You don't need software - if you substitute one of the plane's beacons for the smoke effect then you'll see exactly where the emitter is.

The coordinates in the smokesystem are for vertical, longitudinal and lateral distance in feet from the plane's reference datum (normally waterline, centreline, quarter wing chord), so in your example the smoke effect would be 2 feet to the left side of the reference datum point, 19 feet behind it and 5.8 feet below it. Replace it with a beacon and you'll see it in the sim.

There's a minor problem though - the vertical parameter in the smokesystem in FS2002 has no effect on the vertical position of the effect! It's a 'feature' (i.e. bug) of the software. You need to edit the effects file itself to rectify this. IM me if you don't know how to do this. There is a 'Y offset' value that you need to change to get the vertical position moved.

Another tip - the smoke effect is normally behind the engines, so if you start with the same lateral/longitudinal coordinates as the engines in the aircraft.cfg file, you'll have them roughly in the right place before you start fine-tuning.

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice Microlight!

I've managed to get the exhaust lined up correctly using the engine co-ordinates.
Are there any co-ordinates for the wing tips in the CFG file because i need to set up some wingtip contrials now.

Oh yes, i havn't a clue how to edit the effects file so if you could show me that would be great.
Also, how do you get the Beacon to show up in place of the effect?

Cheers!
Ed  

Ed,
As Dave says, use a navigation light from the [lights] section in place of your effect name in the [smokesystem] section. Here's an example to best show what I mean. I've got 2 dedicated smoke effects for a DC-10 (a and b), as the engines are on different levels - wings and tail. This is what the [smokesystem] entry in my aircraft.cfg looks like:

[SMOKESYSTEM]
smoke.0=-8.4,-10.0,-27.6, fx_dc10aexhaust.fx
smoke.1=14.4,-100.0,0.0, fx_dc10bexhaust.fx      
smoke.2=-8.4,-10.0,27.6, fx_dc10aexhaust.fx

So smoke.1 is on the centreline way behind the other 2 engines. Even though I've put figures in for the first value (vertical), they have no effect in the sim. So use Windows Notepad to open your selected .fx file (it's just a standard .txt file with the filetype renamed .fx) and you'll see sectioned commands, just like in aircraft.cfg. For each particle comprising the effect, there are emitter, particle and particle attributes section. Here is the parameter you need to change:

[Emitter.0]
Lifetime=0.00, 0.00
Delay=0.00, 0.00
Bounce=0.00
Rate=30.00, 40.00
X Emitter Velocity=0.00, 0.00
Y Emitter Velocity=0.00, 0.00
Z Emitter Velocity=0.00, 0.00
Drag=0.00, 0.00
X Particle Velocity=0.00, 0.00
Y Particle Velocity=0.00, 0.00
Z Particle Velocity=-20.00, -20.00
X Rotation=0.00, 0.00
Y Rotation=0.00, 0.00
Z Rotation=0.00, 0.00
X Offset=0.00, 0.00
Y Offset=7.00, 7.00 //Change this one. +=up, -=down
Z Offset=0.00, 0.00

For more details, look at the Microsoft special effects SDK.

By the way, when you save the .fx file after modifying it, make sure that you include the whole name including the filetype (e.g. effect.fx), or else Notepad will save it as a .txt file.

Good luck!

Aah, this is where you come across a couple of those little Microsoft idiosyncrasies. What your problem boils down to is this: the co-ordinates in the smokesystem are in a different order to those that control the location of the lights! (And the engines, come to that.) Whereas the smokesystem locations are vertical, horizontal, lateral, in the lights section this changes to horizontal, lateral, vertical! And of course in the lights section there is no bug so the vertical parameter works fine.

Yes, the smokesystem effects are all on or all off - there is no switching. I've tried in the past to use the switching abilities of the lights section to control the smokesystem, but then you come across another issue that I haven't been able to solve (yet). This is that whereas smoke looks like smoke when it's in the smokesystem section, it looks like science-fiction-glowing-plasma when it's in the lights section.

Confused? You will be!

Good luck!