Today (or actually I should say last night I think), I finally found the time to finish the AGNIS/PAPA docking system I was working on. For those not familair with this system, it contains of two unit. One is the azimuth display that shows if the pilot is lined up with the leadin line correctly. If he is two green lights show and when he gets to far of the center the light on that side will turn red. So all the pilot has to do is keep two green lights. To determine the stop distance there is a stop sign besides the azimuth display. On this sign lines are drawn for different aircraft types and there is a bar in front of this sign. When the bar shows exactly in front of the line for your aircraft type, you have reached your stopping point.

The azimuth sign was not really hard to design for FS. As it only needs to respond to your position compared to the leadin line, it is not very complex. But creating the stop sign was a little more tricky. I already made my life a little easier by only using one stop point for all aircraft types (all docking systems I have made use this assumption, making the stopping distance dependant on the aircraft type as well, would almost mean that I need to make one model for each gate stand, as they are all slightly different). But how to get the bar show correctly in front of the line on the texture? In the end I have made the position of the bar variable, so that I can set it from the VGDS Tweaker tool. You enter the stop distance and the lateral offset from the leadin line in the tool and it then calculates the correct position of the bar for you. Below you find a screenshot of the system as using in the Schiphol scenery I am working on.

The system shown on the screenshot is mounted on the terminal wall, but there are also systems at Schiphol that are placed on the apron and are thus mounted on a pole. I am going to make this variant as well. And once that one is done as well and everything has been tested properly, you can expect a new release of VGDS Tweaker, containing the AGNIS/PAPA system as well.