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