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The Graphical Layout Editors
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One of the features that made Calana's Commander software so popular was its ability to print out your joystick file as a graphical image, with all your statements beside each hat and button. This made it so much easier to remember what all your hats and buttons did on your joystick and throttle, and helped in optimising and planning your files.
Fox Two users don't have this feature, and this is perhaps the reason why users of Commander kept their software on their system. However, this has all changed now, and Fox Two Pro users get this feature, but seriously far more powerful and better implemented. One of the criticisms of Commander's handling of this feature was that with large files, a lot of the text would overlap the images or other text (see the screenshot below) making it unreadable,
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often spilling out onto two pieces of paper when printing and the text couldn't be edited or moved around. This last problem was important when assigning raw code statements - the last thing you want to read in the thick of combat was a hat surrounded by a series of raw codes. Rather, you wanted to be able to actually print out what the raw codes do, not what they are.
With Fox Two Pro then, James has taken a very different approach, and it works superbly. Fox Two Pro contains 3 graphical layout editors - a joystick layout editor, a throttle layout editor, and a custom layout editor. The rationale behind Foxy's approach is this: Foxy effectively mimics a Word template, where an image of the controllers is surrounded by textboxes containing the statements for each hat and button. As these are text boxes, you can move, resize and position them to wherever you want, and you can edit and format the text again, however you want.
The idea behind having three separate layout editors is that by separating out the joystick and throttle statements onto independant layout editors, then you have a lot more room to display them - they're less cluttered and this makes editing and designing your files so much easier and clearer. Also, it's a lot easier to see what a particular hat or button does when you're flying. Of course, James was well aware that users would still like to place everything onto one layout, and that's the purpose of the Custom Layout Editor. Very simple to use, you can just transfer the information from the joystick and throttle editors by pressing F5, and rearrange your textboxes as you wish.
You can even load up custom and/or background images to your layouts, and create stunning layouts that ordinarily would require high end graphical apps to produce. These layouts can be saved so that you can come back to work on them at a later date, they can be captured as bitmaps so that they can be distributed with your files to other users, and of course, they can be printed out in full colour. Here for example is a quick layout I produced using the Custom Layout Editor for my F22 ADF files, using one of the images from the huge image library on the CD.
The ability to fully edit and customise these layouts is superb. In the image above, I've done very little editing - in fact apart from the odd raw code I've edited, all I've done is to reposition the images of the joystick and throttle so that they didn't lie directly over the F22 aircraft, moved around the textboxes, and then applied colour highlighting in the /U, /M, and /D format, so that I can quickly distinguish the statements associated with the position of the dogfight switch on the TQS throttle.
But if we go back to just the jostick layout editor, as in the image below, then I'll use this to show you just how editable these layouts can be.
First of all, I've made the layout size smaller, as I don't need all the space I needed in the Custom layout. That's a good point for me to add here actually - all the layouts can be any size you want. If you look at the textbox for Hat 2, this is the way that Foxy automatically fills the textbox. Now with some editing, as in Hat 1, you'll see that I've rearranged the statements so that they appear in the positions associated with Hat 1, ie. Up Right, Down and Left. I can get rid of the slash modifiers for /I and /O if I make the /I statements italics, and the /O normal, as in the textbox for Hat 4. Getting the idea? You can create layouts exactly as you want them. Foxy doesn't force you into having layouts with its style - it's entirely up to you.
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And you can do exactly the same for the throttle layout editor.
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This is the only Thrustmaster app I've seen to handle this layout representation so well - it's like using a professional graphics app. Indeed, a lot of the features you'd use with such apps are present in Foxy. For example, to help you align your textboxes, you can display a customisable grid, and align your textboxes to it automatically, or resize them to fit along grid borders. You can also display other blank textboxes, into which you can type what you want, which can be useful when you're optimising your files, or as memory aids - the option is there for you should you want it.
This isn't it though for the layout editors. There's one more feature implemented with the Custom layout Editor, and that's the ability to couple the Composer with it to create joystick files, graphically. The way this works is that you first of all display with the Custom Layout Editor, textboxes for each hat and button, surrounding the joystick and throttle images. You then fill these with templates that come with Foxy or ones you've created, so that each text box contains blank statements for the appropriate hat and button.
Then with the composer, you just get busy double clicking on the macros that you want inserted beside all these statements, and they appear beside each hat and button. Effectively, it's like having Foxy's Editor all broken up into individual chunks, and placed in the right position beside each hat and button.
The beauty of programming like this is that you can see immediately where all your macros are going to be placed. So, if you tend to program so that you program all the /D position macros first, then now you can do so. You just select the /D line for a particular hat/button, double click the macro in the Composer that you want there, and there it appears. When you're done, you just tell Foxy to create joystick file from the layout, and it does just that, with the joystick file transferred over to Foxy's main Editor for you to add any finishing touches to it.
It's pretty difficult for me to impress upon you just how superb these layout editors are - but I hope I've given you an idea that what we're dealing with here is something us Thrustmaster users have never had before. The use of the layout editors is brilliantly illustrated with the tutorials on the CD, so nobody will have any problems in learning how to use them effectively.
What else is on the CD?
You've probably realised by now that Fox Two Pro impresses the hell out of me, and it's damned cheap for what you're getting. But it's ridiculously priced when you consider just what else is on the CD. James really has put together a CD that has everything you'll ever need on it. We're talking about 148Mb of goodies here. So here's what else is on it:
- Mystic's Six Degrees of Freedom: Mystic has worked closely with James, particularly with Fox One, and was one of the principle beta testers for the Pro version. For those of you who don't know who Mystic is, he hosts one of the most popular Thrustmaster sites on the net, with a large array of files for Thrustmaster users to use with the latest sims. He's created a special version of his site for inclusion with Fox Two Pro, and this is a blessing in disguise for many users, as on the CD, you have excellent, tried and tested files, ready to use straight away with your sims, combined with custom made graphical layouts that you can display and print off to help you learn these files.
- Thrustmaster files: Thrustmaster have also given James permission to distribute their latest files on their site, including Pentium II loaders, and a bunch of other goodies, like ProPanel.
- Bob Church, the author of CTFJ and WinLoad, worked closely with James on the implementation of WinLoad into Foxy, and his files are also on the CD.
- The image library: Oh - you're going to love this! On the CD are almost 200 high resolution aircraft images to use with the custom layout editor, or just as your Windows background. Let me tell you that many of these images are HUGE. You'll be scaling a lot of these down in resolution, not up.
- Finally, James has made sure that you won't have any problems installing Foxy, because he's also distributed those Visual Basic components that Microsoft have allowed to be distributed as separate installable components. And he's also provided 2 versions of Foxy. People who prefer their macros to appear in the macro lists in the Editor, Composer and Fox One in the same order that they're in in the macro file, ie, not sorted alphabetically, then there's a version of Fox Two Pro and Fox One on the CD that behaves in this manner. Nice touch James!
In summary
So the big question therefore is: Should you part with some money and get the Pro version, or just stick to the Freeware version of Fox Two? Well, if you need the answer to that, you haven't read this review! Seriously, if you've splashed out to get yourself these superb controllers, do yourself a favour - splash out a little more, and blow your mind on some software that's going to amaze you. Remember, this isn't like buying a sim, this is like buying the controllers themselves. You'll be using it for years to enhance your flying of all of your sims. And if you've never used Fox Two before, take a look at some of the comments James has received. He's definitley doing something right!
Fox Two Pro is without doubt, the most powerful, feature rich, easy and fun Thrustmaster programming application you'll ever use. Get it now!
Ed. Note: James is also working on integrating a Masterpilot programming and template ability within Fox 2. Click HERE for a look.
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