use
SPAD.neXt to do something that I thought was impossible.
I don't think that I impressed very many people, because my use was unique.
So this time I'll show a couple of examples in the next post that might appeal to more people.
If it looks confusing remember this; If I can use it ANYBODY can use it.