I’m looking at Air Manager, and though it says it includes panels, they really seem to simply be panels that users have made. If so, why aren’t more community panels (and instruments) available through their site?
Is there a better place to find them? I also get that there’s… something… on Github, but I’d prefer something that wasn’t designed to be navigated by programmers.
thanks
GitHub is where the panels are. If you prefer to look elsewhere, be prepared to be a little disappointed.
Thanks - Ok, I can use Github.
I guess part of my question is why it’s on Github - I’m assuming there is a lot of community- based/shared intensive programming tasks?
@Crunchmeister71 can correct me if I am wrong, but to be accepted into the Air Manager / SimInnovations Store, your panels must be 100% “authentic” meaning, you need to make your graphics from scratch, versus taking screenshots in the Virtual Cockpit etc…
There are a bunch of other rules as well.
So in short, it’s probably just easier for folks to make their stuff and push it via DropBox, GitHub, etc… versus complying with the store rules.
Check out simstrumentation.com for a number of quality panels and instruments.
As well as their Discord.
There seems to be confusion between panels and instruments.
Instruments are just that - instruments that are either generic in nature, or specific to a plane.
Panels are full layouts of instruments with background graphics of some sort that
There are very few community “panels” in AM. There are some payware ones, and a few free ones. But what AM has in spades is instruments. And for the most part, people create their own blank panels and add these instruments to them to fit whatever their screen layouts are.
That’s not panels. There’s nothing like that for panels. It’s all about instruments.
Yea, that’s what I meant 
I always just refer to stuff as panels, incorrectly.
Not sure how you can say there aren’t many instruments in Air Manager. There are about 1200 free instruments available in Air Manager currently, and close to 1000 of those are MSFS compatible. That’s not an insignificant number. And there are a bunch more available externally from various authors that haven’t made it to the community store yet for various reasons.
We at Simstrumentation have made about 200 different instruments for Air Manager - mostly for specific planes. Some of them are already in Air Manager (CJ4, Kodiak, the G1000 NXi, GMA 1347 audio panel, and more). Others are available for download from our site at simstrumentation.com like the entire cockpit suite for the Vision Jet. There are plenty of instruments.
Other authors like @HPuukka have done all kinds of work for various other planes as well and are available from their own external sources.
Panels, however, are another story. There are so many different screens sizes people use out there - from small tablets (using SpaceDesk to connect to PC) , 11", 13", 15", 19". 22", 24". Many are 16:9 aspect ratio. Others aren’t. Designing panels to work with a wide variety of monitor sizes is pretty much impossible. We’re only able to design complete panels for the size monitors we have.
As an example, I run dual 22" touch screens as my main Air Manager panels. If I distribute my full panels made for a 22" screen, that’s barely usable for someone using a 15", and useless for someone with a 13" or smaller. Stuff will be too small to read, buttons too small and close together to accurately use, etc. Likewise, if we develop for small monitors like 13 and 15", those will be comically large on full size monitors. In either case, it means most folks won’t be able to use our panels and will just end up tearing them down and building their own anyway. So we have the philosophy to just provide the required instruments and let people build their own panel layouts.
@Sling380 from Experimental Sim Avionics, on the other hand, provides fully made payware panels. He puts the time into creating complete backgrounds and full layouts. Currently, he’s got 1 in the AM store (Cessna 414) with more to come (very worthwhile if you have the C414). He likes to provide full panels that people can then modify to their own liking. The same problem still exists though. He built and sized them on 24" screens. I tried loading the C414 on a 15" screen. I can’t read the gauges, nor can I accurately use any of the controls with my stubby fingers. But he likes to give people a starting point, and I get it. Besides, he’s charging money for his work, so putting that extra work in there is worth it for him.
So that’s the general gist of why there are instruments available, but not a lot of full panel layouts. If you find a panel, chances unless it was designed for the exact size monitor you own at the same aspect ratio, you’re going to be basically rebuilding it anyway to make it work for you.
OK, I was a bit busy earlier and didn’t have time to properly elaborate on this.
It’s mostly coding standards that need to be adhered to. Keep things clean, file names, code comments, not including unused assets with instruments, and a bunch of other rules to ensure quality of the product.
There’s nothing that says they have to be exact matches. People tend to do that because we want our stuff to look authentic. That’s not really in the publishing standards.
Graphics and sound files do have to be original works though. They can’t be screenshots from the sim, lifted from other unauthorized sources, etc. Any fonts used have to be either open source freeware or the end users licensed to use them. As an example, if you pay for the Adobe Creative Cloud (2 of us at Simstrumentation pay $750US / year for it), you’re allowed to use any of the included Adobe fonts in any of your works (paid or free). That would extend to publishing works via Air Manager as well (free or payware).
There are some other guidelines in there as well. It’s a lot to comply with, but in the end, it does mean you have a better final product for end users.
While the standards can be a bit of work to adhere to, I can say that in the case of most of the Simstrumentation stuff, we haven’t pushed it to the store yet since some of it is still work in progress, as the planes they’re intended to be used for are still being developed. Only once a plane is in its FINAL state will we push instruments.
The reason for that is that the AM Store is a bit like dealing with the MS Marketplace. We can submit new instruments or even updates. Sometimes they’re up in a couple of days, and sometimes it can be weeks or even a month or more until an instrument makes it to the store. So if a plane changed and requires instrument updates, people using stuff from the AM store will have to wait until the instrument goes live in the store. Until then, it will be “broken”. Users of our instruments are mostly already on our Discord or follow our Simstrumentation thread here on the forum. So when there are updates, we advertise them and people can download the updates immediately.
If you go to our GitHub page and scroll down from the very top, you’ll see we’ve arranged our instruments very neatly by plane. It’s easy and clear to navigate, and we have single links to download the stuff. It’s not your typical GitHub page. Standard GitHub layout is very user-unfriendly.
On the Air Manager subject, has anyone managed to get it to talk to the PMDG 737. I have been trying to create some instruments/panels for this aircraft but I can’t get it to see any values/data even though I know the variable to subscribe to.
If the answer is no, then the only other way I can think of is to get something like spad.next to read the variable/dataref from PMDG, then re-write the value to another variable that Air Manager can read (just a theory)
Someone has already taken this on and created a number of them which were uploaded last week.
You can get to them from the website, or within Air Manager directly.
Like skypilot said - the whole set is already in Air Manager as of last week’s store update. I’m pretty sure everything you need is in there. Detlef’s been working on these for a while and has done a fantastic job from what I’ve heard.
Nice! I’ll check them out.
YES! Just saw that. I wish everyone using GH tood the time to arrange the “final content” (or code, or components, or reference) as well as this.
Note regarding the website: from a visitor’s perspective, it may be worthwhile, where the discussion of Community Panels takes place, to note that many more panels are actually available (and subject to increase, change, etc.), possibly with a some thumbnails, and information regarding where they are.
Also - the link is “Community Panels”, but there are also instruments; here, we begin with “All Instruments” listed in the dropdown, which I saw - and scrolled down, with only about 10 instruments that show up. I didn’t notice the number in the “search” field since I just started scrolling after seeing this.
Anyway… I’ll be aboard shortly
cheers
I take your point about various different screen sizes. On the other hand, if you have made a panel for a specific size, the fact that it wouldn’t work on a smaller screen is no reason not to share it.
People with smaller monitors can crop or scale to fit what they have.
People with larger screens could put something else in the spare space
Agreed - even the ones that are available via the main website don’t match what are probably the majority of setups.
I just figured most people resize and rearrange things as needed, especially (as I am planning) if they don’t have a specific or final screen / controller configuration in mind.
Thing were never really expected to match exact setups anyway… way back in 2012 I had a setup using (I think) FS Panel Studio… really, it was just set up to mimic the RW aircraft I was flying. It only had a tiny forward view window, but that’s all that was needed for what I was practicing.
It’s more than that.
Most of the planes we work on have glass cockpits and require sim popouts. That means suddenly, the holes we have to make in background images to let the popouts show through have to be a very particular sizes and don’t scale at all. If it were just flat graphics without said holes, that would be another matter altogether. It’s not just a matter of cropping and scaling. It’s a matter of having to do some major edits to the background graphics, which quite honestly, is beyond the both the skill level and caring of most end users. That in turn will cause complaints since the panels “don’t work” on a particular user’s setup, create support requests on Discord, unhappy users, and a bunch of work for nothing.
The panel building tool in AM is tedious to use. Building full panel layouts for planes is a fairly lengthy process. And most folks wouldn’t know how to edit / manage those themselves to make the changes needed. Which again generates support requests.
Again, we do this for free. We provide users with high grade free instruments that are superior in visual quality to the majority of stuff currently in Air Manager, completely tailored to specific MSFS planes. We strive to ensure everything works and looks as close to the real thing as possible We put literally hundreds of hours into development of said instruments and we take end users 95% of the way to their final cockpit layout. Even if we provide full panels, we’re still only taking the majority of users 95% of the way as they’ll still have to do a bunch of work and rearranging to get their layout working on their own monitors.
On a side note, I’ve never shied away from sharing my background images for my panels over on the Simstrumentation Discord. I even posted both the PNG and source PSD Photoshop files for my C414 panels in the Simstrumentation thread sp that people could edit them to their liking (assuming they use PS). I’m happy to provide said backgrounds if people want them. But personally, that’s as far we’re willing to go.
Honestly, most of my backgrounds are simple flat graphics. I have a carbon fibre texture I found on Google and use that for the background for most of my planes. I just cut the holes in it for my popouts to show through and call it a day. I only have a couple of planes where I’ve bothered doing more background panel work.
Out of interest @Crunchmeister71, given the origin restrictions that apply to instruments that will be posted to the Air Manager store, how do you go about creating the graphics for things like switches? Study photos / screenies and then free-hand draw it? All the Simstrumentation instruments are highly authentic-looking so either you’re all talented graphic artists or there’s a trick I’m missing.
(Currently attempting to learn how to make AM instruments… the LUA is easy enough but the graphical side fills me with woe.)
Our graphics are hand-drawn. @CaptainTick433 is a pro graphic designer. He’s done a lot of our stuff. Most of the time, I’ll send him screen shots of the instruments I need made and he draws them, then sends me back the resulting Photoshop file with the vector drawn stuff. In the case of the CRJ, we had a guy actually 3D model switches and knobs and he and Tick worked on that together to get them looking awesome.
I’m proficient in graphics (although not an expert). When I make switches, sometimes they’re freehand. Knobs I typically freehand. For more complicated switches, I tend to start with screen grabs for the sim with switches in their various position, then hand-draw (trace) over them with vector drawing tools so that I can keep the proper shapes and proportions. Then I apply textures, lighting effects, shadows, etc. So they look really genuine and 3D in nature. I’ve actually gotten reasonably good now using the drawing tools in PS.
Thanks for the detailed post - FWIW, among other things, I’ve been a graphic designer for about 30 years, so I’m ok with editing. What it sounds like is that the panel is in front of the instruments, requiring an alpha channel to be applied to make the underlying instruments visible?
You’re referring to it as holes in the “background” image, but the way it’s described here, it sound like it’s a foreground image.
Please let me know if this is accurate… I’ll be trying the demo this weekend, but will also look at the Wiki - could you please advise which section of the Wiki covers the “layering” you mention?
No, it’s behind… You have your background image for the panel, then instruments are placed over that. If you’re dealing with an analog cockpit or using just AM instruments, this if fine.
However, when dealing with popout instruments from the sim, those sit BEHIND the entire AM panel, not on top. That requires holes being cut into the background image (alpha transparency) so that the popouts will show through.
Keep in mind that with the demo, you can only use the demo panel, which is a basic 6-pack of gauges. You can’t load any other instruments nor import any custom instruments.
