fs2002 aircraft editor

[NightStrike]

I am having problems with my fs2002 editor. I transplanted a P-38F Lightning across from CFS2 into my fs2002 and i switched up the engines for the F6F-3 hellcats engines...now whenever i try to fly it the P-38 climbs very slowly and then at some magic altitude it starts droping my joystick is calibrated and all normal craft work fine. it is just the CFS2 planes that i modify that do this...PLEASE HELP!

[Hagar]

I haven't tried the P-38 in FS2002 but it should work OK. You don't need to use the Aircraft Editor to install it. Simply copy the P-38 folder from CFS2\Aircraft & paste it straight into FS2002\Aircraft. The CFS2 default P-38 has its own panel & sound files so won't need alliasing to show up on the menu. It will be listed under Unspecified. You can add the FS2002 Aircraft.cfg entries manually in Notepad once you've checked it out. This is how I install all aircraft to all my M$ sims

[Travis]

And for the love of Apples, please don't try using the Aircraft Editor from the sim.  Its a buggy piece of software that should never have been released.

[NightStrike]

I am using the built in editor mainly to change the engines over. but if its buggy then that might explain the decreased handeling. I do have a MS Excel aircraft creator and so i supose i will start using the fs2002 editor mainly to get information for my other editor (like hp, commpression ratio, etc) one other problem is that i cannot change the textures in any of my flight sims (CFS2, and fs2002) they come up as blank BMP drawings. the gunsights in the CFS2 aircraft come up but nothing else. I am running Windows XP so i have an automatic pre-view feature but all it says is "Drawing failed"....

[Travis]

I have never used an editor program to change around stuff in the config files.  Most of it is easy enough to understand, especially if you're just grabbing different parts and transferring them.

Try using Notepad, and take a look through a few of them.

The reason the textures don't show up in a preview window is that the textures are in DXT3 format.  This means they have the textures themselves, and then an alpha channel combined with them.  An alpha channel tells FS how much a certain part of the texture shines.  If you want to take a look at the textures in a regular format, try downloading and installing DXTBmp.  Its a freeware program that you can use to seperate the two parts of the textures, and then edit them afterwards.

[NightStrike]

thank you very veery much for that bit of info.

[microlight]

I only recently started using DXTBmp - great piece of software! Now I understand what an alpha channel is. Even started tinkering with some textures now - did a Virgin Atlantic repaint today for the new 7E7/787 (whatever it ends up being called!) over at Avsim.

Great hobby, this.

[Hagar]

Just to clarify. The CFS2 default standard textures are in DXT1 Opaque format. This is a compressed format with no Alpha Channel. You will still need DXTBmp or Imagetool to convert them for editing. This is covered in more detail in DXTBmp Help.

[NightStrike]

i got DXTBmp and im exparimenting with it....lotsa fun...