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5
Creating an Instrument Panel
Creating a basic 2-D instrument panel in Plane Maker is as easy as choosing a panel background image
and dragging the instruments you want where you want them. Creating panels that use generic
(user-created) instruments are more complicated, as are 3-D panels; both generic instruments and
3-D panels are beyond the scope of this manual, and will thus be discussed only briefly.
5.1 Introduction to Panel Creation
With the aircraft whose panel you want to design open, open the Standard menu and click Panel:
2-D. The panel design dialog box will appear.
This window is made up of a number of different sections. The buttons in the toolbar at the
top of the screen (labeled 1 in Figure 5.1) perform a variety of functions; mouse over each button
to get a description as well as the keyboard shortcut that does the same thing, where available.
For instance, mousing over the far left button, whose icon is a floppy disk, tells us that this button
saves the file, and that you can also save by pressing Ctrl + s.
Two groups of information panes lie on the left and right of the screen, respectively. On the
left is the Instrument List, which is combined with the Preview, Description, and Properties panes,
and on the right is the Hierarchy, combined with the Key Frames pane. These left and right groups
can be displayed or hidden by clicking the large Instrument List and Hierarchy buttons at the top
of the screen, respectively.
Creation of an instrument panel, then proceeds this way. First, find the instrument you’re
looking for in the instrument list (labeled 2 in Figure 5.1) and click on it. For instance, in Figure
5.1, the general aviation altimeter, whose filename is alt GA.png, is selected. With an instrument
selected, you can see what it will look like in the Preview tab (labeled 3 in Figure 5.1). Beneath
this is the Description tab (labeled 4 in Figure 5.1), which details what the selected instrument
does.
Having found the instrument you’re looking for, click it in the instrument list and drag it into
the layout pane, labeled 5 in Figure 5.1. Doing so will cause the instrument to also be listed in the
hierarchy pane, labeled 6 in Figure 5.1. With an instrument in the panel, click on it to select it;
selecting an instrument in either the layout or the hierarchy pane will cause it to be selected in
both.
When an instrument has been added to the panel layout, it will appear in the Hierarchy pane.
You can select an instrument from the layout pane by clicking its name here. Additionally, you can
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