Gentlemen: I'm a newbie to FS (FS2004 in particular). I have a lot of experience with MS's Train Sim, but I find FS quite different when it comes to adding/changing scenery, changing airport layouts and otherwise 'messing' with it. I guess 'customizing' would be the proper term. Anyway, I was hoping to find a section in the Forum or someplace decicated to newbies which would tell me/us how to do things or where to go to learn how to do the simple and basic tasks that are second nature to you who are experienced with the program. Maybe I haven't looked in the right places yet, but I haven't found anything like that. What I would like to do is to make my home town airport in MD look more realistic (it's pretty basic now) by adding structures, surrounding scenery, static parked acft, airport signage, navaids, etc., and would like to learn how to do all that. Are there any tutorials I can turn to, or can anyone point me in the right direction to learn how to do these things? Specific questions I have right now are...where can I find structures like buildings/houses/hangars, etc. (what is is the FS program seems pretty sparse) and how do I add them; how do you plant static parked acft on a ramp; how do I install navaids like NDB's, VOR's & ILSs; can I add roads where they don't exist in the default FS9? Pretty basic stuff I must admit, but everyone has to start at the beginning. Would appreciate some help to get started. :-zhelpJon B: another :-newbie

> Specific questions I have right now are...where can I find>structures like buildings/houses/hangars, etc. (what is is the>FS program seems pretty sparse) and how do I add them; how do>you plant static parked acft on a ramp; how do I install>navaids like NDB's, VOR's & ILSs; can I add roads where they>don't exist in the default FS9? Pretty basic stuff I must>admit, but everyone has to start at the beginning. Hi Jon,You can search the library here for your home town airport. Choose the FS2004 Scenery library from the dropdown and search it for your keyword. You might just get lucky and somebody has uploaded just what you are looking for. These downloads usually contain a readme.txt that explains how to install it. Installation of these addon files are almost always easy, say, a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. The other part about adding things to your own airport is somewhat more complex and I don't have much to offer directly, you just need to mess with it and ask specific questions when they arise. I have done some tweaking using AFCAD to put some parking places here and there, but that's about it. Search the FS2004 library for "afcad221.zip" and play around with it. The program is intuitive and with it you can add markers, beacons, ILS, etc. as well as adjust parking and taxiways and some other stuff. There are also some pay-for commercial programs available that you can use to put some cows and chickens and stuff on the runway if you are into that sort of thing. They just clog my turbines so I don't mess with them. You might also try the Scenery design forum for help.Hope this starts to answer your questions.Dolph

You might wish to look at this scenery program which you can visually add objects while fs2004 is running. Move them around using keys right on the fs2004 terrain in the sim. This is a lot earier than doing it from scratch or using some other scenery editor which you must save and then run fs2004 to test after changes.Instant Sceneryhttp://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=instscenYou can add more than just some cows and chickens ;-)

Thanks for the response gents, at least they give me a starting point. Hope the learning curve isn't too tough here. In the train sim forum they started some 'how to' partitions and it proved to be a great help to newbies. But for the FS it seems that everything is 'ala carte! You have to dig it out for yourself. I'll give your suggestions a try. Thanks again! :-wave Jon B

Here's a link for you Jon, just click on Design in the left column and you should be on your way!The Scenery Hall of Fame -> http://www.scenery.org/Default.htm

Check out the Scenery Design Forum, specifically:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=23298&page=

It rather depends how much time you want to spend on actually flying or indeed on eating and sleeping, but the freeware RWY12 Object Placer enables you to add a range of objects to your airports.Search for rwy12_program_v1.2.zip in the Avsim library for the basic program and files and for RWY12 in FS 2004 for "sceneries" other people have already set up.A quick Google finds this site http://www.rwy12.com which looks pretty new but has support forums etc.I have tried RWY12 a couple of times with I have to admit mixed results - but that may say more about me than RWY12.This is a payware equivalent if you are really keen!http://www.avsim.com/pages/0206/EZ/EZ.htm