Simviation Forums

Can anyone recommend a source of russian language marked metric gauges for FS2004 helicopters. I enjoy flying the Mi 8 updated for FS2004 . The gauges are good and fairly authentic. However the airspeed indicator and altimeter are calibrated in "imperial" units ( ie. MPH and feet) . Does anyone know of suitable metric versions or how the imperial gauges could be modified to read metric ?
How easy is it to produce new gauge faces using an image editor?

I hate to see a legitimate request for help go unanswered so here's what I would do.

Download a bunch of Russian helicopters.  Unzip them one at a time into a temporary folder.  Look through the gauges and see which ones you want.  I have a nice little utility called Gaubmp2 that will let you view the bitmaps so you can see whether they look sufficiently Russian before you put them into your gauges folder (email me and I'll send you a copy - 62k).

Producing new gauge faces isn't overly difficult, but I have FSPanel Studio and I don't know whether cfgedit can do it (you have cfgedit, don't you?).  It's basically editing a bitmap file with your paint program - more time and nuisance than I'm willing to put up with.  But if you edit a gauge that's in in thousands of feet it probably won't work very well in translation to thousands of meters.

Webb ,

Thanks for the advice and offer. I have tried most Russian choppers I can find and inspected the gauges the hard way ( i.e. placing them in my mini panel for an aircraft and viewing them within the sim). I have not found suitable ones so far. They nearly always use stock imperial gauges. The few Russian metric ones ( for YAK etc ) are for FS98 and are of poor quality for FS2004

However if I used the utilities you describe (cfgedit or FSPanel Studio), could I modify one of the fairly common German Metric gauges to have Russian text on the gauge face ( always assuming I can find a Cyrillic Font somewhere in my PC)?

I have not got cfgedit and would be grateful to receive it.I will e-mail you.

The reason I seem so fussy about gauges is that I like to fly in Spot plane view with a mini panel of the six "blind flying" instruments particular to the aircraft along the bottom of the screen. I usually add rpm and manifold pressure / torque gauge to the sides of the screen a bit farther up.
On choppers I normally add a small digital radar altimeter just below the standard altimeter ), helps with landings as in a sim you have less depth perception than in real life.

Thanks again for your interest and help.

The files I sent you should help.

If you're going to modify a gauge, though, you will have to modify the bitmap file pixel by pixel - a font file won't help.

There is no good Mi-8 panel for FS2004 as far as i know...

I have used Gaubmp2 to modify guage faces and this has proved very succesfull indeed and easy to do. I have used it to modify several other gauges also

Thanks a lot Webb for the help and advice

Glad you were able to work it out.  Don't forget to upload that Mi-8 panel for us.