October 14, 2007 - Orbiter-Forum.com is founded.

Some of you have been around long enough to remember when I first suggested the idea of setting up a new Orbiter forum over on the M6 forum. The idea was not very well accepted among the senior members (rightfully so, no one wants to start all over again) which ended up in me giving up on the idea all together for the time being. This was probably a good thing since at the time I had just founded a vBulletin forum setup for friends and...

Advertisment first published in Kamikaze Journal #346



You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
Your requirements are the omelette... Callsign Zero are the eggs.

Testing new aircraft, experimental avionics, innovative space exploration techniques, running missions that nobody else is willing (or stupid enough) to try.
Taking the risks...

Orbiter 2010 introduces a new way to define 2-D panels. Documentation for this is still thin on the ground (but under development), and currently only the stock DG provides an example for it.

I thought that maybe a small tutorial series may be the way to nudge developers towards adopting the new style. So here goes ...

Why should I switch to the new interface?
The new panel style has a number of advantages over the legacy (2006) method:

• It is better supported

...

If you have followed Part 1 of this tutorial, you should have a working panel background. Time to add something useful ...

Lesson 5: Adding an MFD
Multifunctional displays (MFD) are the primary user interface for most Orbiter spacecraft, and consequently they feature in most instrument panels. So let’s start our panel instrumentation by adding an MFD.

MFDs consist of two main components: a square display, and a set of control buttons around it. The display will...

This continues the tutorial from Part 2.

Lesson 6: Adding a switch (button, dial, etc.)
Apart from MFDs, the panel can contain many more active elements. A common class of elements has two or more discrete states (a switch that can be flipped up or down, a dial that can be turned to a set of discrete positions, a control light that can be on or off, etc.) Representative for all those objects, let’s add a 2-way switch now.

Active objects that have a number of...