Okay, hello all those who are still interested in this add-on.  I recently discovered it because of a sudden rekindling of interest in military airplanes.  Naturally, you want to them be able to do their job, and this is about the only option that's reasonably affordable at the moment.

I played with the F-18 for a bit, and that was fun, but naturally I wanted more so I dusted off my old another company F16, upgraded it to 1.21, and started getting CSWeapon to work on it.

When you start down this road there's days and days of tweaking involved!!!

The forum here was very helpful in getting me started.  But the solution here involved a working CSWeapon HUD that has a nasty side effect:  wiping out the top part of both MFDs under certain conditions (related, I think, to the angle you are flying into the sun.)

So I set about solving that and figured I'd share what I found about what the numbers in the various configuration files really do in plain English without having to have a degree in math or graphics programming to understand.

The problem is getting the HUD in the VC correctly.  I had no problem with the 2D one but this is a VC-only airplane.

Firstly, you must place the CS 3D HUD over the one from the airplane, so, in panel.cfg comment the line with the original and replace with the CS.  Note that because the HUDS are different sizes you need to adjust some numbers.

//gauge00=HUD!HUD,            0,46,254,264
gauge00=CSWeapon!hud3d,      1, -20, 254, 320

(The problem with the numbers in the forum solution here are instead of the 320 above, it was 400, which extended the bottom of the HUD over the top of the MFD space.)

That's easy enough.  Now the hard part is the update of the "collimation" numbers CSWeapon.xml to place the CS HUD in 3D space.

Here is my solution:

       <CollimationData>0.0,31.5,-1.5,5.8</CollimationData>

What is all this insanity?  Here's what it means:

The first parameter (0.0) is the horizontal position, where positive numbers move it to the left and negative to the right.

The second (31.5) is the distance from the center of the airplane along the longitudinal axis.  Increasing this number moves it CLOSER to the pilot seat, decreasing moves it further away.  (It does not change the size, as some have said here, it just appears that way because the closer it gets to you to bigger it looks and vice versa.)  It is possible to get this behind the pilot location, in which case I think that's why it sometimes appears upside down.

The third (-1.5) is how far up or down the HUD is placed, where positive numbers move it up and negative move it down.  This is where most problems lie.

The fourth and last is the size of the HUD, where positive numbers mean smaller and negative mean larger.  Yes, I know this is backwards, but that's how it works.  Note that if you make the HUD larger than will fit in the space defined by the rectangle in the panel.cfg, it will clip and you'll be missing out on data around the edges.

Having done all this, my HUD was too small for my tastes, I wanted it bigger.  Increasing the fourth parameter didn't work - data got clipped.  The solution was:

       <HudFov3d>19.0</HudFov3d>

Think of this as a "magnifying glass" to zoom in on the HUD data.  The bigger you make this number, the higher the magnification.  Instead of clipping, the program will try and stuff everything on there and so if you make this number too big the HUD will be crammed with data and unreadable.

Aha!  After many hours, I have a perfectly positioned CS HUD in my another company F-16 that doesn't mess with the MFD data!!

BUT...

I still have a problem that I haven't solved yet.  When the system locks onto a target, the target box is drawn quite a bit below, and not directly on the visual target.  This is also true of the gunsight -- it too is drawn the same distance below where the vulcan actually shoots.

Calibration doesn't help this.

Nor does adjusting the "angle of incidence" of the gun or missles in CSWeapon.xml:

           <Station name="Nose" params="0,9,0,0,0.05,0,1200" />

The 0.05 here adjusts whether the gun shoots up or down, but it also moves the gunsight up or down on the VC HUD so that it always shoots higher than what the sight says.

This is not a problem in the 2D HUD, which tracks targets perfectly and the gun shoots right where the sight is located.  The only way to mess this up is the get the 2D HUD out of calibration then it shows exactly this same effect - target box drawn in the wrong place.

But no matter how well the 2D HUD is calibrated, the 3D HUD doesn't get fixed.

Anyone have seen this problem and solved it?

Many thanks, and I hope this is helpful.

Dutch