Surviving FS2004

By Ron Salt (15 June 2004)

The day FS2004 broke out, my wife said to me "Well, what are you going to do about it then?" Looking at a black screen, with a polite invitation to inform Microsoft of the event that caused it in the centre, I said "Me and Charley Evans are going to Redmond on Monday morning to talk to the bloke in charge." She said "Don't be daft, your 'Bus Pass only takes you as far as Warrington and anyway, you two'll get no further than the Boilermakers' snug." "Well," I said, "we had to manage on our own in 1940 when that Hitler bloke got stroppy, so I reckon we'll just have to muddle through again for a bit until the Yanks find their tin hats, won't we?" She just sniffed, and got on with cleaning the gas oven. So muddle through I did, and this is how.

FS2004's whimsical habit of crashing without warning 10 minutes after takeoff was the first obstacle. Running 'EndItAll' (from EndItAll Company: Ziff-Davis, Inc.) before launching FS2004 provided some relief, and considerably shortened the black-screen hiatus while it arranges all its ducks in a row. On the other hand, it made accessing Jeppeson a chancy business, sans real-time anti-virus screening. Thus thwarted, the Imps soon found a way of striking back. FS2004 now took to crashing just one second after establishment on any really perfect short final. (My wife said if I used that sort of language again while the the grandchildren were in the house, she would chuck the dishwater over me and the PC.)

A month and several futile searches for driver updates later, I started to wonder if Microsoft are being just a tad economical with the truth when they claim FS2004 will run in 512MB of RAM under a 1 Gig CPU. The problems I was seeing looked suspiciously like hardware resource exhaustion. Sure enough, another 256MB and a 2 Gig processor upgrade brought the fatal error incidence down to a more tolerable level. A further stability improvement was achieved by running 'XP Tuner' (Vn1.05 from Neikeisoft at www.neikeisoft.de, sourced from a 'Computer Shopper' coverdisk, June 2004 Issue). Subsequent defragmenting revealed that a large un-moveable file has been set up in the partition where FS2002 and FS2004 reside. More importantly, FS2004 now runs fairly reliably with virus protection in background, a useful quiver of scenery development utilities on the taskbar, and acceptable frame rates withal.

High time, I felt, to begin the mammoth job of fixing up my favorite UK FS2000/2002 add-on scenery to work in FS2004. At the top of the list was Manchester Barton. My enhanced Barton is basically Gary Summons', with the best bits of several alternative download versions tacked on. Having had the foresight to buy Gary's FS2004/2002 CD, I expected no problems, gullible fool that I am, so you can imagine my dismay when I saw a flock of AI aircraft neatly parked with their little wheels some 3 feet above terra infirma and/or taxiing, taking off and landing nonchalantly on sweet f.a. A swift e-mail to Himself brought the polite but not very enlightening reply that the problem was a consequence of the current state of flux in Microsoft's compiler code, and the solution would have to wait on an SDK becoming available from that quarter.

Next on my agenda were the twenty-one Yorkshire airfields created by Richard Maxted. Amongst them, altitude chaos reigned supreme! All my earnest attempts to restore order with AFCAD2 ended in tears and a complete re-installation of both FS2002 and FS2004, so having looked the problem squarely in the face, I moved on, confident that there is enough talent in the flightsimming fraternity to find, given time, a modus vivendi. As Richard Maxted assured me that he was working on FS2004 versions of his scenery, I didn't expect to have to wait very long. Microsoft meanwhile maintained dignified silence, apart from adjuring developers to use their brand new XML code and Gmax exclusively – or else.

Two events persuaded me that patience might not be the most practical course of (in)action. First, Richard released his FS2002/2004 Version 4 scenery, confessing that he had not been able to test it in the latter (!). No surprise, therefore, to find altitude anomalies persisted. Second, John Hinson released scfafd1a.zip, a small fix for floating AI aircraft at Dundee. It includes a clear exposition of his method, in PDF format, so I won't reproduce it here. Having verified that after following John's concise instructions, AI birds at Ian Gallacher's Dundee park prettily, the obvious next step was to apply his system to John Woodside's IoM Ronaldsway, another fine piece of FS2002 add-on scenery that has been fluxed up by FS2004. What joy – all floaters instantly grounded! But hope turned to ashes when I tried it at Barton. The light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a Balrog with a Maglite. The Barton floaters remained obstinately afloat.

Although I knew it was little more than displacement activity, I went back to fiddling about with the altitude parameters in AFCAD2 – anything seemed preferable to admitting defeat a second time. This got me no further, indeed it made things worse! At one point, I had AI aircraft on the ground OK, but my Skyhawk sunk in the turf up to its spinner. Next, it kept falling into invisible pits. Then I had my Edward de Bono moment. "If you can't raise the bridge, lower the river!" The readme file in Ian Gallacher's earlier scfafd1.zip (the very one which prompted John Hinson to reveal his AFDlow strategy) included an instruction to put a Flatten.0 command in FS2004's scenery.cfg. It didn't strike me at the time, but in retrospect it is truly amazing that the hoary old relic should still be alive and well and lurking in the convoluted bowels of FS2004. If John Hinson's reasoning is sound, said I to myself, then if you can't lower the AI planes it should be possible to raise the airfield to whatever FS2004 thinks is 'ground level' at their location by putting a Flatten.0 command inside an AFDlow area entry in scenery.cfg.

Euphoria! Bliss! Oh frabjous day, caloo, calay! IT WORKED. Then came the dreadful realization of the Herculean labor I had let myself in for, for the business of arriving at the correct altitude to use in the Flatten.0 command line, not to mention the optimum co-ordinates of the flattened area, is a long, long way from straightforward. The keyword is FATIAF – Faff About 'Til It All Fits – in course of which FS2004 has to be opened and closed like the NAAFI door on a troop transport in the Bay of Biscay in January (ask your dad). I've done the jobby for Richard Maxted's Vn4 Yorkshire airfields, all 21 of them. Maybe, when my brain has recovered from the cruel and unusual punishment of thinking and I have regained the will to live, I will find enough stamina to tackle the lemons in Gary Summons' opus, but my secret self hopes some other public-spirited hacker(s) will pick up the baton and run with it before I get that desperate.

Tales of pain and suffering should always end on the upbeat, so as not to depress the gentle reader. The first time, after installing FS2004, that I visited John Woodside's Ronaldsway, I was sitting on the taxiway to general parking goggling at all the AI planes a good twelve feet above my wings when the radio announced landing clearance on 03 to a Learjet 45 in the offing. This, I thought, should be worth watching. In the fulness of time a Bombardier appeared over the sea, flaps and gear down and landing lights atwinkle. As it flashed past, 'way in the middle of the air, the tires shrieked and bursts of smoke streamed aft, once, twice, three times, before the engines opened up again and the laconic pilot voice announced "Going missed approach."

Sim flyers who have downloaded mx*40 zips from the FlightSim.Com scenery archive should look for
mxafd00.zip
mxafd10.zip
Read the instructions carefully – installation is a strictly recursive procedure!