.FS2004

Flight Simulator 2004 sure has its highlights, but as to some particular aspects my prevailing sentiment is that of slight disappointment because the new version comes with some nagging glitches which are still being ignored, although some of them are well-known, old carryover flaws from earlier versions of FS. I still wonder how all these things keep passing thru the beta department. Additionally, I am not at all happy about always having to put in CD4 to be able to start Flight Simulator. It is a boring and time consuming thing to do! And as a policy against piracy it is probably rather ineffective. Also, at least for the German edition, FS2004 is released on four standard CDs, although the whole program could easily have been packed on a single DVD. What a waste of material! Heck, I wish I could be as enthusiastic about FS2004 as I was when FS2002 came out late in 2001, but it isn't that bad after all. So, in today's How to ... article I will try to outbalance the negative items against the positive sides. Although I don't want to turn this into a full-scale review, let me first give a short survey of my first impressions of FS2004, before I am going to enter into how to do away with some of the flaws.

Diving Deeper Into FS2004
On the downside:
1. There sometimes seems to be a glaring display issue both in cockpit and spot plane view mode. For a fraction of a second there is something like a stoppage revealing a strange display phenomenon as to be seen in the screen shots. So far I really doubt that it is caused by the graphics card, but you never know. The issue is obviously neither restricted to a particular scenery area nor to the use of one aircraft only. You can replay the sequence that contains the issue to study it in close detail.

I am afraid I don't have a clue for this at the moment, some more testing will have to be done (the red circle in the second screen shot is made by me to highlight the round area shown in shot No.3).

2. The DME display (Cessna!DME) in the C172SP panel is displaced a bit too far to the right, as the x value is a tiny bit too high (carryover flaw from FS2002). This can easily be modified if you are familiar with panel.cfg files, which can be opened by MS Notepad or similar text editors. Use gauge06=Cessna!DME,540,49,,33 instead of the default entry (mind the two commas after 49).

3. Buuuuuuh! The Reverser Warning lights of the default B737-400 once again do not light up, which is one of the most persistent carryover flaws from FS98 up to FS2004. To say I am stunned would be the understatement of the year.

4. Wind has no visible effect on snow and precipitation falling. This can be seen from the windsock at Meigs on a snowy day. Always remember it's the little things that count.

5. The trim tab of the C182S again moves in the wrong direction in relation to the position of the trim indicator (FS2002 carryover flaw) because when trimming this Cessna nose-down here, the trim tab on the trailing edge of the right elevator (wrongly) moves down, too, increasing its lift and thereby causing the elevator to move up a little, which then results in raising the nose of the Cessna instead of lowering it.

6. For some unknown reason we have lost the Cessna Skylane 182R RG in FS2004 like we lost the Concorde when FS2002 came out, but it can be imported from FS2002 without any relevant quirks (apart from the fact that landing lights do not illuminate the runway and that the wheels are not turning, which is only possible with Gmax models, of course. There is no VC either, which I do not consider a major drawback). I was surprised to see how nice it still looks during a snowy approach to KORD. And what is more, I don't want to miss its panel, as it still looks good to me. Would be nice to have it redesigned as a Gmax model for FS2006. Dreaming on, huh? Many of us made their first flying experiences with this nice aircraft, so it is also a nostalgic matter for old fogies like us.

7. The Lear 45 radio stack still offers bad readability of the frequency digits even if the settings for brightness and contrast on a CRT (ordinary) monitor are all right (carryover flaw since FS2000). On a TFT screen you won't have this problem, though.

8. The Boeing 747 EICAS has little glitches as to readability (TAT, REV) and as to the fact that the text strings TAT and TOTAL FUEL are slightly cut off at their topside (FS2002 carryover flaw).

9. The sim rate function has been removed from all chronometers. This is not a bad idea, but doing so without modifying the design of the respective gauges and just leaving a blank space in the static bitmap is simply not satisfying. What about inserting a voltage display instead?

10. Yuck! Roads and rivers are still running uphill at several places. Landing lights and beams don't look right, do they? The size of some resource bitmaps (e.g. King Air 350) is wrongly dimensioned.

11. FS2004 does need a high-end machine with a fast processor to get rock solid flyable frame rates and if you really want to enjoy what this version can principally offer you. On older machines (see my system specs at the end of the article) you might meet blurry ground and aircraft textures and stuttering as well. Ugh! Shift-Z'ing has become frightening for me again, but always upgrading the current system is a controversial matter to do. Yep, a lot depends on the sliders in the hardware settings menu.

12. Aircraft lights and other light effects have black squares around them. This even happens with an nVidia Geforce4 420 GO graphics card with 32MB. Going to the Settings-Display-Hardware menu and unchecking the box called 'Transform and Lighting' makes the black squares disappear, but you will largely lose the cool, smooth rain and snow effects by this. So this is not a real solution to the problem, I guess. The good news is that after installing the latest nVidia drivers this problem could be cured because their drivers are updated very frequently.

13. At least in the German edition of FS2004 there is a terrible confusion in the weather dialog as to the slider which defines the visibility distance levels.

Reducing the visibility step by step from right to left you won't get any correct indication of the distances you have selected. I do not know for sure but if I should hazard a guess I'd say that in the US edition you will not encounter this bug. This is not a big deal, but it is certainly a sloppy way of coding.

Glitches galore? Admittedly YES, but the good news is that I have not yet discovered any issues that seriously affect flight. Some glitches of the former version have indeed been hammered out, such as the jumping graphics engine in spot plane view; the de-centered trim indicator after loading an aircraft; the exaggerated size of the moon; clouds being displayed as flat sprites as soon as any text is displayed on the screen, to mention only a few. I firmly believe it is a matter of fair play to point this out, too. To make it quite clear, I have no serious objections to the new version, although it is far from being perfect. Within the long history of MS Flight Simulators this latest version of the granddaddy flightsim of all time is one of the best anyway. O.K., now for some of the positive stuff.

Improvements:
1. The size of the moon has been corrected. When nearing the horizon, the moon is now about half the size of the FS2002 moon, I guess.
2. The position of the trim tab control indicator is dang-near neutral now after loading another aircraft.

3. On fast machines there seem to be no sudden jumps in spotplane view any longer.

4. The default effect of reverse thrust for the jets is still too little, but can easily be modified in the aircraft.cfg files of the jet aircraft now. By the way, turning the nose wheel while doing a standing reverse has no effect. Such a feature should be implemented in the next version. That really would be something!

5. Am I dreaming? No more obtrusive purple spots in snow and cloud textures like in FS2000 and FS2002. During winter runways have textures with pretty realistic snow marks, but they do not show wet surfaces during or after rainfall. Special features like thunder, rain, snow, and lightning are amazing now. The volumetric clouds and dynamic weather are simply stupefying, which is due to a large variety of colors and of diverse atmospheric impressions. Eye candy is the name of the game. Congratulations on a fine job!

This multiple screen shot shows add-on aircraft from Milton Shupe, Roy Chaffin and Bill Rambow and their teams.

6. No wrong syntax in the panel.cfg files any longer: the invalid command window_size_ratio= has finally been replaced by the correct spelling windowsize_ratio= . Wow!

7. The type 295 and 500 versions of the new Garmin GPS are really a big improvement over the former generic GPS in FS2000 / FS2002, which had come out without adapting to night coloring. If you use panels that still have the old GPS in their panel.cfg file, FS2004 is intelligent enough to automatically replace it by the new Garmin 295 GPSMAP (fs9gps!gps_295.xml). The x-size will not be fitting, though, and so you had better correct the panel.cfg file of the aircraft.

Feverishly Fiddling Again
Now, after all this I think it is high time to go into details and to see what can be done about some of these minor issues. So far I have concentrated on three of them:

1. The Lear 45 Radio Stack
In my latest article I complained about bad readability of the Lear 45 radio stack in FS2004. Almost everybody has this, but to my mind the issue has never been addressed before, which is quite surprising as it is an old carryover flaw from FS2002. After weeks I luckily managed to fix this problem by cracking the hex code of the multi-gauge file and mainly by replacing the default dim and pale green color by an intensive light green color, which provides crystal-clear clarity now.

2. The Boeing 737-400 Reverser Unlocked Warning Lights
Since the early days of FS98 the reverser warning lights in the B737-400 panel do not light up although the necessary gauges are there. In FS2000, FS2002 and FS2004 MS have stubbornly kept up this queer tradition. The 737-400!Reverser Unlocked Left and 737-400!Reverser Unlocked Right gauges are in fact integrated in the 737-400.gau multi-gauge, and the resource bitmaps both in 640 and 1024 res are there, too, but due to some sloppy coding they once again do not come to life.
As an extremely good temporary workaround the old FPDA_737_Reverser_Warning.gau can be included in the panel.cfg. Although this gauge was originally designed for FS98, it basically works with FS2004, but with its low resolution of the resource bitmap largely lacks sharpness. That's why I completely modified the display bitmap to better meet today's needs. At dusk and night time it now also dims like the other warning indicators, e.g. like the low pressure lights. Anyway, how to fix this glitch and make the FPDA gauge work in FS2004 is basically the same as for FS2002. Don't forget to download this gauge and copy it into the Flight Simulator 9\Gauges folder, otherwise you will not see any change at all. Remember that in FS2004 Microsoft now also allows gauge files to be located individually in the aircraft's panel folder (both in the .gau and .xml format). So what I am still working on how to basically hammer out this bug, but as the default cluster gauge is a 2.5MB "old" style gauge with a .gau extension containing multiple individual gauges, this has turned out to be pretty difficult so far. Maybe it is even completely beyond the scope of my skills. Yet I hope that patience will put me back on track, and then I will report on my findings here later.

3. Reverse Thrust
The effect of reverse thrust for the default jet planes seems to be a bit too small again. I say this although I am well aware that in real life reverse thrust adds only a small proportion to the overall braking power that is necessary to come to a halt. Thanks to the MS development team it has become much easier now to modify the effect of the thrust reversers as they have implemented a new command line in the aircraft.cfg files of the jets:

[GeneralEngineData]

;min_throttle_limit= -0.25 //default value
min_throttle_limit= -0.30 //modified value for B737, B747, B777, Lear 45, King Air 350

Note that in the first line I have already deactivated the default command by a semicolon right at the beginning of the line. The bottom line for the modification was to find a slightly higher value that just enables the jets to do a standing reverse. Technically they can do so in real flight, so I think they should be able to do that in FS as well. However, I know that in most cases real pilots do not make use of too much reverse thrust because of various good reasons. If you think reverse thrust is O.K. by default, feel free to leave it as it is. Those of you who still operate FS2002 and want to learn how to increase reverse thrust for this version, go ahead and learn more about it here. Besides, you will find that after shutting down reverse again, the King Air 350 makes a jumping start forward at a max speed of 38 kts. To avoid this just put on the brakes when you deactivate reverse. You may download an animated PowerPoint presentation (7.8MB) for a better understanding of how to deal with the thrust reverser issue.

4. The Panel Pinkmania
Heck! It's still there, the pinkish glow that more or less covers several cockpit panels at dusk and night time. It may just be a matter of personal dislike, but if you are like me and want to lend the cockpits slightly different night lighting characteristics, click right here to read more about it. If you are not really familiar with panel editing, you can get more information here, because in the interest of not turning this into a book I won't enter into this stuff in today's article.

5. The Boeing747-400 EICAS
In a certain analogy to the Lear 45 radio stack fix (see above) I have found a cure for another little but nagging glitch. Like in its stunning predecessor, the Boeing 747-400 EICAS in FS2004 lacks good readability of the reverse thrust indicators on my ordinary CRT monitor. This just bothered me a bit, especially considering the fact that the default B777-300 reverser warning indicators are displayed excellently. The screen shot shows that there are some other minor flaws in the EICAS display (highlighted in yellow), which are a strange phenomenon, as they only seem to occur in 1024x768 window mode. Maybe not everybody has this FS2002 carryover flaw. It is caused by the Boeing747-400.cab, which is a cluster gauge in the Windows .cab format, containing the newer .xml gauges (industry standard format). This is quite enjoyable because it is easier to edit and modify gauges coded in this format, as we no longer need the programming tools required to create Windows .dll files. The second screen shot on the right reveals what the EICAS looks like after the modification of the EICAS Display.xml gauge.
And here is how you can modify the EICAS. Go to the Flight Simulator 9\Gauges folder and make a backup of the Boeing747-400.cab file first. Create a folder structure such as D:\WORKSHOP\BOEING747-400\ . Then copy the original cab file into the folder D:\WORKSHOP. Open the Boeing747-400.cab file with the help of WinZip 8.1 (note that older versions can't extract .cab files if I remember right), and extract it into D:\WORKSHOP\BOEING747-400\ . Among all the extracted files you will find one which is called EICAS DISPLAY.XML (46KB, 12.6.2003, 20:18). Assuming that you have MS Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher installed on your system, double click on the .xml file and you'll see the internal hierarchical structure of this gauge file as shown in the following screen shots. I have already modified the entries highlighted in green.

Apart from these changes above the string %((A:General eng1 throttle lever position, part) s1 0 <)%{if}REV%{endif} you must do the same changes at three other lines (not shown in the screen shots here). So go and search

%((A:General eng2 throttle lever position, part) s1 0 <)%{if}REV%{endif} and %((A:General eng3 throttle lever position, part) s1 0 <)%{if}REV%{endif} and %((A:General eng4 throttle lever position, part) s1 0 <)%{if}REV%{endif} and perform the same changes as shown in the second screen shot. To modify entries go to the menu VIEWS / EDIT SOURCE CODE first and then overwrite the default values. You can also directly edit an .xml based gauge file by MS Notepad if you think this is less complicated for you to do. Basically these .xml files are just simple text files such as the .cfg files.

The third screen shot denotes the changes you must make in order to fix the minor glitch at the bottom of the EICAS display. After doing all this don't forget to save the changes and shut down MS Internet Explorer. It is a good idea to do all this work while you are offline. From the new date you can see that the default Eicas Display.xml file has been overwritten by the modified one.

So far not bad, right? However, there is some more work to do. The next thing is to compress the whole Boeing747-400 folder into a cab file again. For that you need a self-extracting tool called Cabfile_SDK.exe, which MS offers for download from their official SDK page. It's best to extract the cabfile_sdk.exe into your WORKSHOP folder. After that you should have a cabdir.exe and a cabdir.doc in this folder, which tells you how to use the tool. Then follow the instructions given in the Word document. If everything goes right, you will now have a file called Boeing747-400.cab in your Workshop folder, which you copy into the Flight Simulator 9\Gauges\ folder then. Boot up Flight Simulator, load the Boeing747-400, and you will have the EICAS as it should be by default.

Note: It shouldn't hurt your computer but if you imagine it has, we accept no liability. This goes for all modifications that have been made with the default Boeing747-400.cab file.

This procedure is for free and there will be no complications hereafter. On the other hand, editing and modifying .xml format gauges is also possible and perhaps even more convenient by using FS Panel Studio, which I think is well known to most simmers. In various responses to my former articles where I had referred to this software I was repeatedly asked if it is really worth buying. Well, my answer today is definitely YES, but I would recommend this software even more ethusiastically if it weren't for two trouble spots: the first thing you must know is that FS Panel Studio cannot handle and modify the behaviour of the old-style .gau based gauges, i.e. you can only edit and change the appearance of bitmaps contained in this type of gauge. This means, for example, that FS Panel Studio could not be of any help for me when I tried to improve the Lear 45 Radio Stack of FS2004 (and FS2002 / FS2000 alike). Admittedly there isn't any program on the market that can do this. So be sure what you expect the program to do for you. It is certainly a good idea to first download a free and very detailed 120+ page Adobe PDF format manual from their web site (7.5MB), which gives you a superb survey of what this program can achieve.

When it comes to buying this software online, I can't help getting the feeling that there are some tricky implications in the registration process and I cannot exclude that it provides a security risk for the end-user who pays the software via credit card. Having to fill in lots of (partly unnecessary) personal data, and what is more, plus the additional card verification number from the signature line on the backside of your card, is nothing that I feel comfortable with. Less is more! It's a pity that many possible consumers may hesitate buying products as good as this because they naturally shrink back from accepting such procedures or terms of use. So, personally, I would prefer to go to my local dealer and buy the CD edition there if this were possible.

My System Specs:
Intel PIII 1.0 GHz
FSB 133 MHz
VIA chipset Apollo Pro 133A
384 megs of SD-Ram PC-133
ASUS AGP-V7700 32MB (nVidia GeForce2 GTS) video card
Creative SB PCI 128 (WDM) onboard
DirectX v8.0a
WinME v4.90, Build 3000

That's all there is to it. I know it's but catching a little fish, but it's great fun to see it done. I have thoroughly tested the EICAS fix and the other small fixes for FS2002 / FS2004 on my system, but as usual I say you may use them at your own risk. If you run into unexpectedly negative results (which I honestly do not believe), just install the original default Boeing747-400.cab file again, re-boot and fire up FS2004 again. If you are like me, you will perform the changes yourself. For those of you who want to save time, down at the bottom are the links to download the modified FS2002 and FS2004 cluster gauges, which have been customized for each version of Flight Simulator and are available only here on FlightSim.Com. Please do not ask me to send the files via email, as they are at least 3 MB each. To download them you may have to log in to FlightSim.Com first. You can follow this member login hyperlink and register as a user, which is free of any charge. So go and get registered, and, first of all, enjoy new flightsim moments in Flight Simulator 2004 ACOF. And I bet you will, because despite some nagging glitches and slightly ahead of our current computer systems, this version is truly amazing and enjoyable.

Ulrich Klein
huki.klein@t-online.de