Creating planes for Micro Flight

All of these vehicles have intrument panels which share the same format and are documented in the following sections.

	Plane Tutorial Main Page		Airplanes		Hang gliders
	Gyroplanes		Balloons		Helicopters
	Land vehicles		Instrument panels		Weapons

Each of these vehicles requires use of a standard text editor for editing the configuration files, and also a 3D modelling software such as 3D studio or 3D studio MAX for creating a 3DS mesh files.

3DS Mesh files can be converted to the X file format by using conv3ds

Each of these vehicle uses textures which can be in any format that the x files supports, for example bmp, jpg, gif.

In addtion to the texture itself some actions are applied by the program depending on the name of the texture and on the properties of the mesh that is using it.

These special actions are:

Color key - if the texture's name includes "_" the texture is treated as having a transparent color which is the first color index of it's palette, or the black color if it has no palette.

Greyscale alpha - if the texture's name includes "=" the texture is loaded as an alpha layer only and not as a colored texture, such alpha layer can be used for high quality smoke of transparent cloth.

Greyscale color - if the texture's name includes "#" the texture is loaded as an alpha layer with color, the strength of the alpha layer is taken from the average value of it's color, such texture can be used for rotating parts as rotors and propellers.

Chrome mapping - if the mesh using the texture is 75% to 90% opaque, the mesh is applied with a chrome mapping texture called refmap.bmp, this chrome mapping is making a reflection map upon the mesh making it look shiny.

Transparent window - if the mesh using the texture is 5% to 75% opaque, the mesh is treated as a window and is drawn last in the drawing order, this allows the body to be seen through this mesh properly without the need to build the object in this order.