Hi Doug,

Just saw your PM, I was flying in FSX
I started FSX again to build a little example, to show you what is, in my opinion, one of the only points left that can still be improved in your screenshot above: the angle of view.

Your screenshot, in its actual form, is really great and I like it a lot:
- the choice of aircraft is cool, this plane is well detailled and has nice textures. The yellow is a bit classic, perhaps you should give a try to the cream/red variant too!
- the sky/meteo is outstanding.
- the sun "glare" is just cool. The ligthing in this shot almost makes it look like a real picture.
- the scenery, only water here, is very good too: the water color is realistic, the waves look fantastic, and you won't get problems like blurries or poor scenery objects/autogen in such a case.
- the quality of the graphics could be improved, since we can see a bit of aliasing (visible pixels on the edge of the plane), but it's ok.

So in the end, the angle of view in this shot is very good, because it shows so much stuff, it creates a good composition. The only problem is that the plane is in the perfect center of the picture, which is too much classic, kind of boring. This is, I think, the only thing that makes you unhappy about this shot.

Now, I will show you a concrete example of what we've been discussing in our previous message: the "off-centered" aircraft

Take a look at my shot, I did it quite quickly, and made a very poor attempt at creating the same screenshot as you did, but I was completely unable to get a sunglare as impressive as yours, and my water was not so good-looking either (I guess I was too high )...



Can you see the difference ? It looks much more like a picture taken by somebody, not just an external view classic screenshot. What I did is:
- switch to the "special" view, with the S key. I went to the view that show the plane from aside
- switch to "Tail" view mode, by pressing A a couple of times
- moved the view point on the right, by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER for quite a long time, until I got more or less a similar angle as you had.
- moved the view direction to place the plane in an interesting part of the picture (typically off center, at 1/3 of the picture width)
- adjusted the zoom level to get more interesting proportions and adjsusted the view position again accordingly, to find a good general balance
And that's the result.
Tell me what you think about that ?

Ah, guess what ? I forgot that you could select the views directly from the menu 
So the only way I knew was to use the S key to circle the views (external, tower, special, VC, external, tower, etc...) and then the A key to circle the various modes for a given view.

But your technique is good, in fact it might be faster too, since you can select directly the correct view/view mode from the menu.

For moving the view (I mean, the position of the camera), it's exactely like moving the viewpoint in the virtual cockpit:
- CTRL+ENTER and CTRL+BACKSPACE move the view forward/backward
- SHIFT+ENTER and SHIFT+BACKSPACE move the view up and down
- SHIFT+CTRL+ENTER and SHIFT+CTRL+BACKSPACE move the view left and right.

But the movement of the camera is slow, so you have to keep the key pressed quite a long time (I mean, some seconds) to really notice that your camera is moving

Hi Steve...

Daube is giving me some advice on taking the aircraft from the center of the screen and moving it left or right and I see now up and down.

I guess my next question is using the Numbers Lock and keypad for doing some of this.

I am also using a G15 Logitech Keyboard and there must be a way of programming some of this into that.  I am not up on this keyboard so do not know.

Thanks for the comment on the shot...

Cheers...Happy Landings...Doug

Steve M wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 6:28pm:
The mouse/space bar is about all I ever use then depend on cropping to move the airplane out of center.  I've got a whole laundry list of view keyboard commands so must give Daube's suggestions a try.

Good morning all...

Thanks A1 for the comment.

Never used that technique Dave and just heard about it so will have to give it a try.   

Larry not sure about the difference as I removed FS2004 some time ago as I thought they might conflict with each other. This machine was built for FSX and Vista with loads of memory but another member told me to only have one or the other installed so I removed FS2004.   

I was asked the other day by someone at the bugsmashing field how to take a picture in FS2004.
You know I did not know.

In FSX all I do is hit the "V" Key and it goes directly to a folder.   Not sure about FS2004.

Any help you could add will be most appreciated.   

Cheers...Happy Landings...Doug

patchz wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 9:34pm:


The basic views in FSX are the same, more or less, as in FS9. But there are some additionnal views in FSX, that you can define in the aircraft.cfg of any plane.

Using the default planes aircraft.cfg camera definitions as templates is the best technique to learn how that works. It may sound a bit complex right now, but it will be much easier once you'll have your FSX installed and you'll be able to take a look directly into the aircraft.cfg of the default planes