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.Last Updated Wednesday, 26 July 2000

Painting aircrafts is relatively easy if you have the correct tools. Designing them is much harder and takes time practise and dedication. I am going to give a list of tools which I use or have used to paint, design and modify aircrafts. I will also add a few scenery tools for those who want a serious challenge. I will avoid the subject of panels completely...

PAINTING TOOLS:

Paint Shop Pro and/or Photoshop (Commercial Products). The debate goes on as to which is better, I find having both to be pretty handy! Buy them from the local computer software shop.

Stone Age Hex Editor. Required to edit the MDL file. (Not too professional having a TWA737 with texture files called LUFT737). Try http---www.bpsoft.com

Texture Converter. A nice little freeware utility which converts the R8 files used in FS98 and earlier to BMP files. By Kai Wang Erlandsen and can be found at http---www.flightsim.com

Paint shop Pro tips and tricks - visit: http://flightsimmers.net/fransfs98/psp.htm This is an excellent 'how to' site.

Check http---www.flightsim.com for others.

FLIGHT DYNAMICS

One clear choice (although I still use hex editors) is ADE98, which is available from http://www.flightsim.com/ade/ along with some good help pages.

There are one or two others but ADE is a good place to learn.

DESIGNING AIRCRAFTS

Aircraft Factory 99 and Aircraft Animator are the best choices to start with (Sami Puro uses SCASM). They are commercial products and are relatively easy to use. The only thing you cannot purchase is the eye for detail and patience.

The FSFS Design Short Course by Brian Quayle is an excellent document detailing how to design a good Flight Simulator aircraft. It is available from the Project Freeware site at http://www.avsim.com/mike/pfree/

SCENERY DESIGN

Things are changing here with the arrival of 3d mesh terrain and I think I am loosing touch! However, I can guide you towards the freeware apt210 and adk1rc3 which I believe are still the best freeware scenery design tools available. There are several commercial products and all have their strengths and weakneses.

I hope in some small way the above helps. If you would like to give aircraft or scenery design a try I can tell you that it is a labour of love that involves a great deal of frustration. Once you have started to get results though it all becomes worthwhile...

8-)