Over the years, I have seen the flight simulator program develop and have enjoyed all of the new advancements. Everything from the primitive forms of FS4 to the almost perfect aircraft of FS2000. Dealing in graphic arts, web page design, photography and fascinated with the creation of elements of the virtual 3D world of FS has evolved into experimenting with the personalization of that world. Repainting aircraft and designing my own scenery are my favorites but up until recently, not something I put much time into. Just spent a lot of time looking at what others had created.

Now with the availability of just three programs, I can create so much. The programs I use and will be demonstrating the techniques with are Corel Photo-Paint 8, BMP 2000, and Abacus' FS Design Studio Pro (version 1.42). You can use any other graphics editor such as Adobe Photoshop or Jasc Paint Shop Pro, but use the one that you are most comfortable with and is easiest for you to master. If you don't have one of these programs, all I can tell you is that Paint Shop Pro goes for about $110 retail, Corel Photo-Paint 8 for about $350 and Adobe Photoshop is somewhere around $610 last I checked. I got Corel as a competitive upgrade over Adobe Photoshop LITE that came with a scanner, so I didn't have to buy the "full" retail version off the shelf and saving some big bucks. BMP 2000 is a freeware program that you can download off the internet. It is NOT a paint program but is used to manipulate bitmap files. The last program is Abacus' FS Design Studio Pro. It is much like the fancy Autocad programs but much scaled down with its output being directed at ".bgl" & ".mdl" files, ".sca" source files and ".scm" & ".api" macros. It cost about $60.00. Also check at computer swap meets for any of the above retail software. You can save some money there too!

Also, I would recommend a good quality scanner or digital camera. Nothing fancy but one that produces good quality images in the 72 to 300 dpi range and is dependable.