Simviation Forums

This may be normal, but quite a few of the planes I download have missing panel pieces, or they have a full panel but nothing is "interactive". Am I not doing something correctly, or is this just kinda of an "unfinished product"?

I suspect you're not installing the gauges. It varies but 3rd party gauges will usually be in a folder (or zipfile) named Gauges. To install them paste the complete contents of this folder into the FS9\Gauges folder.

There is another possibility that I don't think anyone has mentioned before.

I have a new Geforce 6800LE that I have 'unmasked' using Rivatuner and it works very well with great FR for the cost. However, its GPU doesn't seem to like panels where the designer has used full black as a transparent mask. This is often done by designers as a way of making gauges look as though they are switching on and off - what you actually do is activate a black image that is positioned to cover the 'on' bitmap of a gauge so it appears to switch off. Now what you don't want is to be able to 'undock' the black images so they move around the screen, so the way you do it is to make them slightly off-black, so they show up and cover the gauge(s) in question but are held in place by a full black mask that covers the whole screen. Now in the sim full black = transparent so usually this works well.

However, for some reason my card (and I suspect yours too) 'sees' the full black mask even though it's transparent and this 'covers' the switches so they don't work.

The way to confirm this is to right click somewher on the screen and select 'Close Window'. If the switches then start to work, that's your problem.

I find this happens with old Roy Chaffin Airbus panels and several others. So far I've not found a way round it even with latest drivers but by doing what I've said most panels can still be used because usually you want gauges to be 'turned on'. However, the problem can appear again in flight if you happen to activate certain sub-panels and I've got round it when I've wanted to by redoing the panels and converting the sub-panels into simple pop-ups without full panel masks.

Hope this is reasonably clear because it's a somewhat esoteric kind of a problem and a bit tricky to explain.