Using GNS 430 overlay in Cessna 172SP panel

[dominikos]

I'm new to Air Manager and got the paid Cessna 172SP panel. For my flying, I need GNS430. I swapped the Nav1/Com1 with GNS 430 and run into issue with transparency. If I keep transparency, the xplane GNS window does not show up. If I turn off transparency, the background image disapears and panel does not look good.
What am I missing? Is there a way to design panel that has partial background image and transparent radio stack? I don't think it's uncommon request but I don't know how to find it/set it up.

Overall great product!

Thanks

[Sling]

Hi,

Yes this is a very common use case so it’s just a case of setting it up correctly. I’m not at my PC right now so I can’t show you the settings. I do have a video on my youtube channel linked below that shows how to setup a panel with pop out windows from the sim. It mainly shows a G1000 but the principal is the same.

[dominikos]

Thank you, I looked at your video. The difference between your setup and Cessna 172SP panel is that it does have black background where the radio stack is placed - as a result, using its background prevents GNS overlay from working. I will see if I can raise it as a bug.

[Ralph]

I suppose you're using the premium panel? Why not use the premade GNS outlay?

[dominikos]

Yes, I’m using a premium panel and I swapped Nav1/Com1 with GNS overlay. I might be missing something but unless I set this panel to transparent, the desktop background does not show up. I usually use black background but your video made a good point that using colored background allows easily to see what’s transparent and what is not.

My current thinking is to resize the primary panel and create a separate panel just for radio stack. Feels like a hack but should work.

[Sling]

If you use the GNS variant of the premium panel everything just works. The panel settings should be as follows.

image.png (5.21 KiB) Viewed 1743 times

Note that transparency with overlays will not work if you have the general graphics API setting on OpenGL. I leave mine on Automatic. I guess also if you do not have a compatible graphics card or out of date driver it may also not work. It needs to be DIrectX 11 capable.

[dominikos]

Thank you for that pointer. In version 4.0.2, I don't have ability to setup background color as transparent.

[Ralph]

You do, go into the color selector and set the opacity to 0%.

[dominikos]

I set background to transparent (thank you for the pointer), but it still does not work. GNS overlay shows black background.

[Ralph]

Are you using the GNS layout of the panel? And please post a screenshot of the settings you have.