It took a bit of experimenting, but I finally managed to regain glass reflections in FS9!I set the material to 75% opacity, added 70 specular highlighting, and applied a texture bitmap (soft gold) with alpha channel set to 136,136,136.Here is the result in FS9...BillAVSIM OmbudsmanFounder and Director,Creative Recycling of Aircraft Partshttp://catholic-hymns.com/frbill/FS2002/images/fartslogo.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26910.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26911.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26912.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26913.jpg

Great job....Looks fantastic... Are you going to apply this to the 400a?Having asked that, specular lighting and reflective glass are two approaches for the effect, but reflective glass edges out specular lighting under some circumstances. They don't look the same, and you can have specular lighting without enabling reflections on A/C... My released Microlight employs a similar technique for the glass, although it would have looked better if I had more polys in the canopy. And my soon to be released update of Chuck Dome's Mirage (he provided the source so I could tinker with the dynamic shine, but I ended up tinkering with a lot more) uses specular lighting and reflective glass. You can really see a difference when reflections are enabled, vs. the effect the specular lighting shows alone.I don't want Microsoft to feel fooled that reflective glass works. It doesn't work in the capacity it did in FS2002. I consider that a bug worthy of a patch. Specular highlighting, which worked in FS2002, still works. But reflective glass doesn't. Thank heavens for developers like you who feel it worthwhile to tinker and update and find workarounds--again, fantastic job. But I think many freeware developers simply won't have the time to retool their work because Microsoft omitted functionality. -John Edit: I forgot to mention, some users are reporting that cowl flaps aren't working on prop third party aircraft. Gives more weight to the suggestion that Microsoft changed a part naming convention, vs. them being available on props only.

>Great job....Looks fantastic... Are you going to apply this>to the 400a?Er, count the windows John... That is the Beechjet 400A... :)Attached is the Hawker 400XP, complete with one less window on each side.>You can really see a difference when>reflections are enabled, vs. the effect the specular lighting>shows alone.Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. These pictures are showing both reflective texture (bitmap w/alpha) and specular lighting (aka: dynamic shine). What MS did was "fiddle" with the apha channel repsponsiveness. We can no longer use really, really dark - almost black - alpha channel bitmaps.>Edit: I forgot to mention, some users are reporting that cowl>flaps aren't working on prop third party aircraft. Gives more>weight to the suggestion that Microsoft changed a part naming>convention, vs. them being available on props only.I know that cowl flaps work on the Mooney, but of course have no way of knowing if MS changed the partname needed in the .mdl file... :(BillAVSIM OmbudsmanFounder and Director,Creative Recycling of Aircraft Partshttp://catholic-hymns.com/frbill/FS2002/images/fartslogo.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26932.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/26933.jpg

>Edit: I forgot to mention, some users are reporting that cowl>flaps aren't working on prop third party aircraft. Gives more>weight to the suggestion that Microsoft changed a part naming>convention, vs. them being available on props only.This is a wild guess, but MS have changed the airfile parameters a bit, which seems to affect some add-on aircraft, but not others. Maybe a change in the FDE/aircraft.cfg would get your cowl flaps to animate again?Cheers,Gosta.http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg

Hey Bill,looks great!!Keep it going. I REALLY hope I some day will get into aircraft design. *drool* *:-*Rgds,Etienne :-wave