I wish that I had known all of the following before I began "building" planes for my FS2002 Pro flight simulator. It took me about one year to completely build my first plane from scratch (no bought or downloaded planes). The most time consuming part is not the actual function of picking the plane and building but the enormous time required to learn all of the software required to do a proper job.
Now to the hard part. I had absolutely no experience with the following software that I ended up using to build my planes. There is software that you must purchase and that which is free by down loading from the internet. They all require learning. The list of the software is quite long and not all of it is absolutely mandatory but some certainly makes the job completion smoother and quicker.
I would like to start by saying that the intent is to produce one of two types of final files that the flight simulator understands and uses. The first type of file is a ****.bgl file which is for landscapes and scenery in the flight simulator. The easiest classification for this type of file is that it pertains to stationary objects in longitude and latitude. The second type of file is the ****.mdl file which is for objects in motion throughout all of the latitudes and longitudes.... like airplanes. To do this we must first create "wire frame" models of our objects in 3D (three dimensions). There was some free software included in my FS2002 Pro package for doing this. It is called "gmax.exe". I do not recommend using gmax in that you probably have to be an expert in CAD to use it. It is very good (I am told) but there are no instructions on how to use it. When you go on the internet to obtain tutorials for gmax, they are so poorly written that you already have to be an expert to understand them (like a CAD expert). I am reminded of a story I tell my wife. If you go to Pittsburgh and get lost and ask for directions you get something like this. "Well you just go down to aunt Minnies house and turn right and then you go down to where the Grover Cleveland school use to be and turn left and then .......". They are assuming you know Pittsburgh as well as they do and they produce lousy instructions. Well written instuctions for how to use software are a rare commodity these days. If you are an expert in CAD, opt for gmax.
I purchased a program from AbacusPub.com called FSDS V2 (Flight Simulator Design Studio). It will do what gmax will do with a whole lot easier learning curve. FSDS has some things (like standard animation parts) that gmax does not and the tutorials that you can obtain on the internet are much more useable. There are many tricks that you will have to learn but you will probably learn them faster with FSDS. So much for creating wire frame objects for .bgl or .mdl. FSDS will compile your work projects to .mdl or .bgl files.
Once you create your objects you will want to "paint" them. The technical terms for this is to apply a "texture" or a "material" within FSDS. To create a texture you must use other software. I purchased CorelDraw 9 because it was no longer being produced and was relatively cheap but works. Along with the CorelDraw 9 came Corel-Photo-Paint 9 which is also useful. CorelDraw is "vector" based software and Corel-Photo-Paint is "bitmap" based software. It is much easier to create your textures in the vector based software and then convert it to bitmap format and all of this can be done within CorelDraw. There are a lot of tricks to learn here also. The Photo-Paint software is useful for editing bitmaps. FSDS imports your outside bitmap texture files and allows you to apply them to your wire frame model parts, i.e. more learning. Learning FSDS and CorelDraw were about equally time consuming and will take months.
The next piece of software is free and almost everyone knows how to use it. It is "Notepad" which comes with every version of Windows. There are three files in each airplane version for FS2002 (and others) which can easily be edited with Notepad. The three files are "aircraft.cfg", "panel.cfg" and "sound.cfg". It is fairly easy to use Notepad on the aircraft.cfg file but using it on the other two config files is not as easy. It becomes tedious in the extreme to use Notepad on the panel.cfg and sound.cfg files because there is a lot of trial and error with putting airplane gauges in the cockpit of your model and adjusting sound files. You find in the config file where you want to make a change, you make the change, you save the config file. You then start up the flight simulator and load a fresh copy of the airplane that you are making into the simulator in order for the changes to take place from the edited config file. You test the changes. Because of trial and error you can literally end up doing this cycle hundreds of times to get the results you want. I ended up purchasing two more pieces of software because of these frustrations.
I purchased two kinds of software from what turned out to be the same vendor called FSPanelStudio (www.fspanelstudio.com) and FSSoundStudio (www.fssoundstudio.com). FSPS turned out to be marvelous and shortens the time to make all sorts of panels (2D panels and 3D virtual cockpit panels) without nearly as much trial and error work. The virtual cockpit 3D panel still requires trial and error but not as much. The 2D panel requires nearly zero trial and error work. The FSSS package is for making sound.cfg files (should you be interested in doing this.....not all people will be). This is again excellent software but does require yet another additional free software package if you want to create your own sounds from scratch or by editing current sound files. The additional free software for sound creation and editing is Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Big news, there is more learning involved and more time consumption.
Now I am just going to list additional free software that will be useful for other purposes when making your aircraft projects. The first category is software for making specialized types of texture file formats that are useful for making refective surfaces, transparent textures, etc.. These are:
imagetool.exe........came free with FS2002
DXTBmp.exe...........can be downloaded from www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/
DXTbmp is especially good and rather comprehensive. But guess what.....more learning.
AirEd.exe............AirEd.zip can be downloaded from www.simradar.com/file/developer_tools/
AirEd can edit and recompile the "aircraft.air" file in the folder of your flight simulator aircraft directly without using aircraft.cfg. It is the most powerful aircraft editor so be careful.
FSEdit.exe...........comes free with FS2002
FSEdit is probably an easier way to change your aircraft.cfg file than is Notepad since it will also recompile your aircraft.air file after the changes. FSEdit also presents the aircraft.cfg data in a more organized fashion. Searching through aircraft.cfg files with Notepad is time consuming. FSEdit does not allow you to edit all of the options that are actually in your aircraft.cfg file so you will have to use Notepad sometimes.
The order is this, AirEd will edit more things than Notepad which edits more things than FSEdit.
cabarc.exe...........comes free with Windows XP
Cabarc.exe will create CAB files in which XML gauge files are stored. XML (extended markup language) files were new to FS2002 and subsequently FS2004. These types of gauge files are much easier to edit/create and do not require C++ programming knowledge as did the older ****.gau files. I much prefer these XML type of gauge files for my aircraft.
Now last and certainly least is the free XMLMind_XML_Editor (xxe.exe for short). This can be used to create or edit XML files but you may also easily do this in Notepad. This free software can be had from www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor. I cannot say that I recommend this editor in that it is very difficult to learn how to use it.
Hope all of this does not scare the hell out of you. This is just an outline for the entire path that you may have to go through to build your own flight simulator aircraft.
