Warbirds III Custom Gauges/Sights Set up gauges and sights in Warbirds III (Beta) to look just like you want them.

DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLATION

Warbirds III Gauges Pack (Zip file includes GEgs.tga, Jags.tga, USgs.tga for German, Japanese, and US a/c.)

Warbirds III Gun Sight (The default Warbirds Gun Sight in editable TGA format.)

Unzip the Gauges Pack to a default folder, i.e. C:\unzipped\gauges\, edit the TGA file of your choice as described below then place the finished 32-bit TGA in the aircraft folder you wish the customized gauges to be visible in. For instance, if you're creating a new Bf 109-F gauge setup, then you would go into your Warbirds III folder and place the TGA in skins/bf109f/ renaming the gauges TGA to "gauges.tga". (MAC users who may not be used to zip files can "unzip" these files with ZIPIT.)

Download the Gun Sight to the folder of the aircraft you wish to have the sight "show up" in, then edit the gunsite.tga as described below.

EDITING CUSTOM GUN SIGHTS

This is written for Adobe Photoshop users, but the info can be easily transferred to other programs like JASC's Paint Shop Pro. Open the GUNSITE.tga in Photoshop, you'll see what appears to be a red square with no site really visible at all. No, it's not a corrupt file. Go to Window > Show Channels. It should look like this.

The Channels menu shows you all the different components that make up the image broken down by color. The top "channel" is the RGB channel, click it on and off to see the final image of any project your working on, independent of any masks etc that may be in the artwork. Red, Green and Blue channels are self explanatory, they show where and how much of that color is visible. Then there is the alpha channel.

Turn the alpha channel on by clicking the empty box to it's left. Turn off all the other channels by clicking on they "eye" in the box next to the RGB channel. You should have something like this now.

What you have here is a mask. The black areas are the parts of the picture that the gunsite.tga will not allow to be shown when in game. The white areas are the actual marks you will see as your gunsite in game.

Edit these marks be either erasing areas of black for more lines, circles, what have you, and filling in (I usually use the pencil tool set to a brush size of 1 for maximum control of my image.) white areas that you want to go away.

When you're happy with the gun sights shape, now think about color. What color do you want your gunsite? Well pick one with the color picker and turn the RGB channel back on. Now fill image with whatever color you like. The site in game will be that color.

With the alpha layer "on" as well as the RGB channel, you can see that my blue fill will show where the blue is visible in the image, the rest, in a kind of light purple, will be masked. Cool eh?

EDITING CUSTOM GAUGES

This is written for Adobe Photoshop users, but the info can be easily transferred to other programs like JASC's Paint Shop Pro. Open your choice of the three available gauges. GEgs.tga, Jags.tga, USgs.tga are for German, Japanese, and US aircraft respectively. Each one has slightly different looks and placement. Keep in mind that you may alter the "look" of the gauges, but their placement in the cockpit may not be altered. Moving them on the TGA file will only alter the background, not the actual placement of the gauges needles, bars etc.

Each file also has an alpha layer as descibed above in the Gun Sights editing section. Turn on the alpha layer and you will see areas marked in red that aren't allowed to "print" in the cockpit in game. Now lets say you wanted to cherry out your gauges and perhaps add a helpfull hint for information you might need on the fly. For instance, in the A6M3 I like to keep my speed in combat between 180 and 250 IAS. I'll ad a helpfull reminder to the Jags.tga so that I always KNOW when I'm in that "sweet spot" in speed.

Here's how. Open Jags.tga in photoshop and look for the speed gauge. Also, while you're at it, turn on the Alpha channel for a better idea of what portions of the gauges will be visible in game.

I first made some guides over the outside area of the "new circle" I'm going to make, I also did another set of guides on the inside of that circle. I filled in the area I selected using these guides with a green color on a new layer. (Get a new layer by going to Window > Show Layers then clicking on the little right facing arrow in the Layer's pallette. Then choose, new layer.)

At that point I turned the layer to "screen" by selecting that option from the pulldown menu that says "normal" by default at the top of the Layers menu. This way I can see the white lettering below my green circle. I then selected the interior gauge and deleted the green from that portion of the image.

This gave me a big "O" to work with. I selected the area between 180 and 250 and then "inverted" the selection by going to Select > Inverse. Simple enough. Then deleted the rest of the green. I didn't like the look of the green, thinking it was a little too bright, almost neon so I just dragged the opacity of the layer it was on down to 51%.

Whalla, now go to that right facing arrow on the top/right of the layers pallette and select flatten. Save it as a 32-bit tga entitled "gauges.tga" into whichever aircrafts folder you want those gauges to show up in. In my case, the skins/a6m3 folder.

Now with one quick look I can tell if I'm in the "sweet spot" on speed.

Let Furball know if you have any customizations that you think others would like to have. Odds are, if anyone can get any use out of it, we'll host it.

Mike Swantak's Gauges "mswantak" sent in this edited gauge set, now a ZIP file including all 3 major gauge sets after his edits. "My biggest knock on the new gauges has been poor readability due to low contrast" Click the gauge to the left to download Mike's edited setup.