FS Panel Studio review

This is a review of FS Panel Studio from Flight1 Software.

Some programs stand the test of time. When I tell you that FS Panel Studio supports all Microsoft Flight Simulator versions from FS98 through to Flight Simulator X (as well as Combat Flight Simulator and CFS3), you can see that this is one such application. It is my experience that the very best applications concentrate on doing a specific task and doing it well. FS Panel Studio concentrates on allowing you to create new and/or modify existing aircraft panels and it does the job very well indeed.

Installation

Installation is very straightforward. The installer detects which version(s) of Flight Simulator you have installed. If you have more than one version, you can select the one you wish to work with at this stage. This can be changed later if you’d like to work on a panel from another version of the simulator that you might have installed.

Using FS Panel Studio

For the purposes of this review, I’ll take you through adding some new instruments (I’ll be adding some of the Century Flight System gauges - also from Flight1 - and the subject of a later review) to the default Cessna 172SP.

When FSPS (as I’ll now refer to FS Panel Studio) is first loaded, you’re presented with a screen layout not dissimilar to a paint package, which in some ways, it is. The first stage in my example is to load the existing panel for the Cessna 172. FSPS keeps incremental backups of all your panels, so you can always go back to an earlier version if things go wrong or you want to make some changes.

Once you have selected the panel, FSPS opens it ready for editing as shown below:

I will now add the first new gauge I would like to include in the panel, which is the Triden ADI. The next screenshot shows the gauge immediately after adding it:

We now need to resize and reposition it to replace the default ADI. If you right-click the existing ADI and select Properties, you are shown the following screen:

As you can see, this shows the precise position and size of the existing instrument, so all we need to do is delete the original ADI (after making a note of the 4 relevant numbers in the Properties window) by simply selecting it and pressing the Del key, right-clicking the newly added ADI, selecting Properties and entering the data from the original ADI. You can use the mouse for manual positioning if desired by simply dragging the gauge to the desired location, or you can use the keyboard arrows for more precise control. The next screenshot shows the panel with the correctly positioned and sized ADI:

The whole process is much easier to do than describe! It took all of about 2 minutes to add this gauge. I then proceeded to replace the HSI and add a brand new instrument - the Triden autopilot - to the panel. The result is shown below:

The entire process of adding all 3 instruments took less than 10 minutes. The screenshot below shows the modified panel in Flight Simulator X:

Looks pretty neat, doesn’t it?

Obviously, all of this could also be achieved by manually modifying the panel.cfg file for the desired aircraft. I’ve done this in the past and it’s quite a painful and time consuming process! As I mentioned at the start of the review, FSPS does one job and does it extremely well, i.e. it takes what is at best a fiddly and not particularly enjoyable task and makes it easy.

As well as modifying an existing panel in this way, you can also add a completely new window if you wish. So, for instance, we could’ve easily added a new window showing a zoomed version of the Triden autopilot we added above. FSPS also allows you to modify existing windows in panels, e.g. the radio stack or GPS windows found in most panels.

I have merely touched the surface here. To give you some idea of what can be achieved, the product includes a 120 page PDF manual as well as a 12 page printed manual. The beauty of it is, if you just want to make some simple changes to existing panels, you can do so with the minimum of effort, but it also provides you with the tools to design a complete panel from scratch should you wish to do so.

Summary

If you do any panel work at all, whether it’s a simple modification to an existing panel, or designing a completely new panel for your newly designed aircraft, there really is only one program you’ll want to use and that’s FS Panel Studio. The fact that is has survived and grown over such a long period of time is testament to the application.

FS Panel Studio is available either as a download from the Flight1 web site for $24.99, or on CD for $29.95. My thanks go to Flight1 for supplying the review copy.

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