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