Thanks for the kind words Tippy but like you say it was the quality of all the other authors work that really pushed me into producing my profiles. In particular was Ruggbutts F15 profile, that just blew my away, and inspired me jump in and do my Orbiter profile. I make my living as an Architect, 12 years in the game so far. I do enjoy design but I think my strengths lay in the technical aspect and I think that helps with this sorta stuff, and I do work on computers all day, so I use Cad, Photoshop etc.. all the time.
There appears to be two approaches to profiles:
1.) The simple button interface.
2.) Reproduction of real life interfaces.
Flight sims really seems to suite no.2, since the keyboard macros are generally reproducing actual mechanical systems. This is the approach I took with my Orbiter profile and what I tried to do for my first LFS profile. But in race sims alot of the commands are nothing you would find in a real car purely used to control the game interface. That is why I decided to redo my LFS profile as a simple button interface. The difficultly now becomes how do I make a simple button interface look as slick and stylely as those switch heavy cockpit profiles. I took the approach of trying to make it look as close to the game GUI as possible. Perhaps you should look a rFactor and use that as guide. The game writers hire very talented and expensive designers why not use their talent. Care has to be taken on copyright though, I got permission from the LFS devs to use all the images I ripped from the games folders but LFS isn't a freely moddable game like rF so it might be different.
Off course you can mix the two. Switch heavy realistic reproductions for the items that could be considered real world and buttons for the sim stuff. They can be seperated on different tabs or, like the MFD on my orbiter profile or the notepad on my first LFS, be included on the same tabs.
Gee what a rant. Oh well have fun thats the main thing.
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