Here's a starter collection of hints and tips particularly aimed at the VFR Photographic Scenery user. Check the FAQs for more information, and please keep your eye on the Visual Flight Forums, particularly Hints & Tips for up-to-date information.

• Forum: Hints & Tips

VFR Map Reading

Now that true VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flight in FS2002 is possible for the first time ever, you may find that navigating by what you can see out of the cockpit is not as easy as you might at first think.

The ever productive John Woodside has produced an excellent guide to VFR Map Reading in FS2002.  Don't forget to visit his homepage, www.fsaviation.net .

Winter Blues?

FS2002 makes the UK look drab and dreary, even with the default scenery. Try brightening your life with a mid-day trip in the height of summer instead.

Water Effects

If you suddenly find that you've lost your water effects in FS2002 and can't re-enable them, you may be surprised to know that you actually need to enable three things in your FS2002 settings for them to come into effect:

1. The water effects themselves
2. Terrain Detail Textures
3. Multi-Texturing

If you have any of these turned off, possibly as a result of changing your settings after installing VFR Photographic Scenery, you won't see the water effects.

NB.  With some graphics cards, if you have anti-aliasing AND multi-texturing enabled, you may get a halving of your frame rate. This is due to the graphics card not having enough texturing pipelines to be able to process the textures in one pass.  Adding a second pass effectively halves the frame rate.  The solution is to decide which of anti-aliasing or multi-texturing is more important to you, or upgrade to a more capable graphics card if that's within your budget.

Multiple FS2002 Configurations

If you've every found yourself wanting different configurations of FS2002 for different situations, e.g. one set of settings for VFR Photographic Scenery, and one for other scenery, or maybe a different settings for different users on the same PC, here's a quick and easy solution (but only if you're confident with file copying and renaming in Windows).

1. Make sure FS2002 is not running.
2. Find the main FS2002 program, FS2002.exe.
3. Make a copy of it, and rename it, e.g. to MyFS2002.exe.
4. Do the same for FS2002.cfg, making sure the first part of the file name is identical to that which you used for the executable, e.g. MyFS2002.cfg.

Now you can run each executable at different times, and any settings changes you make for each will be kept separate.

To make things even more convenient, you can add shortcuts for the different versions of FS2002.exe to your Desktop.

Note 1: This only keeps the main FS2002 settings separately. For example, it doesn't keep separate copies of the Scenery Library.

Note 2: You can achieve the same result by creating separate shortcuts to FS2002.exe, with different command line options specifying different configuration files.

Resetting FS2002 Options

If you want to quickly reset FS2002's options, you can do this by renaming FS2002.cfg, e.g. to FS2002.cfg_save.

• While FS2002 is not running, rename FS2002.cfg. When you start up FS2002, it will create a new version of FS2002.cfg and all the main settings will be reset.

NB. Don't use this trick unless you are confident you can restore your original FS2002.cfg if necessary. No support will be given and no liability, express or implied will be accepted.

If you want to revert to your previous settings, rename the newly created FS2002.cfg, e.g. to FS2002.cfg.new, then rename the original FS2002.cfg (e.g. FS2002.cfg.save) back to FS2002.cfg.

More Hints & Tips

You can find more hints and tips in the Hints and Tips section of the Visual Flight Forums.