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  1. Hi, as a newbie (purchased fsx many years ago but rarely used it), i have been try to install Antonov AN-255 but the instructions are vague. I have downloaded and installed other aircraft where it says to copy certain files/folders into fsx and it's been no problem. it seems (and I could be wrong) that I should extract the zip to a folder called "Community" which does not exist anywhere on my C: drive (which is where FSX is installed). So I have tried extracting and copying the folders into the corresponding folders in FSX, I can now see AN-225 in the selection of aircraft available but when I try to fly it I get "Failed to startup the flight model". Could someone please help. I see others have installed AN-225 without any problems, it appears I am doing something wrong, or not doing something I should. Could someone provide me with a step-by-step guide. Thanks in advance
  2. I can't install update 5. When MSFS 2020 loads I get the message that a mandatory update is required and should be loaded from the Store. When I go to the Store, it doesn't show an update button but instead says I own MSFS 2020 and it is installed. Only a play button is shown and when I click on it the process starts all over again. Any help much appreciated.
  3. My FS2002 cdroms are old, and my new laptop doesn't have an optical drive. I'd like to copy my cdroms to a hdd and install from the hdd. Is this possible? I'd also like to do this with my old FSX deluxe DVD's as well.
  4. How to Create Multiple Installs of FS2004 By Robin Meyerowitz Can I have more than a single FS2004 install? Of course you can; as many as you like. In fact, I have a few FS2004 separate installs myself. I have 'Golden Wings', FS Alaska, FS Vintage (pre WWI), FS History (WWII & misc), and of course, my Ford Tri-Motor install. Note that this is for Windows 10 and is very easy and simple to do: Tools: 'Everything' from https://www.voidtools.com/ This is, by far, the quickest desktop search engine. 'Teracopy' from https://www.codesector.com/teracopy The fastest copy utility I have found, and it replaces the default Windows search. Essentials: A fully working version of FS2004, installed in C:\ For FS2004 to work in Windows 10, it MUST be installed in C:\ and NOT in C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Games If your FS2004 is still installed in in C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft Games, copy the whole FS2004 folder from Microsoft Games & paste the folder directly into C:\, and run it from there. Don¡¯t forget to send a shortcut of the FS9.exe shortcut to the desktop and to delete the old shortcut. The Easy & Simple Way If things don't work as expected: Right-click the desktop icon & select 'Properties' Select the 'Compatibility' tab, tick 'Compatibility mode, Pull down the menu & select 'Windows XP (Service Pack 2) Tick 'Run this program as an administrator' Click 'Apply' then 'OK' Double-click (Run) Copy & Paste your complete Flight Sim folder onto a portable hard drive. You can also just Copy & Paste the folder into C:\ Rename the newly copied folder to Flight Simulator SE (for example) Rename the fs9.exe to fs9se.exe (for example) You now have a backup of your original sim Copy & paste your newly renamed Flight Simulator SE folder into C:\ Open the Folder & right-click the fs9se.exe & 'send to desktop -create shortcut)' Double-click (Run) that new shortcut It should work! You can then delete whatever scenery & aircraft that is not required in your new sim. DO NOT DELETE ANY DEFAULT AIRCRAFT or SCENERY. I you want to do a 'Ford Tri-Motor' install (for example), as I have, just rename the Flight Simulator SE main folder to Ford Tr-Motor Project and the fs9se.exe to fs9ford.exe. Right-click and send that to the desktop. You can then delete the fs9se desktop icon & rename the fs9ford icon to 'Ford Trimotor Project'. So, if you have a second or third FS2004 install, you just follow steps from 5-8. Each install must have its own folder, so you will have FS2004SE, Golden Wings & Silver Wings, as examples. The FS9.exe MUST be uniquely named for each install as well, so, in each additional sim folder you must rename the fs9.exe. The result being; you will end up with an FS9se.exe, a GW.exe and a SW.exe. You will therefore have separate cfg's, such as fs9se.cfg, gw.cfg & sw.cgf once the separate sims are run. So as to make your new FS2004 installations look unique, you can use your own splash screen, as I have done: You can also change the whole look of your sim by giving it a new interface such as these shown below: FS2004 Custom Interface Pack Download fs2004interface.zip FS2004 Custom Interface Pack 2 Download fs2004interface-pack2.zip As well as the two above, there are others that you can find. Simply search for 'interface' in our library. I hope this short article helps show users of FS2004 how easy it is to have multiple installations of the sim installed on their computers. The benefits, as you can see from above, are numerous, and really allow you to enjoy the sim to the fullest. So, with that said... Blue skies and happy flying! Robin Meyerowitz
  5. Installing Add-Ons Into FSX: Steam Edition By Tristan Ayton For almost a decade Microsoft's Flight Simulator X has remained the go to software for us to get our flight simulation fix. Whilst other titles have come and gone, or carved their small niche in our virtual skies, FSX has remained that which we benchmark from. Yet the world around FSX did not stand still whilst FSX remained as it was when Microsoft wound up development for it in 2007. Operating systems and the architecture of the home PC evolved in leaps and bounds but FSX maintained just as it was. The end of 2014 saw the release of the first updates to FSX in 7 years with the release of FSX: Steam Edition, and with it a swathe of new pilots in our community. An exciting time no doubt, yet it also poses challenges that the community has not had to face for many years. Today I will be going through some of the differences between installing add-ons for your FSX:SE from the old FSX. Before I do this however, it is important to make a distinction between two types of set ups: the single install and the coexistence install. The differences, whilst slight, will have a profound impact on the way you install your extra aircraft and scenery. The Coexistence Install If you are still holding on to your old Classic (boxed) install of FSX, and for whatever reason want to run both it and Steam Edition on the one PC, you can install FSX:SE alongside Classic and they will work together. New folders will be created alongside your original FSX ones in your ProgramData and AppData locations (in the format of FSX-SE). Your original data and settings remain unaffected, but will also not be copied across. A separate registry entry will be created specifying FSX:SE and the fact that you want coexistence (this is an important point if you do ever take the plunge and move forward with an FSX:SE install only). Firing up FSX:SE in this scenario for the first time will be just like when you installed Classic for the first time. The Single Install If you are new to the world of FSX, then this is most likely the scenario for you. For veterans of FSX you may have, like me, seen the benefits of all the under the hood tweaking that Dovetail Games has done to improve the stability of FSX:SE over the original then you have or are about to make the jump to only having this ultimate version of FSX installed on your system (If you haven't yet but are preparing to make the switch I highly recommend reading through a two-part guide I published at FSX Insider to help in the transition). This will actually make your installing of add-ons MUCH simpler. So with these scenarios in mind, let us proceed. There is one last little piece of ground work I want to cover before we proceed, Where is my FSX:SE installed? This is possibly the most common question I get and I want to show a reliable way of finding it. With FSX:SE installed, open up Steam and navigate to your Games Library. On your FSX:SE line, right click and select Properties. Then select the Local Files tab and click Browse Local Files... Hey presto! There is your FSX directory with the familiar file structure that we have come to know and love for the last decade. Take note of the file path as you will need this down the track. With this ground work complete, let us look at getting to the fun stuff, installing our add-ons. The installation process for add-ons can be broken down into the following categories: Manual, Smart Installer, Dumb Installer and Optimized Installer. Optimized Installer The Optimized installer is mainly the realm of payware content. The developers have released their installer being fully aware of the fact that FSX:SE exists and want to make our lives a little easier by allowing us to select which platform to install into. Often these products will also include the ability to install into one of the myriad of Lockheed-Martin's Prepar3D versions as well. This takes the guess work out of installing and is perfect for those who run single or coexistence installs. It scans your registry file and finds the necessary information for where your sim(s) is (are) and gets itself ready. Developers that have done this include SIM720, MilViz and Orbx. Really, this is just select the radio button and click install, nothing further required! Dumb Installer The Dumb installer is one that assumes you have installed Classic FSX into its default installation path (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator X) and does not in any way interact with your registry file. This may seem bad, but ironically in our situation its great! Simply grab the directory path that you noted earlier and place that in the destination install folder. This is really useful for coexistence installs as you can specify which version of FSX you want it installed into. As the directory structure of FSX:SE is identical to Classic, all it needs is the path and the installer will handle the rest. Smart Installer I really want to call this the "un-smart" installer but hey. OK so here is where we hit our first hiccup. Smart installers scan your registry file looking for FSX and use that to determine the installation location. Sounds good right? Only problem is that in a coexistence install the Classic installation will ALWAYS be the one it finds. Depending on the developer one of two things happens next, one type will offer you the chance to change the path and the other will not. Fortunately, there are not too many installers out there anymore that do not allow you to change the path, but they are out there (Iris Simulations PC-21 for example). For the ones that allow you to change the path, use the same technique as for Dumb installers and paste in the path to your FSX:SE. For the ones that don't let you change, it's a manual grab of the necessary files from Classic and manually copying them to Steam Edition. I'm going to insert a small disclaimer here for a second. One of the things about installers is that they usually register themselves in your PC's registry file. This can cause a problem for coexistence installations as they will only allow you to install once on your PC (like Captain Sim C-130 and most Virtavia products). This means you have to manually copy from one installation into the other of all the required files. This generally means the aircraft folder in your SimObjects\Airplanes folder BUT will probably require some effect and gauge files as well. For that you will need to do some poking around inside the aircraft.cfg file and the panel.cfg file to see which (if any) files it is calling and go hunting for them in their respective folders. If you are worried about breaking something by doing this, there is a bulk option: Copy the complete Gauges and Effects folders from FSX Classic and paste them into FSX:SE. However, DO NOT let it overwrite anything, when you are asked about copy/replace/skip choose skip. Manual Install So here is the meaty one, the manual install. For anyone who has been using FSX for a while this will most likely be very familiar to you, and the process hasn't changed only your top level directory has. Again this is why I showed you the neat little trick of going to the Properties tab for FSX:SE. SimObjects, Effects, Add On Scenery folders are still where they always were. But for those of you new to FSX, let's go through an install of two popular add-ons from FlightSim.Com: VHHH by Ray Smith and the ATR 42-500 by Michael Pook and F Sanchez-Gonzales. Before you install ANY add-on ensure FSX is NOT running. VHHH - Hong Kong International is as you guessed an improvement of the airport found in default. Once we have downloaded the ZIP file, extract it and inside we see a series of files. There are three main ones we need, the two *.bgl files and the readme file. I cannot tell you how important it is to READ README FILES! Authors put them in for a REASON! Anyway, in another window open up you FSX:SE folder and navigate to Addon Scenery folder. Here is where I am going to recommend something to keep your sim "clean". Create a new folder with the name of the scenery you are adding in, in this case "VHHH". Inside that create another folder "Scenery". Copy the two *.bgl files into this newly created "Scenery" folder. OK, Start FSX:SE, then go to Settings and Scenery Library and click Add Scenery. Double click on Addon Scenery then on the folder we created VHHH. Now click OK, then click the WHITE SPACE IN THE CENTER. This may sound weird, but it's a legacy of a program designed a decade ago running on modern systems. Good, so now click OK on the Scenery Library and FSX will now rebuild its database (this may take a while). And... that's it! You have successfully added scenery manually to your sim. Please note that some scenery may be more complex and require you to copy files into the Effects or World folders as well, as I said read the README FILE! Default scenery (upper) and new VHHH add-on scenery (lower). The ATR 42-500 brings to life a frequently seen regional turboprop. Before we start with the installation example, it is important to understand the file structure of an aircraft in FSX. An aircraft in FSX that is flyable contains at minimum two files (an *.air file and aircraft.cfg file) and four folders (model, sound, panel and texture). Without these the aircraft simply doesn't work. On top of these however, an aircraft will reference files from the Effects folder (all*.fx files go here) and possibly your Gauges folder in your top-level FSX directory. The reason why I mention this is so that when you are presented with a zip file containing the shiny new aeroplane you want to install, you have an idea of what you might need to copy and where it may need to go. So, let's begin. Once we have downloaded the ZIP file, extract it and inside we see the folder ATR 42-500 and one named Gauges. Copy the folder ATR 42-500 to your FSX:SE SimObjects\Airplanes folder and the Gauges folder to your top level FSX:SE directory. What you have done is put the aircraft itself into the SimObjects folder with your other aeroplanes so FSX:SE can find it, and added the gauges to the main location of all your gauges for FSX:SE. Now this step will vary by developer, some will put everything in one folder then get you to manipulate it (Robert James Richardson does this) whilst other developers will create the directory structure so you just drop everything into the top level directory (Dino Cattaneo is an example of this), so again READ THE README FILE! Dino's F-35 with the folder structure pre-done for you Robert James Richardson's de Havilland DH125 that requires you to move the *fx file yourself into your main FSX directory's Effects Folder In our case today we had two folders to copy. The first (the main aircraft) goes into our SimObjects/Airplanes folder, whilst the second (Gauges) gets copied to our main FSX:SE directory (as there is a Gauges folder already there, the two folders merge). Moving on, now we can fire up our sim and enjoy the beauty that is the ATR 42-500! That wraps up my quick guide to installing into FSX: Steam Edition. Whether you are a seasoned virtual pilot or just starting your flight simulation career I hope this has helped a little along the way. Look for more guides, tips, add-on content and general shenanigans on my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/novawing24) and my web site (http://www.novawing24.com). Safe Skies! Tristan "Novawing24" Ayton
  6. How To...Install Enhancements in Microsoft Flight Simulator By Bill Stack 29 January 2008 A wonderful secondary feature of Microsoft Flight Simulator ® (MSFS) is the user's ability to enhance and expand simulations by adding features such as aircraft, sceneries, panels, sounds, and flight plans. These enhancements are done by installing certain operational files to appropriate locations inside the program. The simulator sees these additions and reflects them in the selections menus. Some tweaking is necessary sometimes to help the simulator see these files. Some users have aptly asked how enhancements are installed within MSFS. Well, they aren't. Although some add-on products include setup programs that install their products in MSFS, the simulation program itself does not offer file-management features. When dedicated setup programs are not included with the enhancement, installation is done with file-management programs such as Windows Explorer (do not confuse with Internet Explorer) and with archiving programs such as WinZip. Although much of this lesson might seem elementary to some flight simmers, we discovered that some simmers know more about using the simulator than the computer itself. Accordingly, the procedures are explained for all experience levels. Examples of flightsim enhancements 1. Obtain the Files First, these files are usually obtained by downloading from internet sites such as FlightSim.Com or from compact disks (CD) included with flightsim magazines and products. Files from the Internet should be downloaded to a place where you can easily find them when needed. A lot of people download to their desktop and move them to a permanent storage folder later. I have a dedicated folder that I named "Downloads." Files from CDs can remain on the CDs or copied to your storage folder if desired. Downloading enhancement files from FlightSim.Com 2. Examine the Files Files available from the Internet are often compressed and archived with related files to minimize storage space and transfer time. Such files are compressed and uncompressed by utility programs, the most common being "WinZip", which is readily available from the Internet. Use the archive program to look inside and see the MSFS files it contains. Files from CDs are often listed independently of one another, sometimes in folders with related files. Use a file-management program such as Windows Explorer. It's important to know which files are which. Most developers include instructions in their archive files, but here's a list of common MSFS file extensions: *.air - a program file *.bmp - an image file *.cfg - a configuration file *.flt - a flight file *.gau - a gauge file *.jpg - an image file *.mdl - a program file *.pln - a flight plan *.wav - a sound file *.wx - a weather file Use a file manager such as Windows Explorer or an archive program such as WinZip to examine your enhancement files. 3. Follow the Developer's Instructions The next thing you need to know is which files to copy and where to put them. Most developers include instruction files in their archives. Those instructions are usually in ordinary text files with a "txt" extension. Some developers use a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word, in which case the instructions will be in a file with a "doc" or "rtf" extension. If those instructions are not included with the package you obtained, contact the developer (most of them provide e-mail addresses) or discard the enhancement if you cannot find instructions. The precise locations for functional files vary among MSFS versions. Putting files in the wrong place can foul your simulator's operations, or do nothing at all. Either result will waste your time and frustrate you. 4. Determine Where the Files Belong The basic folder for MSFS files is usually this: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator Within that basic folder are the subfolders for aircraft, scenery, sounds and so forth. Click on that primary flightsim folder, and you will find numerous subfolders named "aircraft," "scenery" "sounds," and many more. The exact names will differ among MSFS versions, and you can find where your files should go once you've arrived at the primary folder for your flightsim files. Obviously, aircraft files go in the aircraft folders, scenery files go in the scenery folders, sound files go in sound folders, and so forth. In earlier MSFS versions, sound files were stored among aircraft folders, which resulted in numerous sound folders and files. In FSX, they are in a single folder independent of the aircraft folders. Examine your simulator's folders and subfolders to see where these files are stored. Read and follow the developer's instructions. 5. Copy the Files This section applies only if your files are not archived. Such files can be copied directly into their appropriate locations within MSFS using a file-management program. If the files are archived, skip this section and go to Section 7. Windows Explorer is an easy-to-use file-manager that comes with all versions of Windows. Go to the destination such as the CD or Desktop, find the needed file or files. Highlight them with your mouse, then click on "Copy." 6. Paste the Files Go to the appropriate destination folder, click on "Paste." Your files will be copied into that folder. The amount of time needed for copying depends on the amount of date being transferred in the numbers of files and their sizes. Use a file manager such as Windows Explorer to copy and paste files 7. Extract the Archived Files This section applies only if your files are archived. If your files are not archived, skip this section and go back to Section 5. WinZip and other archive programs will extract the compressed files directly to the folder specified by the user. Some developers preprogram their archives to extract directly to the appropriate folders for user convenience. Highlight the needed files and click on "Extract" to copy them to the appropriate folder or folders. Check to be sure the programmed folder is correct for your computer, and change it if necessary before starting the extraction. Extract only the files needed by MSFS. There's no need to extract instruction and description files into MSFS because they will only consume space. Use an archive program such as WinZip to extract and install your files 8. Check Your Enhancements Once the files are installed, open your flight simulator and look for the enhancements. As examples: If you installed a flight, pull down the "File" menu, then click on "Load," and look for the flight you copied. For flight plans, pull down the "File" menu, then click on "Flight Planner," and look for the flight plan you copied. For aircraft, pull down the "Aircraft" menu, click on "Select Aircraft," and look for your new aircraft in the selection list. If your enhancement does not appear (or sound), recheck the instructions that came with your enhancement and follow them step by step. If they still don't work, contact the source for assistance. If you cannot make contact with the author, flightsim message forums are a great way to contact other flightsimmers and get their help. Check your enhancement in MSFS A tip: Aircraft are not recognized by MSFS unless their instrument panels are in the correct location and properly referenced in the aircraft's configuration files. If the aircraft you installed doesn't appear, check the panel references in the configuration files, or install a panel separately. Without panels, aircraft will never appear in your selection list. A little experimentation and practice goes a long way toward increasing your ability to enhance your simulator by adding files. — Bill Stack is a flightsim expert and author of several popular books and regular magazine articles about flight simming. His website is www.topskills.com
  7. How To...Install FSX Aircraft Liveries By Andrew Herd 19 September 2007 Although I am assured that the development team put a great deal of effort into creating the 'default' liveries which adorn the planes you get as standard in FSX, it is hard to imagine anything cheesier than the Orbit scheme. Every time I see it, I cringe, and I have only been running FSX for a few months now - before a year has passed, a single viewing will probably make me want to kill on sight, despite the fact that the new one is much better than the old brown Orbit scheme. Yeccchhh. It has, of course, always been this way. To be fair to Microsoft, they can't please everyone all of the time and if they had chosen real airline liveries, there would have been negotiations involved and making a selection from all the airlines the world over would have been an unenviable task. So instead, the team left the architecture of the sim open enough that it is possible to install new liveries without breaking into a sweat, just as long as you have a fairly basic understanding of Windows file management. The icing on the cake is that there is a constant stream of freeware liveries pouring into the file library, with new paint schemes arriving on a daily basis, and unless your tastes are particularly recherche, your favorite airline should be out there, only a couple of clicks away. All that for free. Fantastic world, is it not? Just spare a thought for the simmer who spent so many hours doing the repaint, because getting these things right is not easy, and send him an email telling him how much you appreciate him taking the time out. Okay. If you have experience installing textures for FS2004 aircraft, the only thing you really need to know is that the folder structure has undergone radical surgery in FSX and the planes now live in ...\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes, although bitter experience tells me that different language editions of Flight Simulator have a horrible habit of creating slightly different folder structures. Whether this is true or not for FSX, I cannot say at present, but the final path, ...\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes should hold true regardless of where you find yourself on the planet. If you are new to installing textures for FS aircraft, it might help to skate around the general principles first. For about as long as I can remember, FS planes have been constructed on a modular basis. If you select the default 737 in the folder described above - you will find it in the b737_800 folder, you will see a clutch of sub-folders, including: model; panel; sound; soundai; various texture folders; a file called aircraft.cfg; a file called boeing737-800.air; one called boeing737-800_check.htm; and one called boeing737-800_ref.htm (depending on how you have Windows set up, you may not be able to see the file name extensions - i.e. the three characters after the full stop in each filename). Together, the contents of these files and folders describes the plane that we see as a Boeing 737 in FSX, the ones that we are particularly interested in being the aircraft.cfg file and the texture folders. If you double click on the aircraft.cfg file (again, if you don't have filename extensions enabled for viewing, it will just appear as 'aircraft'), you can open the file using notepad and take a look inside. If you haven't opened a file of this type before, Windows will pop up a dialog asking which application you wish to open it with and I would suggest notepad, unless you have some other favorite text editor already, in which case, you have no business having read this far (-: Aircraft.cfg details all kinds of stuff about the plane with which it is associated, including a section which tells the hull which paint schemes it can wear. With the 737 aircraft.cfg open, you can see the schemes listed in order right at the top of the file, beginning with [fltsim.0] and continuing through [fltsim.1], down to about [fltsim.5], although my FSX installation is so hacked around now that there may be more entries than this in a clean installation. If you read the lines under [fltsim.0] you will see an entry which reads 'texture=1' and if you flick back to view the ...\SimObjects\Airplanes\B737_800 airplanes folder, you can see that this refers to a folder called texture.1, which holds a Boeing livery for the 737 - or at least it does on my system. Inside that texture folder is a collection of specialized graphics files which are called by FSX to 'skin' the 737 when you select that particular livery using the aircraft selection dialog. It really couldn't be simpler, except that there is still plenty of scope for good old human error when you are installing new schemes! Just about the only other thing worth knowing about installing additional liveries is that you can only install them on the 'base' plane that they were designed to work with. Actually, it is possible to install schemes on the wrong planes, but the results tend to be peculiar to say the least, so the first thing to do is to check that what you are downloading is what you think it is. You may think I jest, but for once I am not, the problem being that there are many different 737 FS aircraft models out there in the libraries besides the default Microsoft jet and quite apart from the fact that these often depict different variants of the real aircraft, it is unfortunately the case in Flight Simulator that two simulations of the same variant of a plane like the 737 can be dissimilar enough that liveries designed for one base model are not interchangeable with the other. So you have been warned... This is the first tutorial for Flight Simulator that I have written using Windows Vista. Yup, I know that the majority of you are sticking with XP because you aren't foolish enough to risk a perfectly good operating system on an upgrade, but equally, there is no doubt that Vista will become the dominant OS within the lifespan of FSX, so I am making the change now, in order that people won't be reading this in years to come and wondering why I have stuck with an old operating system - these pieces have a long lifespan. However, even if you are an XP user, the principles used remain the same and the folder structure in Vista is exactly the same as it is in the older version of Windows, so as long as you make allowances for the screenshots looking a little different, nothing much has changed. For what it is worth, FSX definitely runs better under Vista, or perhaps it is just that you get a new set of bugs that I haven't identified yet. The first step in getting a new livery installed is a visit to the file library to check out what is available. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to download a livery for the default 737-800, so that we never again are we condemned to fly around in a plane painted in the Orbit scheme. I have chosen as typical a freeware livery as I can, in that the zip gives only basic instructions about how to go about doing the installation. If you think this is concise, some freeware zips come without any guidance on installation whatsoever, but once you have got the hang of how the livery entries in the aircraft.cfg file work, it is the work of a moment to clone one and edit it appropriately, so that the new scheme appears; only a few lines need changing and as long as you make sure that the number in the [fltsim.x] entry isn't a duplicate and the texture= line points to a valid folder within the aircraft's directory tree, then the new livery will appear in the aircraft selection window. Don't forget that these liveries are freeware; the author has spent many hours painting them and writing extensive documentation is the last thing on their mind when they make the final edit. Be grateful that they do the work at all. The first thing I would like you to do is to go to the File Search page on this site, which can be reached from the Main Menu, or failing that, from here, assuming you are logged in. Click on the arrow to the right of the box saying, 'Search only file section' and select FSX Jetliners, which will narrow our search down considerably. In the 'Search for text' box, type in the words 'default 737' without the quotes (as shown in the left hand screenshot, second row) and then click on the 'Start Search' button down the bottom of the page, just above the runway. This will bring up a list of files, numbering sixty when I wrote this tutorial, but undoubtedly much longer if you are reading this a couple of years from now and somewhere on that list will be a very nice livery for an FSX Qantas Boeing 737-838, by Raul Abella. The filename, if you have trouble finding it, its qanvhvxh.zip. Under the title for the file are the words 'download' and 'view'. Clicking on view allows you to see the contents of the zip, which can be useful if the author has included larger previews than the standard thumbnail. Clicking on 'download' takes you to the screen on the left in the third row of screenshots - the infamous download copyright notice. Click on 'I accept' and you should be looking at something like the screen above right, give or take an operating system or two. You could open the zip as soon as it is downloaded, but the best thing is to click the save button and open the file from your hard disk. I have a system of download folders, but in this case I am going to save the zip in a file called 'Qantas 737' to make things easy for me. Vista's recent files list will actually show the downloaded zip, making it easy to open the file, but if you check out the contents of the folder you downloaded the 737 into, you should find a zip file called 'qanvhvxh.zip' which you can open using the Windows zip file system, WinZip, or whatever. I have to say that I like using WinZip, because it gives you more control over what happens with files, but the system built into XP and Vista is definitely adequate. If you open qanvhvxh.zip, you will find folder called Qantas_VH-VXH_B737-838 and a description called file_id.diz, which has credits and other info and can be opened using notepad. Opening Qantas_VH-VXH_B737-838 (reminds me of playing pass-the-parcel as a kid) brings us to another folder, called 'FSX' and a readme in web and text format. Take a minute to read this, because it is one of the reasons behind my selection of the file... it takes you right to the heart of what freeware is about. I hope things go well for you, Raul! Anyway, leave the readme open somewhere, because we will need it later. Now keep clicking your way through the folders that appear in the zip file, which will be 'simobjects', 'airplanes', 'B737_800' and finally, 'Texture.Q'. Double-clicking on Texture.Q brings up something like the shot above left, telling us we have hit paydirt. Now backup until you can see the Texture.Q folder again, as in the screenshot above right. What we are going to do is to drag this folder into ..\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes\B737_800 which I am going to trust you to find. Remember that if you are using Windows Vista, you will have to turn off User Access Control to do most of what follows. The shot above, taken at great personal risk using high-speed data-logging equipment, actually shows the copy in progress, as I drag and drop the Texture.q folder from the zip we dowloaded into the FSX B737_800 folder. At this stage, half the audience will have gone 'phew' and laid back, but we aren't quite finished yet. Although the Qantas texture folder is in the correct place, the default 737 hasn't been introduced to it, which is why we kept that readme open - inside the readme is the magical spell that does the how-dos. Double-click on the aircraft.cfg file you can see in the FSX B737_800 folder and use Notepad to open it should Windows ask for an app to read the file with. Copy the section which begins [fltsim.6] into aircraft.cfg just above the section where it says [general]. Just in case anyone can't find the correct section in the readme, here it is: [fltsim.6] title=Boeing 737-800 Qantas sim=Boeing737-800 model= panel= sound= texture=Q kb_checklists=Boeing737-800_check kb_reference=Boeing737-800_ref atc_id= atc_airline=Qantas atc_flight_number=VHVXH ui_manufacturer="Boeing" ui_type="737-800" ui_variation="Qantas" ui_typerole="Commercial Airliner" ui_createdby="Microsoft Corporation" description="One should hardly be surprised that the world's most prolific manufacturer of commercial aircraft is also the producer of the world's most popular jetliner. The 737 became the best-selling commercial jetliner worldwide when orders for it hit 1,831 in June 1987 (surpassing Boeing's own 727 as the previous champ). However, it wasn't always that way\s in the first few years of production, there were so few orders that Boeing considered canceling the program. They didn't, and the airplane has more than proven itself in over three decades of service." If you look in my FSX B737_800 folder in the left hand screenshot a couple of rows above, you will see that I already have a Texture.6 folder and, as it happens, a [fltsim.6] entry to go with it. What to do in that case? Well, checking that you don't have any duplicate [fltsim.x] entries is a vital step in the business of installing liveries and if you find you have a duplicate, the solution is easy - just increment one of the [fltsim.x] entries until you don't have any duplicates and then save aircraft.cfg. In this case, just paste in the new section as shown in the screenshot on the right, a couple of rows up. Raul has provided a cut and paste section for aircraft.cfg, but many freeware authors do not and you may have to write your own, in which case just copy one of the [fltsim.x] sections in the existing aircraft.cfg, increment the number appropriately and make sure that the 'texture=' entry points to the folder you have just dragged and dropped. Other edits you will need to do will include the title, which can't be a duplicate, the atc_airline= entry, the atc_flight_number= data, and the ui_variation, all of which should be easy to figure out. Just remember that duplicate [fltsim.x] and 'title=' entries can cause liveries not to show up. OK, save everything and start FSX, because we are about to fly Qantas. Andrew Herd andy@flightsim.com How To...Install FSX Aircraft
  8. How To...Install FSX Aircraft By Andrew Herd (12 June 2007) Way back when, I wrote a series of "how to" guides on installing aircraft in FS2000. At the time I realised that there was a need, but I had no idea how great it was - nearly 5000 people worked their way through that series. Many of those people emailed me to tell me how much they had appreciated the tutorials, which were my way of repaying the countless freeware authors whose products I was teaching people to install. After the release of FS2002, it became clear that enough changes had been made to Flight Simulator that it was worth writing another series, customised for the new version. I kept some of the text from the old tutorials, updated it for FS2002 and redid most of the screen shots. I have extended the tutorial slightly to include common problems that people have installing aircraft in the new version of the sim. Then FS2004 came along, so I rewrote the tutorial again... And now, we have FSX, which is a whole new ball game compared to the older versions of Flight Simulator. If you are reading this, I can imagine that you have flown everywhere and done everything you can do in the Microsoft default aircraft set. By now you will be intimately familiar with the Cessnas, have flown the Mooney upside down under San Francisco bridge and tried to land the 737 on a 400 foot dirt strip in North Dakota. The program has given up its secrets and you are looking for something else to try your hand at - and you have noticed that FlightSim.Com has a zillion free files ready for download, but you just aren't quite sure how to go about it. This is the place to start learning. First of all, before we even go looking for trouble, we need one essential utility, a shareware program called WinZip. Why WinZip? Well, many of the aircraft on this and other sites are in what are known as compressed files. You can imagine a compressed file being like the suitcase you would like to take on holiday, with everything crushed into it, except with a compressed file you can get the kitchen sink in too. Aircraft creators use file compression to squeeze all the files that go together to make their planes into the smallest possible space - not only is it convenient to have everything collected together, it makes for faster downloads too. The universal format used around the net is what is called a 'zip' file, and WinZip is the best way I know of getting the contents of those suitcases out without breaking anything. The first thing you need to do to start this project is to create two directories on your hard disk: one called 'Downloads' and the other called 'Junk'. If you aren't sure how to do this, then I suggest going off and buying a book called Windows 98 For Dummies (Windows XP For Dummies) (Windows ME For Dummies) (Windows 2000 For Dummies) (Windows Vista For Dummies) and reading it thoroughly before coming back to try this, as your learning curve is going to be too steep otherwise. You will use these two directories to store the files you have downloaded and to unzip files before you install them in your Flight Simulator (henceforth known as FS) folder. To get WinZip, fire up your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Netscape) and click on this link. This should take you direct to the WinZip site and from there you can follow the link to downloading the evaluation version. When your browser pops up a dialog to ask you which folder to download the file to, make sure that the 'save this file to disk' button is checked and choose the download folder you just created to save it in. When you have finished getting WinZip, open up Windows Explorer, and take a look in the download folder. There should only be one file in there and it should be the install file for WinZip, so launch it by double-clicking on it and follow the instructions. Assuming you have a working FS setup you now have all the tools you need to build your own dream plane from the tens of thousands FlightSim.Com has to offer. The plane we are going to install into FSX is a Piper Arrow by Hauke Keitel. The file name is pa28r201.zip, but needless to say, we are going to find it the hard way (skip the next few paragraphs if you understand how to use file library searches). If you follow the links to the Main Menu, you will see the page is divided into sections, with the file library links half way down the right column. Click on 'search file libraries'. This takes you to a new page, which lets you search for more or less anything you want. We are going to narrow our search down to FSX files, so click on the down arrow to the right of the 'search only file section' dialog - in the default state this reads 'all file sections' - and scroll the drop down so that it shows 'FSX general aviation aircraft'. Now type in 'piper arrow' without the quotes. At the time of writing the review, the package we want appears third in the list, but time may well have passed by the time your eyes scan this page, so be prepared to flick through a few pages until you find pa28r201.zip. You will notice that on the left side of the blurb, there is a tick (check mark icon), which confirms this is a complete aircraft, which means it has a panel included - quite a few addons do not, but we will get onto that in another tutorial. There is also a blue 'B' icon, which means that you are about to download a 'base' model of a plane, which has been used for repaints. The next step is to left click on the download link you can see just under the word 'Piper' which takes you to yet another dialog warning you about copyright and giving some advice about what to do if your download won't start. Click on the 'I accept, start download button'. This will pop up the Windows file download dialog and my suggestion is that you click the 'save' button on this, because it is simpler in the long run. Doing so will trigger another Windows dialog, asking which folder you want to save the file in - my suggestion is to create a 'download' folder if you don't already have one. By the time you are on your hundredth freeware download, you will thank me for this (-: Once the download has finished, you are ready for the installation. Assuming you haven't forgotten which folder you downloaded the package into, you need to go there and double click on the pa28r201.zip icon. If you have WinZip installed, this will trigger the app to launch and you will be able to see what you have downloaded. I have chosen a well organised package for this tutorial, but be aware that your mileage may vary here and there are almost as many systems for making up zips as there are freeware authors and packagers. A good rule is to read the documentation first, because the opportunities to make a mess of an FSX installation are boundless! Not only do I make a habit of reading the docs, I usually do a trial installation into a spare folder - just to make sure that the directory recursion works... there is nothing worse than finding out that you have files spread all over your hard disk because someone didn't quite get the folder structure right in the zip. In this case, it is reasonably obvious which file contains the instructions, but if you download enough addons, you will encounter every possible combination, ranging from no documentation at all to full automatic install routines that leave little room for user intervention. In this addon, the manual is available in English and German, in the form of PDFs, which are respectively the fifth and seventh files listed in the zip window above - English speakers should click on manual_pa28r201.pdf to read it. In this case, the readme assumes you are an expert, the installation instructions being confined to a bald statement that you should 'unzip and move into the main directory of your FSX'. OK, so this is on the thin side of concise, but do bear in mind that you aren't paying for this addon and manuals are boring things to write. So what next? In FS2004, the main aircraft folder (which is where all the planes live, default and addon alike) was relatively easy to find, but in FSX, Microsoft have, in their wisdom, chosen to move it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes - in the English language version of FSX, at least. In the past, the path has varied depending on which language set the Flight Simulator installation has used, so when you come to actually installing an addon plane, if you cannot find the path above, keep on looking; it won't be far away. Do note that some zips are made up to decompress into the main FSX folder, so it is vital that you check where you need to point your zip at in order for it to decompress correctly. As I hinted above, if I have any doubt, I create a folder called 'junk' and decompress the zip into that, then take a look at the folder structure that is created. We are going to do that now. Shut down the manual, close the zip file window by clicking the red X at top right and then double click on pa28r201.zip to open it again. This sounds long-winded, but it means that you will get all the files you want extracted properly. Expert users can just check that all the files in the zip are selected. The crucial step here is to have 'use folder names' checked in the extract window - some earlier versions of WinZip use 'folder recursion' instead. If you don't do this, then the result will be a mess, because the unzipping will not create the correct folder tree. Before you do anything else, make sure your junk folder is empty, as stray files left there cause confusion. Once you have hunted your way to your junk folder in the WinZip extract window and have double checked that 'Use folder names' is enabled, you can hit the extract button. Stuff will happen for a while. When the dust settles, go visit junk and you should see this: Open the SimObjects folder, then the Airplanes folder that appears inside it and then the Piper28r201 folder that appears inside that and you should see something like this... The only reason for taking a peek in the aircraft folder is to check everything that should be there, is there and it is - a complete plane should have at least one model, panel, sound and texture folder, as well as aircraft.cfg and a .air file. They are all there, so back up one folder level until you are looking at the Piper28r201 folder again. We are now going to perform major surgery on FSX, so wash your hands and try and get the larger bits of dirt out from under your nails. Open another folder view and find C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes - it should look something like this: Now, with both windows open, click on the PA28R201 folder in ...\junk and drag it across into ...\SimObjects\Airplanes - then let go. Watch it for a bit in case it tries to escape (-: Once you are happy that the PA28R201 folder is in ...\SimObjects\Airplanes, then you can close all the folder windows and start FSX. Scroll through the aircraft list and somewhere down the bottom, you should now have a PA28 listed. Hauke Keitel has produced a remarkably good little addon here that has already garnered its share of repaints, so have fun playing around with it. I am sure that people are going to ask, 'Can I install FS2004 planes in FSX?' and the answer is that you can, but the results are variable. In my experience, most FS2004 addons work fine, but if the addons have any clever programming in them, the end result isn't always as good in FSX as it is in FS2004 - in other words, some stuff may not work as advertised. Some addons appear without transparent windows and I have come across all kinds of other oddities, but the best advice I have is to play around, because you have nothing to lose. One thing I would not do is to attempt to transfer payware addons from FS2004 to FSX as that is almost guaranteed not to work because of copy protection schemes and so forth. If you are planning to move favorite FS2004 addons into FSX, bear in mind that FSX has a gauges folder at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Gauges and a sound folder at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Sound - but if your addons use aliases, you will need (a) to alter the paths and (b) check that they work, because many FS2004 addons reference gauge sets that don't exist in FSX. If you are uncertain of how sound and gauge files should be installed in addons, read the FS2004 panel installation tutorial, as the general principles are unchanged in FSX, even if the folder structure is different. There is much experimentation to be done - have fun! Andrew Herd andy@flightsim.com
  9. How To...Install FS2004 Aircraft Textures By Andrew Herd If you have worked through the previous tutorials in this series, you should have a good understanding of how to download and install new aircraft and panels in FS2004. In this tutorial, we are going to take a look at how to install texture sets. What? Texture sets? I guess I had better explain. At one time new FS planes used to be so few and far between that folk were prepared to put up with any livery the designer supplied, but then groups like Project Open Sky came along and changed all that by releasing planes with multiple liveries. To begin with, there wasn't a problem, but as time passed and more and more repaints became available, users began to run into trouble. The first was that every time they downloaded a new livery, a complete plane had to be installed with it, and even if they used panel and sound aliases to keep things tight, hard disk space became something of an issue, not to mention the ever lengthening aircraft list that resulted. Fortunately FS2002 offered a way around this problem, by making it possible to add additional texture sets (aka liveries, or repaints) to each plane, so that a single aircraft could have several liveries tagged onto the same visual model and panel. FS2004 behaves much the same way - as you can see that in the screenshot here, where I have dropped down the 'variations' list for the default 737 to show that it has five alternative liveries available. FS2000 couldn't do this - you would have had to install five different 737s in five different folders because there wasn't a 'variations' drop down. Having learned so much about the power of aliases, you might think that FS2004 uses something them to deal with liveries and it would make sense if it did, bar the fact that while you usually only need one panel and sound set for a plane, you might want many repaints, so something a little more complicated is needed - and the solution is found in the aircraft.cfg. All this extra functionality in the aircraft.cfg has meant that texture sets have proved to be very popular and the CV580 you installed as part of working through the first tutorial has had dozens designed for it, but first of all, a word about texture sets in general. If you are very lucky, you will find a set that installs automatically, but these are relatively rare and usually come from major design groups - Flight1's Text-o-matic sets are a good example, though these are very specialised textures. Most textures aren't anywhere near as sophisticated and have to be manually installed, which requires you to have a working knowledge of how to edit air files. This expertise isn't that difficult to acquire and this tutorial will teach you what to do. It assumes that you have downloaded and installed the Convair 580 from the first tutorial in this series. Before doing anything else, I would like you to download CCV580LU.ZIP from the FlightSim.Com files area, because this is the texture set we are going to work with. I am not going to go through the process of how to find and download the file, because if you have worked through the previous tutorials, you should be familiar with the process already. Unpacking the zip into your junk folder should show something like the screenshot opposite, depending on what options you have set in your OS. Notice there is a folder called 'Texture.1' some graphics to show what you are getting and a readme. Not all texture sets are as neatly packaged as this one and we have Glen Hall to thank for it. Sometimes all you get is a collection of .bmp files, which need to be collected together into a folder before they can be installed. Glen makes life very easy for us, but if you install more textures for the CV580, beware the fact that you will have to give each new texture folder a different name - texture.2, texture.3, texture.4 and so on, because they may not be prepackaged like Glen's. At this stage, it is good practice to read the instructions, so open the readme. Yep, it really is that simple, all you have to do is to drag the texture folder into the main CV580 aircraft folder and paste some code into the aircraft.cfg, but stay with me, because it isn't always completely straight forward and if you understand why you are doing now, you won't get into trouble later on. The Convair 580 we installed was, as you will remember, in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\Aircraft\cv580 folder, so find that and then drag the Texture.1 folder out of junk and put it in with the other CV580 files. What you end up with should look like this. Notice that the CV580 folder now has two texture sub folders, one called 'texture' and the other called 'Texture.1' (the uppercase doesn't matter, by the way). So we now have one plane with two texture sets, but we will have to tell FS2004 that the second one exists. Open the CV580 folder and take a look in there for a file called aircraft.cfg. If you set up your system as per the instructions in the first tutorial, you should be able to open the cfg file in notepad just by double clicking on it. What you should see is this. The file is split up into sections, the first one being called [flightsim.0], followed by [General], followed by [Weight_And_Balance] and so forth. The only part that concerns us is the flightsim section, because the text in here tells FS2004 how to show the plane in the selection box and what variations - or liveries - to list with it. As the Convair is currently setup, there is one variation, the Springbok Convair 580 listed under [flightsim.0]. Going through this line by line the most important sections are: title - this describes the textures sim - indicates which .air file is to be used (note that the .air extension isn't appended here) model, panel and sound - allow the use of alternative visual models, panels and sound linked to the texture set. This is effectively a different form of aliasing. texture - specifies which texture set to use; in this case it is left blank, which will load the files in the \texture folder by default. Setting this to texture=1 will load files from the \texture.1 folder, a value of texture=2 will load files from the \texture.2 folder and so on. ui_manufacturer - in this case 'Convair'. This text appears in the 'aircraft manufacturer' drop down in the aircraft selection dialog, making it easy to choose and load your plane. ui_type - this determines what text appears under 'aircraft model' in the aircraft selection dialog. ui_variation - this determines what text appears under 'variation' in the aircraft selection dialog. atc section - this tells FS2004 what ID to use, which airline the plane belongs to, whether it is a 'heavy' or not (a designation giving you all kinds of priveleges in real life) and what the flight number is. In many cases you may need to make up your own entries here and if an appropriate voice call isn't listed for the plane in the ATC airlines list, you may have to use a substitute. kb_checklists and kb_reference - tell the kneeboard which checklist and reference data to load; if blank, nothing will be loaded. description - text describing the plane. There isn't space to go into detail here, but if you sniff around your default FS2004 setup you should end up with a good idea of what can and cannot be done. OK. Go back to the CV580LU folder in Junk and open the readme, if you don't already have it open somewhere on the desktop. The next thing you need to do is to select and copy out the [flightsim.1] section in there. In the screenshot I have highlighted the relevant text. As you might expect, there is little difference between this and the Springbok plane we downloaded, but it is enough. title - identifies that the textures in the new folder are for a Lufthansa plane - I guess Glen must have done a couple of repaints, hence the 'Paint 1'. texture - set to '1' to point FS2004 at the \cv580\texture.1 folder ui_variation - set to Lufthansa to make it possible to select the repaint in the variation drop down. The atc entries have also changed, but this is mostly housekeeping stuff to keep ATC happy. OK. Copy this section, then go to the aircraft.cfg for the CV580, open it and paste the text in, following on from the [flightsim.0] section. Do not overwrite anything, just create a space there and so that it looks like the screenshot below when you are finished. If you have done everything right, [flightsim.1] should follow on from [flightsim.0]. Once again, note that many texture packages will leave you to construct your own [flightsim.x] section, the easiest way to do this being to copy the entire [flightsim.0] section and paste it in underneath the original, incrementing the flightsim number appropriately, and changing the 'title' value and the 'ui_variation' value to match the texture set that is being included. Everything else can be left the same, as long as you don't mind ATC giving you the wrong call sign, in which case you will have to change all those values too. Now save the aircraft.cfg, start up FS2004 and go find the Convair... Don't panic if the original Springbok livery doesn't appear there at the top of the variation list - the reason is that FS2004 keeps its house very tidy and all the entries appear alphabetically, regardless of their numbering in the aircraft.cfg. If you open the drop-down list, it will be there all right. If you want to be extremely clever, then download Richard Taylor's ACCALLS.ZIP, backup the original airlines.cfg in \Flight Simulator 9\Aircraft and extract Richard's airlines.cfg into the folder to replace it. Now, when you load your Lufthansa CV580, FS2004's ATC will get the airline name right. This piece of trickery works because Microsoft have recorded most of the real world airline names as part of the ATC engine, but have only included the FS2004 airline names (World Travel, Emerald Harbor Air, etc.) in the default aircraft.cfg Just load and fly - and happy texture hunting. Andrew Herd andrew@flightsim.com
  10. How To...Install New Panels In FS2004 By Andrew Herd If you have been around FlightSim.Com for any length of time, you will have heard people going on endlessly about installing new panels, and you may have wondered what on earth they were talking about. This article will make you a member of that group, because it will show you how to find a new panel for the default 747 and how to install it. First of all, just to clear up some terminology. It used to beat me what people were talking about when they were raving on about how good some "panel" or other was. But by sticking around and asking stupid questions, I eventually figured out that what they were talking about were instrument panels and the mists cleared. As a matter of fact, the term is used to mean not only the instrument panel, but also 2D views within and outside the cockpit. Panel packages vary - many freeware ones have just one forward view, the main instrument panel itself, others come with subsidiary panels, overheads, pedestals, you name it. What you do not get as part of a panel package is any virtual cockpit views, because the virtual cockpit is part of the aircraft model itself. But why install 2D panels at all if virtual cockpits are around? After all, you can pan and even work the instruments in FS2004 VCs? Well, sure, that's right, but 2D panels are fast, very flexible, and best of all, there are a lot of them around. We are going to go a step further than we did last time, because we are going to look at the configuration files that are part of the guts of FS2004. FS uses config files to set up everything from the way the scenery looks to the way aircraft fly. If you know how to edit these files safely, then the program is defenseless before you. So back things up before you change them! This tutorial relies on you having WinZip installed - check out the first article in the series to see where to get it. Yes, I know that Windows XP has its own zip reader, but WinZip is better if you handle a lot of archives. For now, I want you to start up Windows Explorer and take a look at the folder structure of the default 747. Assuming you used the default setup for FS2004, the aircraft is installed in C:\Program files\Microsoft games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_400. What a mouthful. You can go straight to it by left clicking on the plus sign next to - then the plus sign next to Program files - then the plus sign next to Microsoft games and so on until you finally click the plus sign next to "b747_400" and expand that folder. If you look, you will see several sub-folders including model, panel, sound and textures. The sub folder called model contains information about the way the aircraft appears in FS2004; while texture folders contain the graphics which 'skin' the plane and give it different liveries. The panel and sound sub folders are pretty self explanatory. Let's take a look in the panel sub folder by clicking on the word panel in the left hand pane of Windows explorer. You will see a number of files, one of which will be called panel, or panel.cfg, depending on which options you have turned on in Explorer. What I would like you to do is to double-click on that file. You will get a dialog called 'Open with,' and the purpose of this dialog is to let you associate an application with a particular file type. In this case, we are going to associate Notepad with files which have names ending in .cfg. You will see why in a minute. Use the slider to scroll down the list in the bottom box until you see Notepad, then left click on the Notepad icon and click the OK button at the bottom of the 'Open with' dialog. Some people will find that this dialog won't appear, by the way. This sometimes happens because of a Windoze bug, and the only way around it, short of finding out which app is associated with Notepad files and fixing it, is to open Notepad manually and do things the long way around. You can do this by clicking on the Start button, then clicking on "Run" and typing notepad in the dialog that appears. That gets Notepad up and running - but you will have to step through the folder structure using notepad to get to C:\Program files\Microsoft games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_400 and you will also have to select "files of all types" on the "files of type" drop down that appear when you hit file\open on the Notepad menu. Whichever method you end up using, the panel file should open in Notepad and it should have reams of text in it, which sets up the panel for the default 747. Shut down Notepad and swap to Windows Explorer, because what we are going to do is to rename that file to 'panel.cfg.old'. This lets us back the file up while leaving it in the panel folder - we are only installing the 747-200 panel as an example and you may want to change back to the default panel later. Basically, what the panel.cfg file does is to point at one of the default instrument panels folders stored in FS2004. When you select the Boeing 747 aircraft in FS2004, it does a quick read of the panel.cfg file and loads whichever panel it is told to. In the default 747 setup, the panel.cfg says 'use the bitmaps in this folder and get the following gauges from the \gauges folder and stick 'em in the places I tell you' but you could set it up to load the Cessna 172 panel if you wanted - this is called making an "alias". The point of all this fiddling about is to point up the fact that the modular nature of Flight Simulator makes it possible for an aircraft to load with just about any panel you want - so if it pleases you to fly a 747 with the default Cessna 182 panel, you can, just by altering the panel.cfg to look like this: [fltsim] alias=c182\panel Which redirects FS2004 to the Cessna 182 panel folder, where it reads another panel.cfg file and does whatever that tell it to put on screen. This sounds totally wacky, but there is method in Microsoft's madness - for once. While it is rare for aircraft files to get seriously big, panels can trespass well over the 10 Mb mark these days (don't laugh if you are reading this in 2010 and panels are a minimum of 1.4 Gb, remember I was writing this a long time ago). So if you are into 747s and you find one panel you really like or want to get familiar with, you can load up the panel once, install six different aircraft, point the alias in every aircraft's panel.cfg file at your favourite panel, and when you are flying no one will know you are cheating (-: Makes sense now, huh? Incidentally, you can do the same thing with sound, but that will be the subject of the next article in this series. What we are going to do right now is to find a new panel for our 747 and make FS2004 load it instead of the default one when we run the plane. So rename the panel.cfg file you find in the \b747_400\panel folder to panel.cfg.old. That way, if you want to change back, all you have to do is delete the alias file we are going to make and rename panel.cfg.old back to panel.cfg and everything will be back the way it was. If you aren't connected to the Internet already, fire up your connection and point your web browser at FlightSim.Com. I want you to log on, and then go to the 'search file libraries' page from the Main Menu, just like we did last time. Pull down the slider in the 'search only file section' drop down until you can select 'FS2002 panels' by left clicking it, then type '747' (without the quotes) in the 'search for text' box. Now left click the 'start search button.' Why are we searching FS2002 panels and not FS2004 ones? Well, at the time I wrote this, there weren't any panels built specifically for FS2004, so I didn't have much choice in the matter, but if an FS2004 panel section exists when you come to do this, be my guest and use it. However, for the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to use an FS2002 panel, which seems to install pretty much OK. You will get a list of panels to choose from, each with its own description and picture. Browse through the list using the right hand scroll bar and if necessary use the 'next 10 files' link down at the bottom of the web page. We are after a particular file, so I want you to go back to the search page (use the back arrow, or the 'exit list files' link on the web page. Once you are at the search page again, make sure that the 'search for text' box is empty by deleting '747' and type 'b7474az2.zip' in the file name box. Check that 'FS2002 panels' is still selected and then click the 'start search' button. You should get a one file search result, showing a 5.3 Mb panel for a 747-200. I want you to download this to the download folder you created in the last session, by clicking the download link above the file description, then clicking 'I accept, start download' on the download copyright page, and selecting your download folder as the destination. Once the download is complete, close your web browser and shut down your Internet link. If you take a look in your download folder now, you should see the file in there. If you can't see b7474az2.zip there, you downloaded it to the wrong directory and will you need to use the finder to locate it. Next I want you to go to your 'Junk' folder and delete everything in it (that's why we call it 'junk'). Then go back to b7474az2.zip and double click on the icon. WinZip should show the contents of the file. There should be many files, in there as shown in the illustration. I have chosen this particular panel because it illustrates more or less everything you might have to do when installing a 2D panel - with the majority of packages there is usually less to do, so take comfort in the fact that this is as bad as it is likely to get. A couple of things while I think of them. First, make sure you check the included list of files out carefully. Many panels include a utility called FSUIPC.dll, which works fine in FS2002, but doesn't work at all in FS2004 (it may actually crash the program) unless you have an updated, payware version. I haven't got any firm details about the payware FSUIPC yet, but I will add them in here as soon as I know. But for now, the message is - don't install panels which use FSUIPC.dll, unless you already have the payware version installed somewhere and even then, be careful you don't let the panel installation overwrite a more recent version of FSUIPC, so check out the file dates when you get the 'File overwrite?' dialog. Second, you may find other dll files such as FSSound in the zip. It is more than possible that if these are installed, they will generate error messages early on in FS2004's load routine, but in the case of FSSound, you can answer yes to the 'Do you want to load this dll?' prompt. If you get tired of seeing the prompt, check out the FS2004 FAQ for instructions on how to get rid of the dialog. Make sure you have 'use folder names' checked in WinZip or the files will decompress in an unholy mess which even I will not be able to sort out. Hit the 'extract' button and unzip everything into your Junk folder. If you are not certain how to do this, go back and work through the first tutorial. Now go check out Junk. All the files should be there. Depending on how you have set up Windows Explorer they may appear in a different order to the illustration. The first thing to do in these circumstances is to RTFM (this being a family web site I can only reveal what this means by private email, as long as you can guarantee to me that you are over the age of 35. In general, this means being familiar with the early works of groups like Fleetwood Mac) by double clicking the file labelled ReadmeFirst742.txt. This panel was written by I. D'Attomo and not only is it a terrific piece of freeware, the readme actually tells you what you need to do to install it, but just for the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to ignore it and I am going to walk you through. Close the readme file for now and stop talking in the back there, you are ruining my concentration. Some panel files unzip to show folders, others contain folders and zips (that's right, you can put a zip inside a zip), but in either case, the principles are the same. Now and again, you discover zips within zips within zips within zips, which always makes me wonder if the developer enjoyed pass the parcel as a kid. First step, I want you to open the zip called "Gauges747.zip". Double click on it to open (apologies again to everyone with single click set-ups, it's my age, you know). You should see something like the illustration. Use the scroll bar on the right just to show how many files are in there, if you are curious. What you are looking at are the files which create the gauges you see on the panel - if they aren't copied into the right folder in your FS2004 setup, your panel will have holes in it where the gauges should have been. If you come across a panel where the gauges are in a folder rather than a zip, don't panic, just open the folder called "gauges" and follow the instructions below. If the gauges are just dumped in the junk folder with everything else, select all the files ending in .gau or .cab and then carry on as below. Now we need to find the folder where FS2004's gauges live. Assuming you have a standard setup, this means left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files and clicking the plus sign next to that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and clicking the plus sign next to that, then clicking the plus sign next to Flight Simulator 9, and then left clicking on the folder you see called 'gauges'. Resist the urge to click the plus sign next to gauges, or it will become a habit. Incidentally, I realise that I am being inconsistently referring to FS2004 all the time, when the folder is called Flight Simulator 9, but you try calling it FS9 out in the forums and see how many people understand what you are talking about. Take a second to look at the left hand pane, which shows the FS2004 folder tree expanded, the gauges folder circled about halfway down. This is where FS2004 expects to find its gauges, when it loads a panel. With WinZip showing the contents of the gauges zip, you can either choose "actions" then "select all" from the WinZip menu, then left click on one of the files in the right hand pane, hold the button down, and drag the files across to the left pane until the highlight is over the \Flight Simulator 9\gauges folder - and release the button... or you can use the 'Extract to' dialog that pops up when you hit the 'Extract' icon to navigate through the folder structure and find \Flight Simulator 9\gauges. The advantage of using this second method, as shown in the screen shot, is that WinZip keeps a recent extract folder list, which makes it easy to select frequently used folders. If the gauges are in a folder, then the procedure is to use 'edit' on the Explorer menu, then 'select all', left click on one of the files in the right hand pane, hold the button down, and drag the files across to the left pane until the highlight is over the \Flight Simulator 9\gauges folder - and release the button. In all probability, WinZip will quietly extract all the files and then go about its business, but you may see a message asking about a file overwrite, if you have installed any other panels besides the Microsoft default set. If you get asked this, you will have to weigh it up yourself. In general, I look at the dates and press no if the file I am overwriting is newer than the one in the downloaded panel. But as I say, hopefully this won't happen to you. When WinZip is done all the extract dialogs will disappear and the green light will come on again at the bottom right of the WinZip window. You can close WinZip and breath again. You may be wondering why we have installed the gauges first. Well, in my experience the most common problem people face when installing new panels is forgetting to put the gauges in the \Flight Simulator 9\Gauges directory, with the result that when the panel loads for the first time they are faced with a bitmap with a series of black holes where the instruments should be. If you install the gauges first you won't forget them. Now the next step is to install the rest of the panel files. This is a little more complicated than installing the gauges as we are going to have to make a new folder to put them in, deep within the folder structure of FS2004 - but if you have already worked your way through the first article in this series, you should have done this once already. Just make sure you read this carefully, and keep double-checking. Find your Flight Simulator 9 directory using Explorer (it should still be open from when you last used it). I want you to click on the plus sign next to the 'aircraft' subfolder in Flight Simulator 9 - OK, I've had it with saying 'click the plus sign,' from now on I'm going to say 'open' or 'expand,' right? Within the aircraft folder you should find a folder called fsfsconv. Every version of Flight Simulator except FS2002 has an fsfsconv folder and it is where most of the panels lurk What we need to do next is to create a folder inside of the Fsfsconv folder called 'panel.747.200' excluding the quotes of course (and from now on, I'm not going to remind you about that anymore, either!) So let's go. With fsfsconv selected, click on 'file' in Windows Explorer, then highlight 'new' and finally, slide the pointer over to 'folder' and click on that just like you did to create the Convair aircraft folder in the previous article. A new folder will duly appear and I want you to rename it 'panel.747.200' as shown in the illustration. The next thing we need to do is to go back to the Junk folder, and select the panel zip. I want you to select all the contents of this folder and copy it into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\fsfsconv\panel.747.200. I can hear some sharp intakes of breath out there, so I'd better do some explaining. Flight Simulator 9 is simply the full 'path' name of the folder you just created, the one called panel.747.200. If you imagine that every single one of those backslashes represents a plus sign you have to click on in Windows Explorer, you can see that this is just a shorthand way of referring you to a particular folder, without saying 'click the little plus sign' six times. So using whichever method you favor for Winzip extracts, extract all the files in panel.zip to the \fsfsconv\panel.747.200 folder. Incidentally, the screen shot here shows exactly what a panel looks like if you forget to copy the gauges across. Once seen, never forgotten! If you are installing a different panel and the gauges are in a folder, use 'edit' and then 'select all' and then left click and hold and drag 'em across just the way you did before. We'll go through it one more time in detail, expand by left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files expand that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and expand that, then expand Flight Simulator 9, then expand 'aircraft', then expand 'fsfsconv' and finally, left click on the folder called 'panel.747.200' so that it is highlighted and then do the select all the files thing and drag 'em out of hiding in the junk folder and into panel.747.200. You will almost certainly find that you need to use the horizontal slider to see what you are doing at some stage, because FS2004 has a deeply nested folder structure. There are still a couple more things we have to do, one of which is to extract the sound zip. The destination folder is \Flight Simulator 9\Sound and not the aircraft sound folder. This is a potential source of confusion and one very good reason why it always pays to check out readmes before doing anything with downloaded files. The reason for not putting these particular files in the sound folder is that in general, the sound files that come with panels relate to sounds made by the panel and heard in the cockpit, rather than sounds made by the plane. So in the absence of instructions to the contrary, you can assume that any sound files included in a panel distribution should be placed in the main Flight Simulator sound folder and not the aircraft folder. One final bit of file moving you have to do is to extract FSSound.dll from the zip and put it in the \Flight Simulator 9\Modules folder like this. FSSound allows the panel to do some clever stuff and is a neat little freeware utility. At the time of writing there isn't a native FS2004 version, so it may generate a dialog when Flight Simulator boots, as I mentioned above. We are very nearly there, except that our Boeing 747 is still blissfully unaware that we are going to all this trouble on its behalf. We need to edit its panel.cfg file to let it know about the new panel it is going to use. So open Notepad on a clean page and type: [fltsim] alias=\fsfsconv\panel.747.200 Make sure that it looks exactly the way it does in the screen shot and also that you definitely renamed the original 747_400 panel.cfg file to panel.cfg.old. Then save the notepad page as a file called 'panel.cfg' in the default Boeing 747 panel folder. It is essential that you get this in the right folder, or nothing will happen - if you get a file overwrite message you have either selected the wrong folder or you failed to rename the original panel.cfg file. If you have check everything is OK and have the text done, click file on the Notepad menu, then save, then navigate all the way through the folders until you reach \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel and then click the down chevron next to 'file save as type' and select 'all files'. Then enter 'panel.cfg' (no quotes) in the file name box and hit save. Now double check. In the \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel folder, you should have several files including one you renamed earlier to panel.cfg.old and the one you have just created, called panel.cfg. The reason I keep emphasising this is that panel aliasing like this is incredibly powerful and recreating the original 747 panel.cfg is not an easy task, hence our renaming of it. But should you lose it, there is a replacement one here. See how we look after you. We should have the show on the road now, so start up FS2004, select the Boeing 747 and… was it worth it, or what? Well if you don't like the result, there are plenty of other panels out there. Be my guest and try 'em all! If you get tired of the 200 series panel, all you have to do is go back to the \Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\aircraft\b747_200\panel folder, rename the panel.cfg file to panel.cfg.bak, rename the panel.cfg.old file to panel.cfg and you will get the default panel back - just make sure that you don't have the 747 loaded when you do this, as FS2004 may crash. Andrew Herd andrew@flightsim.com
  11. How To...Install FS2004 Aircraft By Andrew Herd Some years ago I wrote a series of "how to" guides on installing aircraft in FS2000. At the time I realised that there was a need, but I had no idea how great it was - nearly 5000 people worked their way through the series. Many of those people emailed me to tell me how much they had appreciated the tutorials, which were my way of repaying the countless freeware authors whose products I was teaching people to install. After the release of FS2002, it became clear that enough changes had been made to Flight Simulator that it was worth writing another series, customised for the new version. I kept some of the text from the old tutorials, updated it for FS2002 and redid most of the screen shots. I have extended the tutorial slightly to include common problems that people have installing aircraft in the new version of the sim. If you are reading this, I can imagine that you have flown everywhere and done everything you can do in the Microsoft default aircraft set. By now you will be intimately familiar with the Cessna, have flown the Mooney upside down under San Francisco bridge, and tried to land the 737 on a 400 foot dirt strip in North Dakota. The program has given up its secrets and you are looking for something else to try your hand at - and you have noticed that FlightSim.Com claims to have over sixty thousand of files there for download, but you just aren't quite sure how to go about it. Now is time to learn. First of all, before we even go looking for trouble, we need one essential utility, a shareware program called WinZip. Why WinZip? Well, many of the aircraft on this and other sites are in what are known as compressed files. You can imagine a compressed file as being like the suitcase you would like to take on holiday, with everything crushed into it, except with a compressed file you can get the kitchen sink in too. Aircraft creators use file compression to squeeze all the files that go together to make their planes into the smallest possible space - not only is it convenient to have everything collected together, it makes for faster downloads too. The universal format used around the net is what is called a 'zip' file, and the program you need to unpack a zip is called WinZip (there are others, such as PKZip, but this one is my favorite). The first thing you need to do to start this project is to create two directories on your hard disk: one called 'Downloads' and the other called 'Junk'. If you aren't sure how to do this, then I suggest going off and buying a book called Windows for Dummies (Windows XP For Dummies) (Windows ME For Dummies) (Windows 2000 For Dummies) and reading it thoroughly before coming back to try this, as your learning curve is going to be too steep otherwise. You will use these two directories to store the files you have downloaded and to unzip files before you install them in your Flight Simulator (henceforth known as FS) folder. To get WinZip, fire up your web browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape) and click on this link. This should take you direct to the WinZip site and from there you can follow the link to downloading the evaluation version. When your browser pops up a dialog to ask you which folder to download the file to, make sure that the 'save this file to disk' button is checked and choose the download folder you just created to save it in. When you have finished getting WinZip, open up Windows Explorer, and take a look in the download folder. There should only be one file in there and it should be the install file for WinZip, so launch it by double-clicking on it and follow the instructions. Assuming you have a working FS setup you now have all the tools you need to build your own dream plane from the tens of thousands FlightSim.Com has to offer. OK, so now we have to decide which aircraft to get. You may have your own ideas, but I think we ought to have a Convair 580, this being the hundredth anniversary of powered, sustained, FAA approved flight. The first thing you need to do is to log in to FlightSim.Com, if you haven't already done so. Many people never get behind the news page, so if you have never seen the guts of FlightSim.Com, you need to follow the member login hyperlink up at the top of the home page, just under the ad banner, and register as a user on the way. I have circled the link you need in red. Just click on the image on the left to see a larger version. Incidentally, don't worry about giving away your family secrets on the Internet, FlightSim.Com only uses the login to keep track of the number of users online. You won't get deluged with junk emails. Once you are logged in, you will need to follow the links to the 'main menu' - there is a big bold hypertext link down the bottom of the home page, plus other small ones. The main menu page is the guts of FlightSim.Com and it is pretty daunting to look at, but it is well worth getting to know it, because it gives you access to all sorts of goodies and knowledge about FS. If you have got the time and the inclination, have a play around, clicking on the links to see what you get. Particularly useful ones include Product Reviews (which takes you to a long list of FS product reviews stretching back into the dim mists of time, when everything was in sepia) and the Forums, where you can post messages, discuss FS and aviation. About two-thirds the way down the right hand side is a bar saying 'File libraries (downloads)' and just below that is a link called 'search file libraries'. I have circled it in red and I want you to left click it. You should now have the Advanced File Search page up. This is right in under the hood of FlightSim.Com and if you understand how to use this page, the world of flight simulation is at your fingertips. The bit we want is sandwiched in between the two runway graphics. There are three selection boxes, two text boxes and a 'Start Search' button. Feel free to play around with this for a while, but once you are ready I would like you to left click on the button to the right of the top selection box, then grab the slider by left clicking, holding and dragging it until you see a line saying: 'FS2002 aircraft' (the sample plane we're using is for FS2002 but works with FS2004; it serves our purposes for now since at the time this is being written no FS2004 planes are available yet). Select it by left clicking on it and the line should highlight. Okay, now type 'Convair 580' (without the quotes) in the box called 'search for text' and click 'Start search'. After a pause, your screen should fill with a list of Convair 580 files. There are ten on the first page and if you scroll down to the bottom, you will see a link called 'next ten files.' Left clicking this will bring up files 11 through 20 and so on. When I did the search, there were 120 files found, which should be enough Convairs for anyone, but by the time you do this search, there are likely to be more, so don't be upset if none of the files in this illustration appear on the page you see. Greg Pepper and Tim Gibson's Convair 580 is a popular download and who knows how many repainters are sharpening their skills on it right now. The aircraft we want isn't shown in this screen shot - I chose a repaint by Andrè Vermeulen, largely because it looks great and comes equipped with a custom panel. It works well in FS2004 and makes a fine introduction to freeware add-ons. This might be a good moment to point out that not all FS add-on planes come with panels, so it may be that you download some that don't have one, but we'll deal with that in another tutorial. Normally, you wouldn't know exactly what the file name of the aircraft you wanted was and would have to scroll down the list, but because I have been sniffing around, we already have a file name and so we are going to go back to FlightSim.Com's Advanced File Search page, so that I can show you how to use it. You can get there either by using the 'back' button on your browser or by clicking the 'exit list files' links on the page. Back again at the Advanced File Search page, make sure that you still have the "search only file sections" dialog set to FS2002 aircraft and type 'cv580.zip' (no quotes again) but this time in the 'file name' box. Then hit 'start search'. Got the plane first time, huh? You should have one file in your list, titled 'FS2002 South African Airways CV-580' and right above it are two links, one saying 'download,' the other saying 'view.' Hold on, here. This is an FS2002 plane! Well, yeah, but it works in FS2004. Trust me, I have a propellor on every hat I possess. Left click 'download' and up comes the copyright page, boring I know, but a necessary evil, given the number of pirates out there. Take a deep breath and left click 'I accept, start download' button. Incidentally, if you click 'view' instead, all that happens is you get a look at the files contained within the zip. Sometimes this is interesting, sometimes not, but it can be a great way of taking a peek at what you are about to get. If the developer has been kind enough to put a text readme in there, you will be able to click on the filename and view it, and sometimes there are screenshots of the plane and even the owner's dog. Up should pop the file download dialog again, and making sure that the 'save this file to disk' button is checked if you are using Windoze 98 or ME, click OK, then use the 'Save as' dialog to select your download folder and click the OK button again. If you are using Windows XP the screen will look like the shot opposite and you should left click the save button and then select your download folder to receive the new file. Time will pass, depending on the speed of your modem and the quality of your Internet connection. When the download is finished, close the download dialog box, back up the menus on FlightSim.Com until you see the logout prompt, click that, wait until you are back at the site's main screen, close your browser and shut down your Internet connection. If you have broadband, do not take that last instruction literally, as it will involve yanking the cable out of the wall and I don't want to be held responsible for damage to property. Now fire up Windows Explorer. If you use XP you can just hit the 'folders' button on Internet Explorer and open up whatever folder you downloaded the file to. Being tiresomely logical I use a special folder called 'Download' in the 'My documents tree and create folders inside that for all the stuff I have er... downloaded. Call me Mr. Tidy or what? My halo is available for inspection elsewhere. If you have done everything right, there, sitting all on its lonesome should be cv580.zip, although depending on how Windows is set up on your machine, you may not be able to see the .zip bit. If you have WinZip installed on your machine, the file icon should be a yellow filing cabinet in a vice. Open the file in WinZip by double clicking on on the cv580.zip icon (my apologies to people who have Windows set up so that single clicks substitute for double clicks). In the colorful WinZip window that opens up, you should see a worryingly long list of files. Click on the 'extract' button up there in the middle of the WinZip toolbar and you will get a new dialog which is there to help you select which folder you want to extract the zipped files into. I hate to do this to you, but along with my addiction to having a special download folder, I have a special one for extracting files to, called 'Junk'. You can call yours whatever you like, but it might be worth creating one right now to extract your file into. Whatever you do, don't forget where it is. Why do I have such a folder? Well, if you download enough files, you will get left with all kinds of stuff you don't need to install and having it all in one place makes it real easy to clean out. Not such an issue in these days of two hundred gig drives, but it makes for an easier life. If you use the 'folders/drives' pane to find the 'Junk' folder on your hard disk, and left click on the folder name to select it, the 'Extract to' pane should change to show something like this. Make sure you have the 'all files' button checked and especially the 'Use folder names' button checked too. To unpack the files all you have to do is to left click the extract button at the top right of the 'Extract' dialog and there should be a flurry of disk activity as your aircraft files are unzipped into the junk folder. If you look in the Junk folder, you should see that it contains a single folder. Now this is a particularly well organised add-on plane and you may not always get something as near a result as this. Some freeware designers like to make it a little tougher for their users and you will get a clutch of ten or more files and folders when you decompress the zip. Inside that folder are all the files that make up our plane, but as I hinted above, you are not always going to get such a neat result. If that happens, don protective headgear and click here to see what you do. Okay! Now we have to find where your copy of FS2004 is lurking on your hard disk. Most probably it is in Program files, though this varies depending on which type of installation you have. Left click on the little + sign next to the Program files folder in the left hand pane of Windows Explorer. A huge list of sub-folders should appear - drag the scroll bar on the divider down until you can see a folder called Microsoft games. Click the + sign next to that. Again, you should get a list of sub-folders appearing, the length of which will depend on how many Microsoft games you own, but one of those folders will be called 'Flight Simulator 9'. Make sure that you don't accidentally drop the plane into the main Flight Simulator 9 folder - believe me, it is easily done. At risk of getting repetitive strain injury here, left click the little plus sign next to the Flight Simulator 9 folder. Even more sub-folders will appear - I bet you had no idea how many files there were on you hard disk Now one of these sub-folders should be called 'Aircraft,' find it but don't click on it, because that is where we are going to put our hard won Convair 580. Now go back and select the Junk folder - you may need to use the scroll bar to find it depending on how much software is installed on your machine. Left click on the Junk folder in the left hand pane of Explorer and then select the CV580 folder by moving your mouse to the right hand pane. Left click on the plane folder and the drag all the way down until it is level with the 'Aircraft' folder and then move it across until 'Aircraft' folder is highlighted and let the mouse button go. I'll have you know that all the screenshots here were created with SnagIt and to get that particular one, I had to hold down ctrl and shift with my left hand, drag the file with my right, and press the 'P' key with my nose. Now you know what we go through here at FlightSim.Com. It isn't all sitting in the penthouse suite swapping stories with Boeing executives. The CV580 folder should disappear from Junk and move to Aircraft - check it has really gone there by left clicking the + sign next to Aircraft and somewhere in there you should see it. If the CV580 folder doesn't appear in Aircraft there are two possibilities. The first is that Windows hasn't updated Explorer to show the move - you can check this by left clicking View on the Explorer menu bar, then selecting Refresh from the drop down menu. If CV580 doesn't appear in Aircraft after this, either it is still in Junk, or you have missed Aircraft and dropped it in some other nearby folder. Or it is in Flight Simulator 9. Or the network pixies have got it. The only good news if you lose it is that by now, you should know enough to go looking for it and move it back to its rightful place. Close Explorer and any other windows that happen to be open. We are going to see this bird fly. Take a deep breath and start up FS2004. Once the default plane is on the runway, go to the menu bar and click 'aircraft' and then 'select aircraft'. If you scroll down the list of aircraft manufacturers you should see "Convair" early on. Go to the line below, the one that says "Aircraft model" and left click on the arrow at the far right so that the list drops down. You should see "Convair CV580" a little way down there. Left click on that line and admire your brand new 580 spinning around in the show room. Want to take it for a spin? Select the OK button down at the bottom, wait for it to load and you have a new plane. Depending on your flying skills, it is possible to get this mother off the ground at Meigs. Make sure you wind on a fair amount of trim and drop some flap if you don't plan going waterskiing. Additionally, I would floor the throttles and let the fans build up a bit of power before you release the brakes. And good luck; because this baby isn't quite as manoeuvrable as the Cessna. Before we finish up here, a quick word on things that can go wrong with aircraft installations. This CV580 installs fine, but sometimes installations fail - the first sign that something has gone wrong being that the plane doesn't show up in the "select aircraft" dialog. There are a few things to check. First off, hunt down the list of manufacturers and peek into the "unspecified" section. Sometimes planes which weren't originally designed for FS2004 end up there. Next, check that you really did drop the plane's folder into \Flight Simulator 9\aircraft - it is easy to miss. If it isn't either of those two things, then it is very likely that the plane you chose isn't compatible with FS2004. The best way to check this out is by looking at the readme file which will almost certainly be included with the plane. Freeware readmes are often very basic, but they normally say which version of the sim the plane was designed for - and if that was FS98 or before, then the plane is not compatible with FS2004 and won't show when you try to select it (of course, the best time to check this out is before you do the install...) The other reasons for an apparently good installation failing to produce a plane in the menu is a corrupt or missing air file or a bad aircraft.cfg. Unless you are a developer yourself, that kind of thing is tough to fix. One last thing - if you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, some add-on planes will fail to load, sometimes triggering a dialog which says "Unable to load visual model". If this happens, you need to download Dave Parsons' excellent MDREPAIR.ZIP, which will fix the error and allow the planes to load normally. Andrew Herd andrew@flightsim.com
  12. How To Build Your Own Aircraft - A Step By Step Guide For Beginners Part 2: Finding And Installing FS2002 Panels By Andrew Herd If you worked through part one of this series, you should have a Delta Boeing 757 installed in Flight Simulator 2002 in addition to the default aircraft. The 757 is a great aircraft, but like many freeware planes for FS2002, it uses a default instrument panel which looks nothing like the panel from a real 757. If you have been around FlightSim.Com for any length of time, you will have heard people going on endlessly about installing new panels, and you may have wondered what they were going on about. This article will make you a member of that group, because it will show you how to find a new panel for your new 757 and how to install it. The instructions here will not work unless you have already installed the aircraft in the first article. First of all, just to clear up some terminology. It used to beat me what people were talking about when they were raving on about how good some "panel" or other was. But by sticking around and asking, I eventually figured out that what they were talking about were instrument panels and the mists cleared. As a matter of fact, the term is used to mean not only the instrument panel, but also 2D and even 3D views within and outside the cockpit. Panel packages vary - many freeware ones have just one forward view, the main instrument panel itself, others come with subsidiary panels, overheads, pedestals, you name it. We are going to go a step further than we did last time, because we are going to look at the configuration files that are part of the guts of FS2002. FS uses config files to set up everything from the way the scenery looks to the way aircraft fly. If you know how to edit these files safely, then the program is defenseless before you. So back things up before you change them! For now, I want you to start up Windows Explorer and take a look at the folder structure of the Delta 757. If you remember (assuming you used the default setup for FS2002) the aircraft is installed in C:\Program files\Microsoft games\FS2000\aircraft\Delta 757-200 `97 colors. What a mouthful. You can go straight to it by left clicking on the plus sign next to - then the plus sign next to Program files - then the plus sign next to Microsoft games and so on until you finally click the plus sign next to "Delta 757-200 `97 colors" and expand that folder. If you look, you will see several sub-folders including model, panel, sound and texture. The sub folder called model contains information about the way the aircraft appears in FS2002; while texture contains the graphics which 'skin' the plane. The panel and sound sub folders are pretty self explanatory. Let's take a look in the panel sub folder by clicking on the word panel in the left hand pane of Windows explorer. You will see just one file, called panel, or panel.cfg, depending on which options you have turned on in Explorer. What I would like you to do is to double-click on that file. You will get a dialog called 'Open with,' and the purpose of this dialog is to let you associate an application with a particular file type. In this case, we are going to associate Notepad with files which have names ending in .cfg. You will see why in a minute. Use the slider to scroll down the list in the bottom box until you see Notepad, then left click on the Notepad icon and click the OK button at the bottom of the 'Open with' dialog. Some people will find that this dialog won't appear, by the way. This sometimes happens because of a Windoze bug, and the only way around it, short of finding out which app is associated with Notepad files and fixing it, is to open Notepad manually and do things the long way around. You can do this by clicking on the Start button, then clicking on "Run" and typing notepad in the dialog that appears. That gets Notepad up and running - but you will have to step through the folder structure using notepad to get to C:\Program files\Microsoft games\FS2000\aircraft\Delta 757-200 `97 and you will also have to select "files of all types" on the "files of type" drop down that appear when you hit file\open on the Notepad menu. The panel file should open in Notepad and it should have just two lines in it, saying: [fltsim] alias=b777_300\panel Basically, all the panel.cfg file is doing is to point at one of the default instrument panels stored in FS2002. When you select the Delta 757 aircraft in FS2002, it does a quick read of the panel.cfg file and loads whichever panel it is told to. You could set it up to load the Cessna 172 panel if you wanted - this is called making an "alias". It takes all sorts to make up a world. The point of all this fiddling about is to point up the fact that the modular nature of Flight Simulator makes it possible for an aircraft to load with just about any panel you want - so if it pleases you to fly a 747 with the default Cessna 182 panel, you can, just by altering the panel.cfg to look like this: [fltsim] alias=c182\panel This sounds totally wacky, but there is method in Microsoft's madness, for once. While it is rare for aircraft files to get seriously big, panels can trespass over the 5 Mb mark these days (don't laugh if you are reading this in 2005 and panels are a minimum of 1.4 Gb, remember I was writing this a long time ago). So if you are into 747s and you find one panel you really like or want to get familiar with, you can load up the panel once, install six different aircraft, point the alias in every aircraft's panel.cfg file at your favourite panel, and when you are flying no one will know you are cheating (-: Makes sense now, huh? Incidentally, you can do the same thing with sound, but that will be the subject of the next article in this series. What we are going to do right now is to find a new panel for our 757 and make FS2002 load it instead of the default one when we run the plane. If you aren't connected to the Internet already, fire up your connection and point your web browser at FlightSim.Com. I want you to log on, and then go to the 'search file libraries' page from the Main Menu, just like we did last time. Pull down the slider in the 'search only file section' drop down until you can select 'FS2002 panels' by left clicking it, then type '757' (without the quotes) in the 'search for text' box. Now left click the 'start search button.' You will get a list of panels to choose from, each with its own description and picture. Browse through the list using the right hand scroll bar and the 'next 10 files' link down at the bottom of the web page. We are after a particular file, so I want you to go back to the search page (use the back arrow, or the 'exit list files' link on the web page. Once you are at the search page again, make sure that the 'search for text' box is empty by deleting '757' and type 'mz757pnl.zip' in the file name box. Check that 'FS2002 panels' is still selected and then click the 'start search' button. You should get a one file search result, showing an 2.9 Mb panel for a 757-200. I want you to download this to the download folder you created in the last session, by clicking the download link above the file description, then clicking 'I accept, start download' on the download copyright page, and selecting your download folder as the destination. Once the download is complete, close your web browser and shut down your Internet link. If you take a look in your download folder now, you should have two files there. The first is your 757 (n604dl97.zip), the other is the file you just downloaded, mz757pnl.zip. If you can't see mz757pnl.zip there, you downloaded it to the wrong directory and you need to use the finder to locate it. If you are wondering why my directory shows only mz757pnl.zip, it is because I have temporarily misplaced the aircraft file. Next I want you to go to your 'Junk' folder and delete everything in it (that's why we call it 'junk'). Then go back to mz757pnl.zip and double click on the icon. WinZip should show the contents of the file. There should be many files, in there as shown in the illustration. Scaaareeey, huh? Make sure you have 'use folder names' checked in WinZip or the files will decompress in an unholy mess which even I will not be able to sort out. Hit the 'extract' button and unzip everything into your junk folder. Now go check out Junk. All the files should be there. Depending on how you have set up Windows Explorer they may appear in a different order to the illustration. The first thing to do in these circumstances is to RTFM (this being a family web site I can only reveal what this means by private email, as long as you can guarantee to me that you are over the age of 35. In general, this means being familiar with the early works of groups like Fleetwood Mac) by double clicking the file labelled readme. This panel was written by Mario Coelho and while it is a terrific piece of freeware, the readme is concise. Close the readme file for now and stop talking in the back there, you are ruining my concentration. Some panel files unzip to show folders like this one, others contain folders and zips (that's right, you can put a zip inside a zip), but in either case, the principles are the same. Now and again, you discover zips withing zips within zips, which always makes me wonder if the developer enjoyed pass the parcel as a kid. First step, I want you to open the folder called "757-200_gauge". Double click on it to open (apologies again to everyone with single click set-ups, it's my age, you know). You should see something like the illustration. Use the scroll bar on the right just to show how many files are in there, if you are curious. What you are looking at are the files which create the gauges you see on the panel - if they aren't copied into the right folder in your FS2002 setup, your panel will have holes in it where the gauges should have been. If you come across a panel where the gauges are in a zip, don't panic, just open the zip called "gauges" and follow the instructions below. Now we need to find the folder where FS2002's gauges live. Assuming you have a standard setup, this means left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files and clicking the plus sign next to that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and clicking the plus sign next to that, then clicking the plus sign next to FS2002, and then left clicking on the folder you see called 'gauges,' - see the illustration. Resist the urge to click the plus sign next to gauges, or it will become a habit. Take a second to look at the left hand pane, which shows the FS2002 folder tree expanded, the gauges folder being about halfway down. This is where FS2002 expects to find its gauges, when it loads a panel. Choose "edit" then "select all" from the window menu, then left click on one of the files in the right hand pane, hold the button down, and drag the files across to the left pane until the highlight is over the \FS2002\gauges folder - then release the button. If the gauges are in a zip, then the procedure is to open the zip by double clicking on it, go to the WinZip icon bar and click 'extract', use the dialog which appears to find and select the \FS2002\gauges folder and click the 'extract' button in the dialog. There will be a burst of activity. In all probability, WinZip will quietly extract all the files and then go about its business, but you may see a message like the one below, if you have installed any other panels besides the Microsoft default set. If you get asked about a file overwrite, you will have to weigh it up yourself. In general, I look at the dates and press no if the file I am overwriting is newer. In this case I would press 'yes' since the file I am overwriting is older. But as I say, hopefully this won't happen to you. When WinZip is done all the extract dialogs will disappear and the green light will come on again at the bottom right of the WinZip window. You can close WinZip and breath again. You may be wondering why we have installed the gauges first. Well, in my experience the most common problem people face when installing new panels is forgetting to put the gauges in the \FS2002\Gauges directory, with the result that when the panel loads for the first time they are faced with a bitmap with a series of black holes where the instruments should be. If you install the gauges first you won't forget them. Now the next step is to install the rest of the panel files. This is a little more complicated than installing the gauges as we are going to have to make a new folder to put them in, deep within the folder structure of FS2002 - but if you have already worked your way through the first article in this series, you should have done this once already. Just make sure you read this carefully, and keep double-checking. Find your FS2002 directory using Explorer (it should still be open from when you last used it). I want you to click on the plus sign next to the 'aircraft' subfolder in FS2002 - OK, I've had it with saying 'click the plus sign,' from now on I'm going to say 'open' or 'expand,' right? We are going to create a new folder within the \aircraft folder called fsfsconv. Why? Well, tradition mainly. Every version of Flight Simulator until this one had an fsfsconv folder and I don't see why Microsoft should spoil our fun by leaving it out. Fsfsconv is where all the panels used to lurk in previous versions of Flight Simulator, and if you can now create a folder called fsfsconv, by highlighting the \aircraft folder and then using Explorer's "File", "New", "Folder" commands from the menu, I would be obliged. What we need to do next is to create a folder inside of Fsfsconv called 'panel.757' excluding the quotes of course (and from now on, I'm not going to remind you about that anymore, either!) So let's go. With fsfsconv selected, click on 'file' in Windows Explorer, then highlight 'new' and finally, slide the pointer over to 'folder' and click on that just like you did to create the 757 aircraft folder in the last article. Incidentally, the pic in the right hand pane is what a panel looks like in FS2002 when you forgot to copy the gauges over. Once seen, never forgotten. A new folder will duly appear and I want you to rename it 'panel.757' as shown in the illustration. The next thing we need to do is to go back to the Junk folder, and select the panel folder. I want you to select all the contents of this folder and copy it into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FS2002\aircraft\fsfsconv\panel.757. I can hear some sharp intakes of breath out there, so I'd better do some explaining. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FS2002\aircraft\fsfsconv\panel.757 is simply the full 'path' name of the folder you just created, the one called panel.757. If you imagine that every single one of those backslashes represents a plus sign you have to click on in Windows Explorer, you can see that this is just a shorthand way of referring you to a particular folder, without saying 'click the little plus sign' six times. Select all the files in the \junk\panel and copy them across to the \fsfsconv\panel.757 folder. If you are installing a different panel and the gauges are in a zip, hit the WinZip 'extract' button and go through the directory structure in the dialog that pops up just the way you did before. We'll go through it one more time in detail, expand by left clicking the little plus sign next to C:, then using the scrollbar to find program files expand that, then scrolling down again to find Microsoft Games and expand that, then expand FS2002, then expand 'aircraft', then expand 'fsfsconv' and finally, left click on the folder called 'panel.757' so that it is highlighted and hit the extract button. You will almost certainly find that you need to use the horizontal slider to see what you are doing at some stage, because this is a deeply nested folder structure. We are very nearly there, except that our Delta 757 is still blissfully unaware that we are going to all this trouble on its behalf. We need to edit its panel.cfg file to let it know which panel it is going to use. So use Windows Explorer to go to the "Delta 757-200 `97 colors" folder (which is in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FS2002\aircraft if you get lost.) If you created the association between files ending in .cfg and Notepad, panel.cfg should have a little Notepad icon, and you can just double click on it to open it automatically in Notepad. If you didn't, go to the back of the class. We are going to do a small hack to this file - because it points to the default Microsoft 777 Panel and no one wants to be seen dead flying with that. Instead we are going to point it at our new file. Delete everything in the original panel.cfg and type this instead: [fltsim] alias=FSFSConv\Panel.757 Make sure it looks exactly the way it does in the screen shot. Then click on file, then save and close down Notepad. Okay, now the Delta 757 knows which panel it is supposed to be flying with and we are set, but one thing you might come across is a folder, or a zip called 'sounds' as part of a panel installation set. If you do find something like this, it is a sound set which is linked to various actions on the panel, like switches and other stuff. If you see something like this, open it up in Explorer or WinZip as appropriate and you should see something like the illustration. Those files belong in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FS2002\sound and this time, you are on your own getting them there, because you ought to know how to do it by now. We should have the show on the road now, so start up FS2002, select the Delta 757 and was it worth it? Well if you don't like the result, there are plenty of other panels out there. Be my guest and try 'em all! The next article in this series will be on installing a custom sound set to complete this aircraft. Andrew Herd andrew@flightsim.com How To: Install FS2002 Aircraft
  13. How To Build Your Own Aircraft Part 1: Finding And Installing FS2000 Aircraft By Andrew Herd If you are reading this, I can imagine that you have flown everywhere and done everything you can do in the Microsoft default aircraft set. By now you will be intimately familiar with the Cessna, have flown the Mooney upside down under Golden Gate Bridge, and tried to land the 737 on a 400 foot dirt strip in North Dakota. The program has given up its secrets and you are looking for something else to try your hand at - and you have noticed that FlightSim.Com claims to have thousands of files there for download, but you just aren't quite sure how to go about it. Now is time to learn. First of all, before we even go looking for trouble, we need one essential utility, a shareware program called WinZip. Why WinZip? Well, many of the aircraft on this and other sites are in what are known as compressed files. You can imagine a compressed file as being like the suitcase you would like to take on holiday, with everything crushed into it, except with a compressed file you can get the kitchen sink in too. Aircraft creators use file compression to squeeze all the files that go together to make their planes into the smallest possible space - not only is it convenient to have everything collected together, it makes for faster downloads too. The universal format used around the net is what is called a 'zip' file, and the program you need to unpack a zip is called WinZip (there are others, including the original zip file utility PKzip, but this one is my favorite). The first thing you need to do to start this project is to create two directories on your hard disk: one called 'Downloads' and the other called 'Junk'. If you aren't sure how to do this, then I suggest going off and buying a book called Windows for Dummies and reading it thoroughly before coming back to try this, as your learning curve is going to be too steep otherwise. You will use these two directories to store the files you have downloaded and to unzip files before you install them in your Flight Simulator (henceforth known as FS) folder. To get WinZip, fire up your web browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape) and click on this link. This should take you direct to the WinZip site and from there you can follow the link to downloading the evaluation version. When your browser pops up a dialog to ask you which folder to download the file to, make sure that the 'save this file to disk' button is checked and choose the download folder you just created to save it in. When you have finished getting WinZip, open up Windows Explorer, and take a look in the download folder. There should only be one file in there and it should be the install file for WinZip, so launch it by double-clicking on it and follow the instructions. Assuming you have a working FS setup you now have all the tools you need to build your own dream plane from the tens of thousands FlightSim.Com has to offer. OK, so now we have to decide which aircraft to get. You may have your own ideas, but I think we ought to build a 747. For some reason Microsoft did not think of putting one in the default FS setup, and while this is a shame, there are hundreds to choose from on FlightSim.Com. The first thing you need to do is to log in to FlightSim.Com, if you haven't already done so. Many people never get beyond the news page, so if you have never seen the guts of FlightSim.Com, you need to follow the 'member login' hyperlink up at the top of the home page, just under the ad banner, and register as a user on the way. I have circled the link you need in red. Just click on the image on the left to see a larger version. Incidentally, don't worry about giving away your family secrets on the Internet, FlightSim.Com only uses the login to keep track of the number of users online. You won't get deluged with junk emails. I've been a member for many years and haven't received a single one. Once you are logged in, you will need to follow the links to the 'main menu' - there is a big bold hypertext link down the bottom of the home page. The main menu page is the guts of FlightSim.Com and it is pretty daunting to look at, but it is well worth getting to know it, because it gives you access to all sorts of goodies and knowledge about FS. If you have got the time and the inclination, have a play around, clicking on the links to see what you get. Particularly useful ones include Product Reviews (which takes you to a long list of FS product reviews stretching back into the dim mists of time) and the Forums, where you can post messages and discuss FS to your heart's content. About two-thirds the way down the right hand side is a bar saying 'File Libraries (Downloads)' and just below that is a link called 'Search File Libraries'. I have circled it in red and I want you to left click it. You should now have the Advanced File Search page up. This is right in under the hood of FlightSim.Com and if you understand how to use this page, the world of flight simulation is at your fingertips. The bit we want is sandwiched in between the two runway graphics. There are three selection boxes, two text boxes and a 'Start Search' button. Feel free to play around with this for a while, but once you are ready I would like you to left click on the button to the right of the top selection box, then grab the slider by left clicking, holding and dragging it until you see a line saying: 'FS2000 aircraft'. Select it by left clicking on it and the line should highlight. Okay, now type '747' (without the quotes) in the box called 'search for text' and click 'Start search'. After a pause, your screen should fill with a list of 747 files. There are ten on the first page and if you scroll down to the bottom, you will see a link called 'next ten files.' Left clicking this will bring up files 11 through 20 and so on. When I did the search, there were 65 files found, which should be enough for anyone, but by the time you do this search, there are likely to be many more, so don't be upset if none of the files in this illustration appear on the page you see. To keep this as simple as possible, I want to use a particular aircraft file and that means going back to the Advanced File Search page. You can get there either by using the 'back' button on your browser or by clicking the 'exit list files' links on the page. Back again at the Advanced File Search page, leave everything as it is and type 'b7473sab.zip' (no quotes again) but this time in the 'file name' box. Then hit 'start search'. You are a real pro now - got the plane first time, huh? You should have one file in your list, titled 'FS2000 Sabena Boeing 747-329SCD' and right above it are two links, one saying 'download,' the other saying 'view.' Left click download and up comes the copyright page, boring I know, but a necessary evil, given the number of pirates out there. Take a deep breath and left click 'I accept, start download' button. Up should pop the file download dialog again, and making sure that the 'save this file to disk' button is checked, click OK. Use the 'Save as' dialog to select your download folder and then click the OK button. Time will pass, depending on the speed of your modem and the quality of your Internet connection. When the download is finished, close the download dialog box, close your browser and shut down your Internet connection. Now fire up Windows Explorer and open up your Download folder. If you have done everything right, there, sitting all on its lonesome should be b7473sab.zip, although depending on how Windows is set up on your machine, you may not be able to see the .zip bit. If you have WinZip installed on your machine, the file icon should be a yellow filing cabinet in a vice. Open the file in WinZip by double clicking on on the b7473sab.zip icon (my apologies to people who have Windows set up so that single clicks substitute for double clicks). In the colorful WinZip window that opens up, you should see a worryingly long list of files. Click on the 'extract' button and you will get a new dialog which is there to help you select which folder you want to extract the zipped files into. If you use the 'folders/drives' pane to find the 'Junk' folder on your hard disk, and left click on the folder name to select it, the 'Extract to' pane should change to show something like 'C:\Junk.' Make sure you have the 'all files' button checked and especially the 'Use folder names' button checked too. To unpack the files all you have to do is to left click the extract button at the top right of the 'Extract' dialog and there should be a flurry of disk activity as your aircraft files are unzipped into the junk folder. Now if you look in the Junk folder, you should see that it contains ten files. Five of them are folders, and each of these contains more files. One of the remaining files is called Readme - if you double click on it, you can read why Vital Vanbeginne created this particular aircraft. We are that close to having a flyable plane here. Although Vital, the creator of the aircraft, has packaged the files which make up the plane pretty well, you can't install them into FS2000 just as they are, because they all need to be in one named aircraft folder. So make sure you still have the Junk directory selected in Windows Explorer, so that all the files and folders within it are visible, and then left click on the word 'File' on Windows Explorer's menu bar (that's at the very top left, just under where it says 'Exploring Junk'). When the file menu drops down, left click on the 'new' prompt, which should appear some way down the menu. Yet another sub-menu will spring out. Left click the word 'Folder' on this one, and the menu should disappear and a new folder should appear with the name highlighted under the icon. Type in 'B7473SAB' here, without the quotes. Now for a tricky bit. I want you to select every other file and folder in the Junk folder and drag it into the B7473SAB folder, until it is the only folder visible in the Junk folder. Okay! Now we have to find where your copy of FS2000 is lurking on your hard disk. Most probably it is in Program files, so left click on the little + sign next to the Program files folder in the left hand pane of Windows Explorer. A huge list of sub-folders should appear - drag the scroll bar on the divider down until you can see a folder called Microsoft games. Click the + sign next to that. Again, you should get a list of sub-folders appearing, the length of which will depend on how many Microsoft games you own, but one of those folders will be called FS2000. At risk of getting repetitive strain injury here, left click the little plus sign next to that! Even more sub-folders will appear - I bet you had no idea how many files there were on you hard disk Now one of these sub-folders should be called 'Aircraft,' find it but don't click on it, because that is where we are going to put our hard won 747 [graphic]. Now go back and select the Junk folder - you may need to use the scroll bar to find it depending on how much software is installed on your machine. Left click on the Junk folder in the left hand pane of Explorer and then select the B7473SAB folder by moving your mouse to the right hand pane. Left click on B747SAB3 and the drag all the way down until it is level with the 'Aircraft' folder and then move it across until 'Aircraft' folder is highlighted and let the mouse button go. The B7473SAB folder should disappear from Junk and move to Aircraft - check it has really gone there by left clicking the + sign next to Aircraft and somewhere in there you should see it. If the B7473SAB folder doesn't appear in Aircraft there are two possibilities. The first is that Windows hasn't updated Explorer to show the move - you can check this by left clicking View on the Explorer menu bar, then selecting Refresh from the drop down menu. If B7473SAB doesn't appear in Aircraft after this, either it is still in Junk, or you have missed Aircraft and dropped it in another nearby folder. By now, you should know enough to go looking for it and move it to its rightful place. Close Windows Explorer and any other windows that happen to be open. Take a deep breath and start up Flight Simulator. Once the default plane is on the runway, go to the menu bar and click 'aircraft' and then 'select aircraft'. If you scroll down the list you should see 'B747 329SCD Sabena' there. Left click on that line and admire your brand new 747 spinning around in the show room. Want to take it for a spin? Ok, select the green check mark, wait for it to load and you have a new plane - just don't expect it to get into the air at Meig's, that's all. If don't want to end up in the sea, I'd go to Denver or JFK of somewhere with the kind of real estate that a really big jet demands. And good luck; because this baby isn't quite as manoeuvrable as the Cessna. The aircraft you have just installed uses a default Microsoft panel and sound set. If you want to make your plane more realistic, then please read the next article in this series, which will teach you the art of installing a different panel. Andrew Herd andrew.herd@btinternet.com
  14. How To Install FS2000 Scenery By Andrew Herd The majority of flight simulator users get bored pretty quickly with the default airports that Microsoft provides with FS2000. OK, there are a few detailed airports, but the majority of the fields are built around a limited and repetitive range of buildings while many others are just bare strips. If you fly to enough places, one airport gets to look just like another and if the boredom doesn't get you, it just feels kinda strange landing at a major airport with three buildings and deserted runways. You can, of course, get out your credit card and buy commercial sceneries, but many users have no idea just how many stunning freeware sceneries there are out there, just for the download. If you doubt what I am saying here, go to the FlightSim.Com search page, pull down the top menu so that 'FS2000 scenery' is highlighted, enter a * in the filename box and hit the search button. When I did this, the count was 542 files. By the time you do it, there will be more, because new sceneries are being added every day. The * incidentally, is what is called a 'wildcard' and it makes the search engine find every file in there. If you enter a * on its own, you get every single FS2000 scenery file; if you enter something like grass* you will get all the files which have names beginning with the word grass. Now if you scroll down the list of files you got by entering * on its own, you will see that some of them are airfields and some are other types of scenery, like buildings, bits of towns, monuments, navigational aids that Microsoft forgot or just got wrong, and even missing ranges of hills. What we are going to do in this tutorial is to download an airport, chiefly because this is the most popular request I have right now. We are going to choose an airport that isn't totally straightforward to install, but one which I know from personal experience works extremely well and which makes Microsoft's and many commercial efforts look pretty sick. The scenery I have in mind is John Young's excellent Stansted airport, which is a small masterpiece of design and a fantastic example of the better side of human nature - keep reminding yourself that this scenery is freeware when you are using it - you might also email John to say how much you like it, because that is the only reward he is going to get for all his hard work. So okay, like the man says, let's go to work. I am assuming that you have worked your way through my previous tutorials and that you are familiar with the idea of downloading files to a download folder and unzipping them using WinZip to a folder called junk. If not, can you please go back and take a look at some of the steps we have already been through, as I am expecting you to be familiar with some basic concepts like directory creation and the use of WinZip. First step is to clean out your junk folder by selecting everything in it and hitting the delete key. When you have spring-cleaned the folder so that not a single file is left hiding in a dark corner, go to the FlightSim.Com search page, and search for egssjy3.zip, making sure that you have 'FS2000 scenery' selected and that the 'search for text' box is clear. You should get one file, and I want you to download it to your download directory. Depending on whether you are paying for your connection or not, you can leave your Internet link up for the moment, with your browser still logged in to FlightSim.Com, because we are going to download some more files. Bring up Windows Explorer and check out your download directory. Egssjy3.zip should be in there somewhere and I want you to open it in WinZip. Next step is to unpack the file into your junk folder - this will produce a total of seven files of which three are zips. A few of you will be surprised to see that you can put a zip inside a zip, but this is common practice for sceneries, chiefly because of the need to keep different types of files apart. Launch the readme.txt file and scan through it. I'm going to take you through this one step by step, so don't spend too much time reading it, but do notice that John asks us to download the 'VOD3' textures; an extra file that isn't in his package. I'm going to digress here. If you download enough freeware scenery you will notice the way designers casually refer to things like the 'VOD' textures and the 'ASD' textures, but never ever give the file names. Most people are puzzled by it, but I can reveal here for the first time that the reason for this is that when you take up flight simulator scenery design, you have to join a secret society and the most important rule of the brotherhood is that you should never give away the file names or any hints about where these textures might be found (-: The trouble is that the textures these files contain are vital to making many third party sceneries work properly, and without them you can end up with some pretty odd looking airports. Many people who might otherwise use freeware sceneries give up at this point because these extra textures aren't as easy to find as they should be, and so at risk of what is left of my professional reputation, I am going to break house rules and tell you not only what the filenames are, but where they can be found. If this is the last thing I ever post on FlightSim.Com, you will know that the society tracked me down and reset my config file. Our Stansted scenery doesn't require all of these extra files, but it is worthwhile downloading them all anyway, chiefly because you won't need to worry about them in the future. When you get them, all you have to do is to unzip the contents of all three into \program files\microsoft games\fs2000\textures and forget about them. If you download any sceneries that need them later on, they will find them automatically. The files you need are: aip210tx.zip Airport 2.10 Textures. Complete package of textures that accompany v2.10 of the Airport scenery design program by Pascal Meziat, Brian McWilliams and Tom Hiscox. vodtex30.zip Visual Object Designer v3.0 Textures package. This file contains all genuine VOD textures for VOD v3.0 scenery. By Rafael Garcia Sanchez. asd21txt.zip ASD 2.1 Textures. Required for proper function of scenery designed by Abacus "Airport & Scenery Designer" Version 2.1. Links are provided here for each of these files. You may run into similiar situations in the future where you need to find a file that everyone seems to be referring to. These common files can all be found on the "Must Have Files" page, which can be reached directly from the FlightSim.Com Main Menu. What I want you to do is to download each one of these files by clicking on the link and save them in your download folder. When you are done, close down your Internet connection and shut down Internet Explorer. Then I want you to unzip each one of these files directly into c:\program files\microsoft games\fs2000\texture. This might be a good place to say that from now on, I am going to refer to folders using 'short' paths. That long combination of folder names and backslashes I just gave is called a path, because if you follow all the steps in it, you arrive at the correct destination. From now on, I am going to cut out saying the 'c:\program files\microsoft games' bit and just say '\fs2000\texture' or whatever subfolder of FS2000 I want you to use. The reason for doing this is partly to save wear and tear on my ageing joints, partly because it saves space, and partly because out there, somewhere, I am sure there is somone who has installed the FS2000 directory on drive F: and is baffled by all these references to drive I keep giving. So when I write something like \fs2000\texture it assumes that you know enough to work out the first bit of the path yourself, now you are a fully paid up FS2000 hacker. The next thing we need to do is to get the Stansted files sorted out. John has packed them in a conventional fashion with a file called file_id.diz, which is actually a text file which gives the bare details of what the contents of the zip are; a small .gif file which FlightSim.Com uses to show what the airport looks like in its lists; the readme file which we have already opened; aptex.zip, which contains some 'texture' files; a file called 'scenery.zip' which contains one part of the airport; and a file called 'texture.zip' which contains the rest of it. This is probably a good moment to discuss the basics of the way scenery files are made up. I should point out here that I have never designed a scenery myself; I just know how to install them, so don't go emailing me any technical questions. The guts of any scenery file for FS2000 are usually to be found in a file like the one John calls scenery.zip - if you look inside this file by double clicking on it, you will see that it contains five files all ending in the filename extension '.bgl'. BGL files can hold all sorts of data, from the shape of buildings, to the frequency of a VOR, and without BGLs you can't have a scenery add-on at all. The majority of sceneries also have a series of texture files, in this case stored in John 'texture.zip'. If you look in here, there is an enormous number of files, which form the 'skin' of the scenery itself. Without the texture files, the airport would have the correct shape, but it would be completely unrecognisable. The grass wouldn't be green, the buildings would be gray blocks and you wouldn't be able to read the signs at all. We can't just take these files and zips as they stand and make a working airport out of them, so we are going to have to do some reorganisation. One of the things John tells us to do in the readme is to unzip the file called aptex.zip into the \fs2000\texture directory, but if you downloaded the three texture files I talked about earlier, you don't need to do this. Aptex.zip contains a number of special texture files that John has used to 'skin' his scenery, but we already have these textures installed, so we can bypass this step. Next step, we need to create a folder called 'Stansted' inside the junk directory. This folder is the container which will hold our airport. Once you have created the Stansted folder, I want you to double click on it to open it and then create two more folders inside it, one called Scenery and the other called Texture. At this point a little light may be dawning about the way John has organised his zip files. If you get this right, your junk folder should now look a bit like this. If you look at the folder tree which I have expanded in the left pane, you can see the scenery and texture folders I have created inside the Stansted folder. Okay, things look like they are going well, no blood on the tracks so far. What I would like you to do next is to unzip scenery.zip into the scenery sub-folder which you created inside the Stansted folder, and then I want you to unzip texture.zip into the texture sub-folder. Make sure you unzip both folders - I have only shown one being unzipped in the illustration. You can do this using the extract dialog in WinZip, but there is a quicker method. If you highlight all the files in scenery.zip by left clicking on the top file and then left-clicking on the bottom file with the left shift button held down, then keep the left mouse button held down and drag the highlighted files to the folder you want them to unzip to, WinZip will move them automatically for you. Do note that if there are more files in the zip than will show in the window, you will need to use the scroll bar to show all the files - otherwise you will end up moving about a dozen files and leaving the rest unzipped. Beginners frequently make this mistake and one good reason why scenery installations go wrong is that all the textures haven't been unzipped - airport sceneries in particular usually have more that one screen full of textures and some have three or four, so use that slider to check things out before you drag. If you get fed up juggling the folders trying to do this, you can force WinZip always to stay on top by clicking on 'options' in the WinZip top menu, then 'configuration' in the drop down list, then clicking the 'miscellaneous' tab and then checking 'always have WinZip on top.' That way, your WinZip window won't vanish under some other program at the exact instant you need it. We are nearly there now. Once you have unzipped all the files, I want you to move the Stansted folder (and the scenery and texture folders inside it) from your junk folder into \fs2000\scenery, as the illustration shows. When you are done, check out your \fs2000\scenery folder to make sure that the Stansted folder is in there, and that Stansted has its own Texture and Scenery folders. The next step is the hard bit, so I want you to really concentrate here. Get this wrong and you could be left with a non-working version of FS2000, so be warned. Even though it has been designed by the great Microsoft corporation (OK, you can stop going 'Ommmmm' now), FS2000 won't know you have added new scenery unless you tell it so. Being a tidy sort of program, Flight Simulator stores all the information it has about the scenery it is using in a file called scenery.cfg, which you will find in the \fs2000 folder. Open this file in Notepad and scan down it - notice that every single area of scenery in FS2000 has its own entry. There are two ways of adding in extra scenery to FS2000. We'll just talk through the first one, but the majority of uncomplicated sceneries can be installed this way. The first method to assemble your new scenery and move the folder into \fs2000\scenery as we have done, then start FS2000, go to the 'World' menu, left click on 'Scenery library,' cleft click on 'Add area.' then use the bottom scroll-bar to scan through the FS2000 sub-folders until we see the one called 'Scenery,' double-click on that to open it, use the bottom scroll-bar to find the sub-folder called 'Stansted,' double-click on that to open it, left click on the folder inside 'Stansted' called 'Scenery,' so that it is selected and then type 'Stansted' in the box called 'Scenery area title'. Then all you have to do is click on OK and follow your nose back out to the cockpit view. There will be some whirring and clanking as FS2000 gets its thoughts in order and once that is done, you should be able to use 'World' and then 'Go to airport' to visit your new scenery. This method works for about 50% of freeware sceneries and the author will usually tell you so if it does. One of the reasons I have chosen the Stansted scenery is that there is an additional complication, and you can't use the add scenery dialog in FS2000 - you have to edit the scenery.cfg file as well. If you install the new airport using the menu method described above, your will see double runways and all kinds of weird stuff. So if you go back and read the readme file that John so thoughtfully supplied, you will see that he has included instructions on how to edit the Scenery.cfg file that is part of the guts of FS2000. What John advises is to add some lines which look something like this: [Area.073] Title=Stansted Local=SCENERY\Stansted\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=73 Exclude=N051 54.00,E000 12.00,N051 52.00,E000 17.00,all Flatten.0=348,N051 54,E000 11,N051 54,E000 17,N051 51,E000 17,N051 51,E000 11 ...at the end of Microsoft's Scenery.cfg file. He also tells you to save a copy of the original version of scenery.cfg somewhere else on your hard disk before doing the edit, and I heartily agree with him. If you do not save a copy of scenery.cfg before doing the edit and anything goes wrong, then I can only reiterate that FS2000 may not work at all afterwards. So if you are feeling lucky, we will use the second method for installing the Stansted scenery. The best place to save a backup copy of scenery.cfg is in the \microsoft games folder, which is usually empty apart from a few sub-folders. You can do this quite quickly by using Windows Explorer to expand \microsoft games and also \fs2000, then finding scenery.cfg where it lives inside \fs2000, left clicking on scenery.cfg (keep that left mouse button held down) and then holding down and keeping held down the ctrl key on the extreme left of the bottom row of the keyboard, and with both the left mouse button held down and the ctrl key held down, dragging the scenery.cfg file up to \microsoft games. If you do this right, you should drag a copy of scenery.cfg up to \microsoft games and you should leave the original in \fs2000. CHECK THIS OUT AT LEAST THREE TIMES. You should now have two copies of scenery.cfg - one in the \fs2000 folder and one in the \microsoft games folder. If you don't have a copy of scenery.cfg in the \fs2000 folder, but you do have one in \microsoft games, then you didn't hold down the ctrl key at the same time as the left mouse button, and I want you to left click on that file, drag it back into \fs2000 and take up macrame, or something non-challenging like that. OK. Assuming we have two copies of scenery.cfg, I want you to open the copy of scenery.cfg in the \fs2000 folder and use the left-hand scroll bar to scroll all the way down to the end of the text you see in there. If you haven't installed any extra scenery yourself, or installed any commercial scenery, which should be the case for the majority of people reading this tutorial, the last entry in the file should look something like this: [Area.072] Title=Tokyo Local=scenedb\cities\tokyo Active=TRUE Layer=72 This is pretty simple to understand, if you know the rules. In FS2000, every installed scenery has to have a separate number in the scenery.cfg file; it has to have a title - that's the second line; it has to have a 'flag' saying whether it is 'active' or not (if this is set to false, the scenery is installed, but you can't use it); it has to have a layer number (almost invariably the same as the scenery number at the top); and then it may have one or more further lines of instructions, one beginning with 'Exclude' and one beginning with 'Flatten' which tell FS2000 to zap other scenery in order to make way for this particular layer. If your last scenery layer is 072, like the example above, you can 'install' the Stansted scenery in FS2000 by typing or copying in the lines: [Area.073] Title=Stansted Local=SCENERY\Stansted\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=73 Exclude=N051 54.00,E000 12.00,N051 52.00,E000 17.00,all Flatten.0=348,N051 54,E000 11,N051 54,E000 17,N051 51,E000 17,N051 51,E000 11 ...below the Tokyo entry, leaving a blank line between 'Layer=72' at the end of the Tokyo entry and [Area.073] at the beginning of the Stansted entry and saving scenery.cfg. On the other hand, if the last entry in your scenery.cfg file is anything like mine, it could look something like this: [Area.173] Title=Bonn Hangelar Local=Scenery\bonn-hangelar\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=173 Flatten.0=197,N50 47,E7 8,N50 47,E7 11,N50 45,E7 11,N50 45,E7 8 In which case, when you copy in the Stansted lines, you will need to alter them to look like this: [Area.174] Title=Stansted Local=SCENERY\Stansted\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=174 Exclude=N051 54.00,E000 12.00,N051 52.00,E000 17.00,all Flatten.0=348,N051 54,E000 11,N051 54,E000 17,N051 51,E000 17,N051 51,E000 11 If you look at it closely, all I have done is alter the 'Area' number and the 'Layer' number to be one higher than what was the last entry in the list. So if the last entry in your list looks like this: [Area.093] Title=Andrew's house Local=SCENERY\Andrew\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=093 Then your Stansted entry should look like this: [Area.094] Title=Stansted Local=SCENERY\Stansted\scenery Active=TRUE Layer=094 Exclude=N051 54.00,E000 12.00,N051 52.00,E000 17.00,all Flatten.0=348,N051 54,E000 11,N051 54,E000 17,N051 51,E000 17,N051 51,E000 11 I think we did that to death, but get it wrong and you may not even be able to start FS2000, so it is important. Now get your scenery.cfg file saved, close Notepad and start up FS2000. If everything worked, you should notice some new activity as FS2K incorporates the Stansted scenery into its sticky embrace; if you did something wrong, FS2000 will generate some kind of error message, and it is time to shut down the program, delete the scenery.cfg file in \fs2000, go to \microsoft games and copy your backup of scenery.cfg back to \fs2000 to replace it. If you did not do the backup of FS2000 in the beginning, you deserve everything that is coming to you, but if you click scenery.zip you can download a new copy of the default scenery.cfg, though I cannot guarantee it will work for you. If it did work, and if you followed the instructions to the letter, it will have, then you can enjoy your new airport by using the 'World' menu in FS2000 and then the 'Go to airport' option. There is only one airport in FS2000 called Stansted, so you can't get confused. Now wasn't all that pain worthwhile? Andrew Herd andrew.herd@btinternet.com
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