Tools & File Formats

As mentioned earlier, FS2000 will come in two versions. Several features found in the Professional Edition are explained as the interview begins.

Scot: Let me give you a little more detail on the tools we are supplying with the professional version. With regards to the file formats, we haven’t published an SDK (Software Developer's Toolkit) yet, so I don’t really know the answer to that question. There are pieces of file formats that I think would be awkward for people to use effectively, so there are questions we are trying to answer ourselves about what information we should talk about in the file formats. But in the meantime, we would like to give people a suite of tools in Flight Sim Professional that will give them the opportunity to do things that they want to do with the aircraft.

Andy Silverman: The main message that we are really trying to get across, the question that we keep getting asked over and over again is "Will the stuff I bought for FS98 continue to work with Flight Sim 2000?". They don’t seem to care about anything else, just can I keep using my airplane. "I don’t care about new features in the program, I just want to be able to keep using my old stuff." They do care but they just get a little panicky because of the time they have put into the old stuff.

There is a lot of effort with the team right now going into making sure that you can still use older airplanes. The File format for the aircraft has not really fundamentally changed in any respect. Scenery formats and aircraft formats are the same but we have made enhancements to the formats in that we have extended them. We haven’t really removed anything per se, so that gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of backward compatibility.

FS Edit

Andy Silverman: In terms of the tools that we are providing, the professional edition has a tool that we are calling FS Edit. It is mainly meant as an aircraft editor. It will give you sort of one stop shopping to allow you to do graphical manipulation of your instrument panel so you can drag gauges onto the panel or drag gauges off of the panel. You can see all the gauges available to you and there is no particular gauge limit. It just continues to expand with the more gauges you have. It makes it a lot simpler to get the panel arranged the way you want it. You don’t have to edit text files to move things around at the pixel level, you can just drag and drop the gauges, you can resize the gauges on the panel. This makes it a lot easier for people who say "What if I want to fly a Cessna with an HSI?" because we did not provide one. Now there is a pretty simple way to do it. Go grab the DG, take it off, take each side, put it on – Boom your done. End of story.

The same tool also gives you access to a lot of other aircraft things that you could want to change. It will launch a bit map editor of your choice. You repaint the aircraft (It will start with whatever textures where on the plane) and let you do anything you want to it. It gives you a good starting ground. The editor also provides you with certain bits of sound configuration, lets you edit checklists that go with the planes. Basically the only thing it doesn’t really let you do is make the 3D Model. Its not a 3D model package. That is something that we continue to look at for solutions. FlightShop is aging certainly and we have a couple of irons in the fire trying to figure out a couple of ways to provide a better 3D modeling solution to the community but we don't really have anything to announce there yet. So FS Edit does everything else, including flight dynamics.

There is some level of flight dynamics editing available in that tool. That should also make the process quite a bit easier in terms of tuning the flight characteristics of the plane because it’s the only Editor! There were others and third party things that had been reverse engineered. And there is FlightShop but that means you had to build the plane in FlightShop under FlightSim 5.1 convert it to FS98/2000, see if it still actually flies the way it did in 5.1 because the conversion process obviously did things to the way the plane behaved. So that is the tool that is being provided with the professional version.

We are not currently providing any other tools per se to the end user other than what is in the SDK. The SDK as we have mentioned will be updated to talk about the enhancements that have been made to the Scenery, File Formats, and Adventure Programming Language. But most of that stuff is a bit beyond what might be of value to the typical user, so those things are really something you can download for free if you want them. We don’t charge for that or anything, but its not the sort of thing we throw in the box just because it’s of limited value.