Hi Brittair. It might be easier to convert an existing aircraft to use as a macro rather than create your own. M98toBGL posted in the SimV Scenery Design section can be used to convert most FS98 aircraft into API macros.

As I recall, the FSDS texture template feature will create an outline image of the selected part. This can be used as a guide for painting your finished texture. It's slightly oversized & there should be lines indicating the actual area covered by the texture depending on the resolution you selected. This can be cropped/resized to suit or pasted into another texture of the correct size. Several parts can be included on the same texture with a little careful planning.

PS. This took less than 5 minutes with M98toBGL & FSSC.

There are several versions of Massimo Taccoli's Tornado posted in the FS98 Military section.

PPS. Ooops. Slight problem with that macro. If you look closely you can see 2 sets of wings. This is caused by the older style animation of the variable geometry wings. It's possible a Tornado by a different author would be OK if you can find one.

Hi Roger.

Hope all is well your end.
It should be possible to remove one set of wings by manually editing the API. I would give it a go if I could remember how to do it. ???
Ah well, you can't win 'em all. Back to the drawing board.

Hi Brittair. I'm no programmer & this is all pretty basic stuff. The macros should work fine in FS2002. The error message seems to indicate that M98toBGL did not convert the aircraft correctly. Providing you use comparatively basic FS98 aircraft this might be caused by the animation in the model itself or you not using the correct (API) option in M98toBGL. It could possibly be fixed by manually editing the API but this can be a tad complicated. It might be better to try converting another version of the aircraft. I had no such problems with the one in my shot. http://www.simviation.com/fs98military27.htm
You could try that one. It's only a small file. If you get the same error I suspect it's something you're doing.

Remember it will have the problem with the wings I mentioned so unless you wish to use more conventional aircraft as macros you could be wasting your time.

Your error message refers to F3BASIC.SCM. I'm not sure this is correct. Maybe you're not using M98toBGL correctly.

Here's a shot of the Tornado MDL file opened in M98toBGL. I've selected the API button at the top.



To create the API macro click the Save File button & it will be automatically saved under the same file prefix as the MDL file - TORNADO F3.api. It might be better to shorten this as we're dealing with DOS based utilities that can only handle 8-digit file names.