This FAQ is obsolete. Please visit the Visual Flight Forums for up to date information.

Disclaimer. This FAQ is not intended to replace the official technical support information available from Just Flight, and as such it will not provide a complete range of support information. Please see SUPPORT for details of how to obtain technical support.

Image quality

How can I brighten up the colours?

It is unfortunate that the VFR Photographic Scenery was released during the UK winter, as FS2002 is particularly poor at handling the lighting conditions for this season. In particular it doesn't take account of the ability of the human eye and brain to compensate for differences in ambient lighting and colour temperature, and as a result many people find the scenery in FS2002 drab and dreary during the winter.

FS2002 also seems to make darkness arrive far to early in the run-up to evening. This is particularly noticeable during the long mid-summer evenings, which are not accurately represented by the lighting in FS2002.

Unfortunately we can't change the way FS2002 handles time of day and season. To see the VFR Photographic Scenery at its best, try changing the season to Summer, and the time of day to noon.

Screenshots

How do I take a screenshot?

If you need to take a screenshot, the easiest way is just to hit the Print Scrn key when you're running Flight Simulator.  This puts the screenshot into the Windows clipboard. When you're out of Flight Simulator, you can Edit, Paste the screenshot from the clipboard into a graphics program, e.g. Paint. From there you can save it to a file.  It is best to save as a JPEG file to cut down on the file size.

You can only do a single screenshot at a time with this method, but it does have the advantage that you don't need any additional programs to do it.  However, if you're interested in taking many screenshots and want to simplify the process, you can find many add-on programs to allow you to do this. Look in any of the main flight sim web sites  (e.g. www.avsim.com or www.flightsim.com) for dedicated screenshot utilities.  You can usually find what you need by searching for "screenshot" in the file library.

Once you've virus-checked and installed the screenshot program, just follow the instructions included.

Important: If you're taking the screenshots for diagnostic purposes, e.g. in response to a support request, you should press Shift-Z to display the on-screen co-ordinates prior to taking the screenshot.

Whichever method choose, be careful not to send the screenshot via email without checking the file size. Large file attachments may not be welcomed by the recipients.

Choose to save the screenshots as JPG files wherever possible to cut down the file size, and if necessary, use an image editor program to crop the image to a smaller size. Alternatively switch FS2002 to a lower resolution before taking the screenshot.

Please note: there are so many different screenshot programs available that it would be unfair of us to recommend any in particular, and similarly we are unable to vouch that any program you choose to download will work properly.

Setup issues

What is the Terrain Adjuster tool?

It's a tool provided with VFR Photographic Scenery which allows you to alter the number of photographic textures pre-loaded by FS2002 in the vicinity of your aircraft.

Why do I need the Terrain Adjuster?

You might need to increase the value set by Terrain Adjuster if you are getting occasions when the scenery in the vicinity of the aircraft appears out of focus.

By pre-loading the scenery at a greater distance from the aircraft, you can increase the chances that it will have loaded the highest resolution version of the scenery textures by the time you pass over.

Where do I find Terrain Adjuster?

From the Windows Start menu, choose Programs, Just Flight, VFR Photographic Scenery, Terrain Adjuster.

How do I know the best value to set in Terrain Adjuster?

Normally, you should use the lowest value you can consistent with the textures consistently loading at maximum resolution.  Increasing the value increases the time it takes the scenery to load, and could also cause performance problems if your system is unable to cope with the larger values.

If you generally fly at higher altitudes, you may wish to use the largest value, as this will increase the distance at which you can see the photographic scenery. Be aware that this will significantly increase scenery load times though.

Performance issues

Why does the indicator bar stop at 36% when loading the scenery ?

The indicator bar indicates the percentage of load tasks completed, rather than percentage of elapsed time. When it gets to around 36%, it starts the task of loading the photographic textures. Because of the sheer number of textures, the task of loading them takes much longer than with the default scenery (which has a very small number of generic textures, rather than all the individual texture files contained in the photographic scenery).

Once the photographic textures have finished loading (at around 40%), all the remainig tasks are relatively quick, so the final 60% usually zips by.

Why does the scenery sometimes suddenly pop into focus?

See the questions about the Terrain Adjuster Tool in Setup issues above. This explains what the tool does, where to find it, how to use it, why it may be necessary, and how it works.

Apart from this, you should ensure that you have the latest official supported drivers for your graphics card. If you are still having problems, try reading the advice in the manual for users of lower specification systems - even if you have a higher performance system. Once you have established a base performance via this route, you can always build back up to your ideal settings, noting anything which causes a deterioration in performance as you do so.

Installation issues

I'm getting "Access to the specified device, path or file is denied" during installation.

Some Windows 2000 users may get a message box saying "Access to the specified device, path or file is denied" appearing shortly after changing to disk 2 and disk 3 during installation.

Although it may appear serious, you can just click OK or Cancel at any time to close the message box and your installation will not be affected in any way.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.