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illustrations. As a nice touch, you can access the manual as FSXME is running by using the F1 key. The manual does a
good job of explaining how to set up FSXME. Much of the rest of the manual explains how Missions are organized
within FSXME, as well as a few basic operations.
I found the tutorial elements to be lacking in the manual, though. It was difficult for me as a rookie to find a good
place to start. The tutorial involves the "Congo Relief" Mission, which is very complicated and not suited to beginners.
I looked at tutorial paragraphs like this:
Judging from the sizes of the AreaRefs attached to the other three triggers, the correct order is “EnrouteKatTrigger",
“KatApprRadTrigger”, “KatTrigger” and finally “KatUnloadTrigger”. If you link these together, using new
ObjectActivationActions attached to the “OnEnterActions” attribute of the previous trigger, most of the mission will be
linked correctly.
And I thought, Man, am I ever in over my head, this isn't for me!
My next step was to look at the FSXME Forum. Again, in a nice touch, you can go directly to the Forum from within
FSXME. In the forum, I found that Jim Kier answers a wide variety of questions. I also found there were a few
absolute beginners like myself.
From the Forum, I came to understand that I should read the SDK documents. Those come with the SDK, and are not
part of FSXME. For the record, I think the SDK manual is fairly well written. It's just that the OPT is hard to use. I
didn't have to memorize the SDK, as there is a lot of charts and stuff, but it did help me to understand FSXME a bit
better.
Wizards.
The active FSAddon Forum. You can
navigate here via the Help Menu in
FSXME, which is helpful.
Then I saw the light! I realized that with the "Congo" Mission, I was looking at a very complicated document. I
needed something very simple to start with. FSXME will automatically generate a simple Mission using the built-in
Wizard.
There are two levels to the Wizard. In the freeware version, you can choose a start and end airport, and you get a
Mission based on that. You get a briefing, and during the flight, you get text and voice cues that tell you where the
next waypoint is (the voices are the computer-generated Microsoft voices, and I will talk more about that later).
Enroute, you will see the Mission compass and at the destination, you will see the familiar green arrow marker. If you
land at the destination airport, you will successfully conclude the Mission.
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