FS Panel Studio 'parm'

[UAL102161]

How do you find the "Param" of a guage? I'm using FS Panel Studio. Below is an excerpt from the Help File of FS Panel Studio.


FS2000 continued the use of Cluster Gauges, but added a parameter field in the panel.cfg file. This allowed some run-time specialization of the Gauge, for example the Gauge could be told to display the RPM of engine 1 or 2 based on the param.
How do I get the Param? Some gauges have t51, c50 for example. What does the c50, t51 and so forth mean.

[n4gix]

The simple answer is this:

only the original gauge programmer knows what use he made of the so-called "5th Parameter." Why do I call it the "5th Parameter?" That's also simple: there are four parameters that proceed it; x,y,w,h... ;)

The only clue you might have is an original panel.cfg that uses a specific gauge. By examining the entry, you might be able to discern what the specific usage the programmer intended. OTOH, you might not!

All of my gauges that read/write data to disk use the "5th Parameter" to pass the path/filename to the gauge, so it will know where to look for its data file, and what the name of the file should be. For example:

gauge01=Citation II!CitationII_Preflight, 0,0,1,1,SimObjects\Airplanes\Eaglesoft Cessna Citation II SP2 1.5\CII_Preflight

The entry above tells the CitationII_Preflight gauge that its data file is located in the following folder:

..\SimObjects
.........\Airplanes
..............\Eaglesoft Cessna Citation II SP2 1.5
...................\CII_Preflight.dat*

* The .dat extension is programmed in the gauge

OTOH, as the FS Panel Studio documentation describes, a programmer may well have chosen to use the "5th Parameter" in a different manner, for an entirely different purpose! Absent any explicit documentation from the programmer for the gauge though, we have absolutely no way of knowing...