Landing our Aircraft as smoothly as possible is usually one of our challenges in Flight Simulation. Viewing the aircraft we just landed at a distance or from the Tower sliding perfectly and flawlessly through the runway really gives us a good feeling.
TwrViw2K2 is a Windows 9x/ME FS2002 utility program that enables you to position your Tower easily at strategic points during Aircraft landings so you can view it from a distance in your likings. Hence, during replay mode, you can view your Aircraft in Tower View mode at positions and angles where you can clearly see or view the Aircraft on its landing approach. FS defaults its tower location to the airport of origin hence landing the aircraft on another airport gives you a small or no aircraft if viewed from the Tower and even if landing back to the airport of origin we sometimes get frustrated viewing our landings from the tower because the view of the aircraft is either too small, obstructed by airport buildings or either totally cannot be seen, and its because the Tower is not on a vantage point you like and you could not easily relocate it, but with twrView2K2 you can now easily do this.
Although you can transfer you're Tower in FS2002 by dragging the tower using a mouse on the Map Window, or entering the location (Latitude and Longitude) where you want the Tower to be located, this would be tedious during long flights or replaying and viewing your landing sortie many times on different angles.
TwrView2K2 simplifies this process and lets you position the Tower for viewing at strategic points from your landing point easily and quickly, so you can view your aircraft and enables you to rate yourself how well you landed your aircraft.
INSTALLATION/OPERATION
Uninstall previous twrView programs if installed. Unzip "twrVw2k2.zip" to any directory and run setup. You will need the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime library, which is not included in the pack to run this program. Though maybe without knowing it, you may have these files already installed in your system, so check first, but if not, you can easily download these files from any reputable Flight Sim sites or from Microsoft.
You will also need to have Pete Dowson's FSUIPC.dll installed at FS2002 modules directory.
Below is a list of VB6 runtime files needed, so try checking first if these files are already installed in your system by using [Start-Find- Files/Folders], before downloading these files from the Internet. These files are usually located at the "Windows/System" directory.
After installing, you can run twrVw2K2 before or after running FS2002. To run twrView2K2, Go to [Start] then [Programs] and click twrView2K2. If you wish you may create a shortcut to the desktop by dragging the twrView2K2 icon to the desktop.
Once loaded and FS2002 already running, the twrView2K2 setup screen can be activated at FS2002's "Options" popup menu (last item) or by pressing Alt-T.
The twrView2K2 setup screen has six frames where you can configure the parameters related to your viewing in Tower View mode and a Menu bar with two menu items. Please see twrView2K2.doc for more details.
To uninstall twrVw21 from your computer, use the normal method of uninstalling Windows programs at [Control Panel]-[Add/Remove Programs] and then select twrView2K2.
Important : TwrView2k2 automatically positions the tower as specified in the setup window only during landings. During landing, twrView2K2 calculates the landing point of the aircraft as bases for the location of the tower, and hence you can repeat your landing replay as many times as you want using the different angles of view for that particular landing. To continue the same flight be sure to reset twrView2K2 at the [twrView] menu and click [Reset]. This will only be necessary if continuing the same flight such as taking off again but won't be necessary if you will be selecting another flight, airport or aircraft in FS2002.
NOTES - TECHNICAL/CREDITS
This is my release of the TowerView series for FS2002. Though released very late, I still hope this would still be of use to simmers out there.
History:
My first twrView program was for FS98, which used Cor Dickland's FS98Class to interface with FS98. In FS2000, I found that some functions of FS98Class would not function properly in FS2000 and seems unstable, hence I have to get away with it when developing twrVw2k and so I developed my own interface for FS2000. This interface was based on Adam Szofrans' C skeleton client and catered only to the minimum parameters twrVw2K needed from FS2000. TwrVw21 then uses Peter Dowsons FSUIPC and his SDK which greatly helped me a lot on the Interface to the FS2000.
Same as my last release (TwrVw21), twrView2K2 uses Pete Dowson's FSUIPC and developed using his SDK. The VB FSUIPC client code comes from Chris Brett. Still, this program was developed using VB6 for this is what I'm most comfortable with. Desawares' SpyWorks was used to subclass FS2002.
I would also like to mention and thank Ed Williams for his Aviation Formulas I got from the Internet and used to compute the location (latitude and longitude) of the tower.
Again this program was developed only during my spare time, but I would still try to be of help should any problems or bugs are encountered.
This program was tested on my Windows ME, AMD 450 3DNow, 128 MB computer with a Matrox MGA200 AGP display adapter. Though I think the faster your computer, the bigger the memory and a better graphics card, the better the quality of the simulation will be.
