I’d love to see the OPs suggestion implemented.
I have AM and use it most flights. But when I started to consider building custom instruments for the BlackBrid PC-6, after looking at what would be involved, I came to the rapid conclusion that life was far too short for that and would make do with a panel using generic instruments. Which works just fine.
Graphics are often what trip people up with AM development. One easy way is to use screen grabs from the sim to build your personal instruments from. If you’re just using them privately and not going to share with the world, that’s the quick and easy way to do it. You just have to code in your interactions. And it looks pretty good.
Interesting. I had thought about finding the .pngs for the instrument in the code, but I guess a snip&clip could be far easier!
But still, I’m trying to learn the SDK and Blender at the moment too, so my Lua skills will have to remain rusty for now.
You don’t need to have animated knobs per se. A static screen grab of something like an autopilot panel is stupid easy to code over. You define the touch zones for buttons and knobs, use nil as the graphics to use for said knobs and buttons, and just code stuff in. No worries about graphic design if that’s not your thing. And I know. Graphics design isn’t my thing as well. I only started getting good at it in the last year or so by doing AM instruments.
LUA is a pretty basic scripting language.You can do a lot with it, but in its really one of the easier scripting languages to learn. The AM Wiki has their API very well documents with examples on how to access the various widgets like dials, switches, buttons, sliders, etc.
Really, IMHO the best way to learn is to open up very simple instruments and check out the code.
I shall give it a go. And thank you for your G1000 panels. Very, very awesome 
It seems to me that all we’re missing to make everyone here happy is a vertical rotaiton offset added to the experimental multi-display settings, no?
Not sure what you mean by this… Can you elaborate?
Currently, when you enable the experimental multi-display feature (the sim provides additional render windows instead of using one large one provided by NVsurround or Eyefinity) the setting it exposes is ‘lateral rotation offset’ which lets you arrange the displays around you horizontally.
Presumably, if they also enabled vertical offset, you could add a display oriented to show any part of the cockpit? From there, you could make an invisible overlay for it in AirManager.
The sim doesn’t have separate 3D and 2D virtual cockpits anymore, so it’s just about controlling where the camera is pointed in the extra render window. Setting aside resource requirements.
I suppose the other problem is that the view would move when changing the POV or using headtracking/VR, so Asobo would also need to add an option to lock that display, to properly support a dedicated panel view (if that’s not already in, I haven’t played around with the feature myself).
Gotcha. In other words, what people actually wanted when asking for “multiple monitor support” in MSFS.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that anyone with any decision-making ability read read anything past the thread title of that wishlist thread and we got this kind of working multi-monitor support that only actually suits the needs of a minuscule number of folks.
I think it’s wishful thinking at best that we’ll ever see this feature improved at this point.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens at some point after DX 12 support is out of beta and average specs have improved some. It basically costs them nothing to add an additional offset, one or two extra lines of code setting up the additional window, and a setting for it. But I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
I suppose people who really want this now might still be able to kludge something up using the existing multi-display support along with custom camera positions. Since my current system struggles enough running surround with the Garmins popped out, I haven’t experimented.
There’s little anyone can do with the current setup. It’s designed to only extend views to the side of a central monitor. So 3 or 5 monitors for wraparound view. There’s no enough latitude in terms of camera adjustment unfortunately.
As I’ve said before on various threads, what we need is what FSX and P3D already have. The ability to create an arbitrary number of view windows, each using a different camera, each of which can be positioned on any display connected to a PC and individually sized and zoomed, and each of which will respond to mouse clicks and touch. Ideally, the ability to define entirely new cameras and specify individual view frustums that can be asymmetric.
This would solve literally everyone’s problems. It would let you do what I described at the top of this thread, it would let you have truly flexible multiple monitor or multi projector visual set ups. It would enable any number of advanced display scenarios. It’s not hugely complex and it’s perfectly possible to do, because Microsoft Flight Simulator already had all of this 20 years ago.
However, it does nothing for the primary use case of most users of the Sim, who are playing on a single screen with maybe a couple of hardware controllers, on an Xbox or desktop PC. So I think the chances of Microsoft investing time and effort in basically replicating what they already had are close to zero at this point.
Which honestly makes me sad and frustrated.
Which is what was asked for in the wishlist item. Only no one seemed to read past the “multi-monitor support” title of the thread, and we got what we got.
It seems to me that all we’re missing to make everyone here happy is a vertical rotaiton offset added to the experimental multi-display settings, no?
This is the post discussing your question.
It’s generally perplexing that Asobo has access to what must be considerable server oomph provided by MS, but MS can’t be ■■■■■ to juice Asobo with more money to make the most of it. (I mean, look at the addon approval backlog…QA interns are about as cheap as it gets in the video game dev world – as unjust as that is.)
I know it’s cold comfort, but these titles last a really long time. We’ll probably get this, eventually. But who knows how long that will be.
I’d love to see the OPs suggestion implemented.
Most of us would.
In the mean time, suggestions offered above by Crunchmeister71 are possible.
Even more simply, in many cases, you can just take a screen shot of the MSFS panel that you want to emulate in Air manager. Open that screen shot in Photoshop (or another good editor).
Clean up the image and save it as .png at 1920 x 1080 or whatever the correct specs of the monitor for displaying in AirManager
Then you can just select that image as the custom background for a new panel and place existing gauges and instruments on that background where specific instruments should be.
If you really want to go the extra step, you can even replace the instrument images found in the resources folder of each instrument under the Create/Edit tab. You just have to give your images the same name as the ones you are replacing and they will show up instead of the original images.
Just make sure you CLONE the original instrument and use that for doing the swap out.
Regarding the CODE, I found by reading the script often enough I figured out the language and what various commands were for… … especially if you delete certain lines and see what happens. You soon learn what commands do what; what can and cant be deleted; what can and can’t be changed - so you can make simple but effective modifications.
But always make a copy of the existing script at each step so if you break the code, you just delete the faulty one start again from where you were.
But of course you will be doing this with a CLONE so you will always have the original to fall back on.
However, I agree that this involves huge amounts of time that most of us would prefer to use flying.
Asobo don’t manage the ingestation of the store. That’s a Microsoft responsibility.
I meant for instruments themselves. You can take a screen shot of the AP panel, for example, and then just program invisible touch zones and knobs over the correct locations. That will give you a working instrument that looks exactly like in the sim.
Back when I first started doing AM stuff and knew little to nothing about drawing in Photoshop (I used it for photo editing previously), that’s what I did. And it works well for the most part.
But the library of AM instruments for MSFS is growing rapidly. Between all the free stuff that @HPuukka and us over at Simstrumentation have made, there’s already a lot available. And now we also have @Sling380’s payware panels (MSFS and XP compatible) available for sale on his web site. The future of AM with MSFS is not quite as bleak as it was back in the day when all that was available was generic instruments.
Well, that’s even more inexplicable then. 
As we know, Asobo only did half the job when they developed “Multiple Window” support – you can add another window, but you can’t choose which camera view to have in that window. So our hopes of having a camera view of the instrument panel on another monitor were never realized. There is a wishlist item to have full camera view control in the additional window (chose camera view and be able to pan and zoom). But since less than 2% of the wishlist items ever get scheduled, the chances of our getting a fully functional multiple window is slim. So the functionality regarding instrument views that we lost when going from FSX to MSF is unlikely to be rectified. Given that, does anybody know of a 3rd party addon that can put instruments on a second monitor? I am a user of “Panel Builder” which works as a stop-gap measure, but is time consuming to set up and has performance impacts (SimConnect). I like it better than Air Manager for putting analog instruments on-screen. Baring these solutions, has anybody come up with something to make MSFS multiple windows actually work as we expected?