Tips

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• Use the space bar to cycle through the displays for each view. Each view ‘remembers’ the current overlay, so you can have a different overlay for each one. For example, you might have the FDAI, X-Pointer overlay on Virtual View 1 and no overlay on 2 or 3.

• F1 and F2 are both help screens. You can press F1 multiple times and get more displays. In windowed mode the third press of F1 will bring up the main help program.

• F3 will show you the location of the historic landing site. A green shadow of the LM appears on the ground and a big arrow in the air allows you to see it from a long way off.

• Try not to use very aggressive graphics settings when you first run the program unless you know you have a powerful graphics card.

• Real shadows heavily affect the frame rates. These shadows are significant calculations of all of the positions of the objects and where their shadows should be. If you have a weak graphics card you will get very low frames/sec. The synthetic shadow is a lot faster but is not always accurate – especially on uneven terrain.

• Don’t be afraid to try different settings in the Advanced dialog box. Sometimes just playing around with the different options may improve your display or increase the frame rates.

• The virtual cockpit allows you to move around inside. You can rotate (your virtual head) as well as move your body. See how the alignment with the LPD varies as you move your head up and down and side-to-side.

• Assign some common controls to your joystick buttons. One example is the PGNS switch. By default it is toggled using CTRL+G. Since it is a three position switch you have to toggle it twice to get it to the right position sometimes. However, the PGNS switch (and the others) have ‘continuous’ position switch assignments too. That means you can have a switch ‘holding’ a particular position. So for PGNS you could assign three buttons for each switch position. If you were designing a real cockpit you could use that to wire an actual switch. For this example you could just assign F9 (or any key or joystick button) to PGNS Att Hold. That way when you needed to go to Attitude Hold quickly you don’t have to toggle through the positions.

• Check out the joystick.ini or keyboardonly.ini files with Notepad or another editor. You can see how the example above can be programmed and you may get some other ideas as well.