Say you downloaded a stunt plane for FSX and you want to add smoke to it, or add something such as flares or machine gun fire to a helicopter, here is where you will find out how to do that.
You need to decide what aircaft you want to add it to and what effect your going to use. Browse to the aircrafts main folder, the path to airplanes and helicopters is shown below:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Airplanes\
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\SimObjects\Rotorcraft\
Then open up the aircraft.cfg file in the aircraft’s main folder with notepad. Scroll down until you find the smoke part: [SMOKESYSTEM].
This is what the Smoke System section looks like in the Boeing F/A-18:
smoke.0= -53.00, -0.0, -0.0, fx_smoke_w
Use the below information to change the above [SMOKESYTEM] to your desired effect.
| smoke.0 | The 0 after the period is determines how many smoke parts there is. If you had two, it would look like this: smoke.0 smoke.1 |
| -53.00, -0.0, -0.0, | These 3 numbers determine the position of the effect releative to the center of the aircraft. The first one, -53.00 in this case, is how far forward and back it is. – is backwards and + is forwards. The second number is how far left or right it is. – is left and + is right. The final number is how far up and down it is. – is down and + is up. |
| fx_smoke_w | This is the name of the effect that is being emited (minus the .fx if you have file extensions enabled). The effects can be found in the main FSX effects folder here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Effects Replace this with whatever effect you want to have. |