We are creating some cars for the sim as well but we have encountered some problems with our cars and I wondered whether you may be able to help and tell us where we are going wrong?  Please see below the problems we are having:

I am however having some slight problems with it that I cannot seem to resolve. The car is in and the textures all work and it moves BUT:

a) None of the animations work, I have exported the model out of 3dsMax with the export animation tab selected and exported it to a .X file. This is then converted to a .MDL file with the /XANIM command line set up so the animations should work, but they dont. I have set the steering wheel to rudder but none of it moves at all, including the wheels when the car moves with throttle
b) I cannot seem to work out how to remove specular highlighting from an object. I have turned all the specular values off in max, dropped down all the spec bloom values in the FSX material setup etc but no matter what I do, there is always some specular, I dont want any on some parts like the driver
c) Whenever the model loads up, as I used the Airbus configuration files as a template, the car is always a fair height above the ground, I have been through the aircraft.cfg file and edited values but the car never gets to the ground
d) The car also has a nice flashing red beacon in the air above it, I dont know how to remove this from the config file either

But the good news is, it is in, it reflects the environment around it well, the bump mapping works well and the transparency (very poorly explained in the MS FSX docs) now works fine too. If you can help me with the above points, I think we are there and now I know what to do, we can start getting the other cars in. One thing btw that really surprised me was the poor naming and explanation of some of the key points for the SDK, files are named incorrectly, the docs point to files that dont exist, their sample model doesn’t follow their guidelines, was quite shocked really.

If you can help at all it would be much appreciated.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.