X-Plane and Saitek Hardware

After many years of using and playing with the venerable and deliciously open source FlightGear Simulator, VATsim has sparked my interest I decided to bite the bullet and buy one of the proprietary flight simulators so that I could (eventually; I have yet to actually connect to VATsim!) join the community and get some "real hours in". There are only really two condenders; Laminar Research's X-Plane and Lockheed Martin's Prepare3d; of these two options I went for X-Plane mainly because of the lower cost, but also because it seemed like a more mature product which would be easier to tweak. I may have been wrong, but I had to make a decision based on what I could see and X-Plane was the one that stood out to me, so rightly or wrongly I am now an X-Plane user.

One of the big advantages to buying a flight sim (to me at least) is that there is a plethora of hardware and add-ons which are commercially supported - I'm a massive proponent of open source software, so don't get me wrong, I still love and use FlightGear, but sometimes it's nice to know that if something goes wrong I can at least get indignant about the fact that I've paid money for it even if I don't get very good support from the vendors.

Having paid for and downloaded a bunch of my favourite aircraft (not to mention buying X-Plane on DVD literally one week before they released it for download, not to mention getting stung for an extra £30 in import duties which had not occurred to me when ordering), I started looking at ways I could make my sim time a bit more interesting and realistic - Using a HOTAS joystick was fun, but it was decidedly more suited to flight games rather than flight simulators - so I set about looking for a yoke and pedals, and after much looking around and reading of reviews I decided on the Saitek range because they were comparatively inexpensive, had fairly good (if a little mixed) reviews and ultimately I liked the fact that I could buy an entire cockpit of instruments module by module.

So, having gotten used to my new flight sim and using proper controls I invested in a few of Saitek's panels. I started off with a radio panel, then added Flight Instrument, Autopilot and Switch panels with a view to buying more FIPs if they performed well enough to justify the cost.

All of these panels were designed with the the long-abandoned MS Flight Simulator X (which inexplicably still has a large following) in mind, and there were 3 or 4 completely different and mutually exclusive sets of drivers available from various kind-hearted and very skilled people to choose from. I can't say I've tried them all, but I did spend a couple of days fiddling with various plugins until I eventually came to the following conclusion:

Saitek's own Panels Plugin was the only option that would support all of my panels at the same time.

I did prefer a lot of the third-party solutions, but it seemed like every time I found something that I really liked I also discovered something essential broke somewhere else - for example I purchased DVT's drivers from the X-Plane store and if I only had FIPs (ie. no other Saitek panels) this would have been my top choice, but unfortunately I cannot use my radio panel as this payware plugin conflicts (as noted by the developer - my bad for not doing enough research before buying!) with any other Saitek plugins.

Because Saitek's Plugin "just worked out of the box", and because I'm somewhat of a nerd/geek/hacker, I decided to take a peek under the hood and see if I could figure out how to make my own gauges without the need for extra add-ons. It turns out I can, although no-where nearly as easily as I'd like, simply by manipulating the XML and images in the plugin's Data directory.

Having finally figured out (although not mastered) the art of creating Saitek FIP Gauges, and discovering that there is very little information out there on how to do so, I decided to start this blog in the hopes that (1) my new panels may be of interest or use to someone else and (2) I can provide information to others who want to create their own panels and hopefully warn them about the pitfalls and headaches I've had.

Apart from "being cool to do", my reason for replacing the default Saitek gauges is to make them a bit more useable and realistic; the default PFD gauge, for example, may just about be useable but looks like something you'd find in the bottom of a packet of cereal. I'm also aiming to include as much information per gauge as possible (to cut down on the amount of gauges I need to buy) and to de-clutter the gauges as much as possible so that all the information in the gauges is easily readable at a glance.

I find that a lot of the default gauges are difficult to read because too much space has been wasted "trying to make them look like the real thing" rather than presenting the information cleanly and clearly - a primary example of this is the default HSI, the replacement for which is my first gauge - It looks very nice, but I want a bigger, cleaner dial without all the extra graphics showing what the edge of the gauge would look like if it were real and twice the size of the FIP it's being displayed on!

My ultimate aim is to be able to just have one monitor (I usually have a vertical split so I can see instruments on one screen and "out-the-window" on the other, but this is giving me a major crick in my neck) with a forward view and to rely on FIPs for instrument readouts with joystick buttons and other Saitek panels reducing the need to click on hot spots on the screen.

Thanks for reading; I hope this blog and its pages are useful to you!