Welcome to the world of Flight Simulator X missions. Over the next few weeks, you're going to learn how to build your own missions. As a bonus, we're going to give you some great insider tips that aren't well known in the FS community.
Let's get started. We need to prepare some things before we start, so mission creation becomes a breeze. Flight Simulator X comes with it's on mission creation tool - the so called 'object placement tool'. We need to do some preparation so we can use the object placement tool.
Step 1: Install the Flight Simulator X SDK
The object placement tool comes with the SDK. You can find the SDK on your FSX DVD (you need the pro version, you cannot create your own missions with the standard version). If you own FSX Acceleration you need to install the SDK from that disk.
The SDK needs to match your FSX install, i.e., if you have FSX SP2 installed, you need the FSX SDK SP2. This is important!
Step 2: Enable the Object Placement Tool
You create missions directly in Flight Simulator X, but you need to enable the object placement tool first.
Open "dll.xml" in "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\FSX\Controls\" for XP or "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX\Controls\" for Vista.
Add this code:
If the object placement tool doesn't show, you need to make sure you have the correct version of the SDK installed and the path in the dll.xml is correct.
This video shows you how to do it (and there is a little extra trick):
Step 3: Enable Mission Debugging (optional)
This video shows a little trick that will help you discover hard to find bugs in your mission. Very useful.
That's it - you're all set. In the next tutorial, we're going to create our first mission!
Christian Stock
