Hi guys... Just to find out whether or not it is your (the P3D team) (or anyone else for that matter) intent to answer this question?...

Jon works for me (Milviz) and we would really like to know how this (and other stuff) works.

I am now the owner of two dev licenses one of which Jon here is using.

Any assistance on this would be welcome.

(yes, this product is for P3D should that be an issue...)

Thanks.

Colin

I worked with the custom draw good briefly a couple years back when adding SIDs and STARs support to the gps gauge, but only making small tweaks to the existing gps gauges custom draw implementation. That gauge hooked directly into the core rather than using the sdk wrappers, though, so I'm not sure if it even used the same interface provided for external use. Unfortunately, I've got too much on my plate right now to go digging through that system and documenting how to use it. If you need to use CustomDraw, I would suggest doing some searches on the Avsim forums as the interface haven't changed since the FSX/ESP days and some users have successfully implemented it.

You may want to consider drawing your map directly using either GDI+ or D3D9. There is an old MS/ESP example that shows how to draw into a gauge using GDI. We've used this technique as the bases for a few internal projects that pipe in visuals from legacy systems.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd262188.aspx

Your other option would be creating a DirectX Gauge (there is an example in the sdk).

In either of those two options, you can use C-variables to push and pull data back and forth between you dll and xml gauges. That way you set up the interface yourself rather than having your hands tied by CustomDraw system. The only caveat I would mention about using d3d9 gauges is that you'll have to eventually update the rendering to d3d11 to support 2.0.

Thanks,
Beau

Any interface changes we make will be documented (such as changes required to update a directx gauge to v2). If we find missing or inaccurate documentation of a system while working on that system, we will likely go ahead and fix the documentation. (eg we realize when looking at the code that a SimVar is read only but the SDK claims it can be set). For subsystems that we aren't actively developing in, the documentation is unlikely to change.

Beau