I wanted to edit the default Cessna 172SP airplane in X-Plane 10 to include an HSI, and a DME. I used Plane Maker to delete the standard DG, and insert a general aviation HSI linked to NAV1. It didn’t really fit in between the other instruments, so I moved them a little too.
I delete the standard CDA NAV1 head, moved NAV2 up to NAV1, and moved the ADF up to the NAV2 position. This gave me pretty much the same panel configuration as the Frasca 141 simulator I have been taking some flight lessons in.
I did a “Save As” to save the plane as a different name (for safety). When I loaded up the plane in X-Plane to fly it, I saw strange shadows / ghosts where the moved and deleted instruments previously were. This led me on a search for the answer to this mystery.
It turns out the makers of the original Cessna 172SP plane in X-Plane cleverly added an overlay of “glow” to the original set of instruments. The “instrument” in the plane maker Hierarchy list is called “gen_rotaryPANEL_LIT” and it uses the image cockpit/generic/panelnight-1_LIT.png to overlay the “glow” based on how much the panel lights are turned up. It’s most visible in X-Plane with night lighting.
The glows in that PNG file were positioned where my instruments were before. I editing it in GIMP to have the right glows in the right places, and I removed the extras I didn’t need. (Before I did that I made a copy of the entire Cessna172Sp aircraft sub-folder in case I messed something up.)
A simpler solution would be to remove the panelnight-1_LIT.png image from your cockpit/generic folder. You’d lose all the glows, but save a bunch of editing trouble.
Hope this info saves you some time and frustration.
Here’s the final result in all it’s glory.
