De-mystifying .FLT files

The SDK documentation for ESP was updated recently with some bug fixes and formatting updates. One of the major additions in the update is a new tutorial that explains the workings of ESP's saved flight format, or .FLT files. The tutorial is in the Mission Creation Kit and is appropriately named Flight Files.

The tutorial mentions a good point that creating .FLT files is much like creating a simplified mission - you can set up quite a lot of different parameters in the .FLT, including the obvious things like aircraft type, starting location and weather - as well as some details like systems failure settings for traning scenarios.The tutorial walks through each of the settings in the .FLT file and shows some examples.

There is also a code sample that the team recently uploaded to the MSDN Code Gallery that relates to this tutorial. The code sample programmatically amends a flight file to set the starting location, weather and which systems will fail after a specific timeout.  Here is a link to the sample:http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ESPFlightFiles.

The next step up from modifying the flight file is to create your own Missions that have additional features and can have code behind their XML for even more flexibility.