You want to unpack it in Flightgear\data\Aircraft so that it gets its own subfolder under Aircraft. Here's where the location becomes critical. Once it's downloaded, you will want to open it up using the decompression software and unpack it. I put it in a separate subfolder under Flightgear called "Downloads" but you can download it to your desktop, your documents folder anywhere handy that you can find later. To start with, there's no particular place that the compressed file needs to go. Once you have a decompression application, you want to download an aircraft file. A compressed file is also referred to as an "archive". Read their websites carefully and be sure you know what you are installing.įYI - "unpack," "decompress," and "extract" are all terms that essentially mean the same thing they all describe the process I just detailed in the previous paragraph. Some are freeware and some are trial versions which you eventually have to register and pay for. A Google search on "Windows file compression" or something similar should turn up something. Some common ones are WinZip, WinRAR, and PowerArchiver. To unpack these compressed files, re-translate them into their regular formats and un-mash them into separate files again, you need to have installed on your computer an application which does this. Some planes are more complex and take up more disk space, and some are smaller.) For example, if all of the aircraft's files added up to 125 MB, the compressed file might only be about 80 MB due to the space saved in the compression process. Not only does the compression process make all of these smaller files into one file, but it also uses mathematic algorithms to literally make the resulting file smaller (fewer bytes) than what it would be to simply add the smaller files together. To make distribution easier, instead of making you download each file separately (a dozen or more per aircraft) and putting them in the proper subfolders, a compression program is used to mash all of the required files into a single file, usually with an extension like. So under Flightgear\data\Aircraft is a series of subfolders, one for each plane, and in each subfolder there may be even further subfolders - one for instruments, one for 3D models, etcetera. There is a main file, and then there are files for the instrument panel, files for each instrument, files containing the 3D models for the plane and its control surfaces, and files containing the data about its flight performance, among many others. So if I have some exact details like some of the long subdirectory chains slightly wrong, use your best judgment to figure out what I meant or else e-mail me back and I'll try to make a correction.Īll Flightgear aircraft are modeled using a series of files. Let me know if anything that follows doesn't make sense and I'll do my best to help - or, feel free to show this e-mail to a friend or someone else that can help walk you through it.Īlso, I am writing this at work from memory, without my home PC in front of me to refer to. Since I don't know anything about your age or exactly what you mean by "new to computers", I may overexplain some things and I may inadvertently underexplain others. I'll do my best to explain in simple terms. If someone wants to take the time to edit it and add it to the Wiki as an article to help expand Windows-based documentation, please feel free to give yourself partial authorship credit! Curious, or anyone that uses Vista, here's an e-mail I just sent to someone who read the forum and solicited me specifically via e-mail for help - he's also a Vista user but is very new to computers, and apparently my two responses below were able to help him.
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