Instrument Alignment

Instruments in X-Plane are positioned based on their center position. Because an instrument with an odd width or height might have a center that is a fraction of a pixel wide, fractional instrument coordinates are allowed.

= Guidelines =

Here are some guidelines for positioning your instruments for maximum visual quality:


 * For best quality, leave the instrument scale at 1.0. If you scale the instrument, the graphics card will blur your art. To make a small instrument, use small artwork!
 * The base layer and overlay layers should all have the same even-odd status. In other words, if your base instrument texture is 57 pixels wide, your overlay should not be 54 pixels wide.  All widths and heights should be either all-odd or all-even.
 * If your textures are even, your instrument should be centered on a whole-pixel position, e.g. (254.0, 127.0).
 * If your textures are odd, your instrument should be centered on a half-pixel position, e.g. (254.5, 127.5).
 * When these rules are followed, Plane-Maker's preview should match X-Plane when the panel is not scaled.
 * If you violate these rules, the particular visual errors you get will vary based on the particular instrument, the type of alignment mistake, and possibly even your graphics card.

= Test Airplane =

This test airplane package demonstrates all possible instrument alignment combinations for non-scaled instruments, both correct and incorrect.



This picture illustrates the panel test:



Some notes:
 * When an instrument is misaligned, there may be no visible error, a full pixel error, or in the case of rotating panels, blurry pixels.
 * The error may be different for each layer of the instrument.