How do you remove and replace gauges in CFS3?

[IndioBlack]

The airspeed gauge in the cockpit of the Firepower B-17 is frozen, so I was wondering if there was a way to remove the gauge and replace it with a gauge from another aircraft.
This sort of thing is really easy in CFS2, but I don't know how it works in CFS3.

[Mathias]

You can't replace gauges in CFS3 since they are baked into the model.
All you can do is repaint them.
The not working asi is due to a strange bug in CFS3 that happens when the aircraft exceeds a certain number of virtual cockpit stations.
Apparently Shockwave choose to include all B-17 gunstations at the cost of a not working airspeed indicator.

[IndioBlack]

Thank you for explaining that.
I don't suppose there's a way of deleting any of the stations, because I just pilot and bomb, so I don't need any of the others.

[Mathias]

Not a straight forward task, particularly since the FP B-17's bombardier station is the "view=9", the offending bit if you will.
First of all, backup the entire aircraft folder :-)
Open the xdp in notepad or any other text editor,
scroll down until you see the last of the gunner station entries and remove it:


     

[IndioBlack]

Well, that sounds like an excellent project to me.
Thank you so much for your  help.

[IndioBlack]

Okay, well this turned into a little headache:
There appear to be two extra stations above the limit:
9 is bombardier
10 is co-pilot
I removed 10 completely
I then removed the tail gunner, and renamed bombardier as view 8, as per your instructions.
This worked fine.
But now the problem came when I opened the B_17G_Cockpit6.M3Dfile in Notepad. I could change the eyepoint from 9 to 8. But whenever I saved and then re-opened to check it, all the forrmatting had disappeared. How do I stop that happening ?

[Mathias]

Hmm, maybe you should use a hex editor in place of Notepad?
There are some freeware editors out there.
Also, you may reduce it to just 7 views alltogether.
Can't quite recall what the total allowed number is since I didn't play with that stuff for ages.

I should also add that I'm not 100% certain if it works at all simply because I don't recall if the bug is caused by the m3d exporter or the game engine.
If it's the exporter you're out of luck.
If it's the game engine the above is the way to go.

[IndioBlack]

I used wordpad, and that solved the re-formatting.
However, the re-numbering doesn't work, because I don't get the views I'm supposed to, and the airspeed gauge still doesn't work.

I bet the bug is in the exporter.
Never mind. It was worth a try, so thanks for your help.