Coincidental Meditation : Flight Simulator Centric

Lucy in the Sky Without a Man

Hal9000 — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:35:00 GMT

There was another interesting post at AVSIM the other day, that the author also emailed to us at tell_fs@microsoft.com, in which he offered suggestions for a "Wife Edition" of Flight Sim. It was full of jokes about shopping, shoes, housework, hair and make-up, etc. The full thread may be found here.

I don't want to pick on the author, whom I'll call "Andre" just as his parents did. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just having a bit of innocent, if anachronistic, fun. Judging by the subsequent comments on the thread, those that responded had a good laugh along with him.

However, since the topic of women in aviation combines the two things I spend all of my time thinking about anyway, I thought maybe I'd dust off the bully pulpit and chime in.

I've never actually seen any customer data of ours broken down by gender, but it's probably safe to assume that our customers are largely, probably even overwhelmingly, male.

I won't presume to suggest that the gender distribution of our customer base breaks down the same as it does in the world of licensed pilots - for one thing, we have more customers than there are pilots in the world, so extrapolation can't always be trusted - but it is interesting to note that, in the US, less than 6% of all licensed pilots are women.

The more interesting (or at least heartening) number to me is that 12% of all student (read: potential) pilots are women - hopefully, that figure will trickle up in the future and maybe we'll see the overall numbers continue to slowly change.

Do I think that would be a good thing? Absolutely, if for no other reason than it would mean more women would see what they're missing.

Regardless, it's clear that men outnumber women in real world aviation, so it's not likely unreasonable to assume that they do so in the virtual world as well. (Note to my long-time pal Katy Pluta: Stand fast!)

With all that in mind, here are some editions of Flight Simulator I'd like to see before we get to the Robert Young / Jane Wyatt Father Knows Best special commemorative release:

Flight Simulator 1911: The Harriet Quimby Edition - Hurry up and get your pilot's license before men let you vote!

Flight Simulator 1921: The Bessie Coleman Edition - Learn to fly in another country, because your gender and your race prevent you from training at home.

Flight Simulator Golden Age of Air Racing: The Jackie Cochran, Amy Johnson, and Pancho Barnes Edition - Fly faster and farther than lots of people, even some miserable blank-knocking men!

Combat Flight Simulator 4: The Night Witches Edition - Fly as many as 10 missions a night, dead stick over enemy lines, hand dropping bombs on the enemy before gliding to safety back in the USSR - all as a woman.

Space Simulator 2: The Valentina Tereshkova / Eileen Collins Edition - Fly Vostok 6 and the US Shuttles Discovery and Columbia on critically low levels of testosterone. (We could also do a pretty interesting Mercury 13 add-on.)

Flight Simulator 2006: The Nicole Malachowski Edition - After working your way up through US Air Force pilot training and becoming an instructor on the F-15E Strike Eagle, transition to the F-16C, and try your hand as Thunderbird 3. (By coincidence, Malachowski is Polish for "Better pilot than you.")

I could go on and on, especially if the criteria were expanded to include some women who may not be quite as famous, yet . . . Anne, Laurel, Bette, Michelle, Beth, Kirstin, Jennifer, etc. In the meantime, at least Flight Simulator 2004 includes nods to Amelia, Patty, and Martha.

With that, I suppose I have made my point with typically clumsy sincerity. Special thanks to my wife (the world's best navigator) and all my girlfriends for appreciating aviation, even when it doesn't happen to be pink and covered with butterflies.

This post was not sponsored in full or in part by the 99's, Women in Aviation, Women Fly, or the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

Grand Theft Flight Simulator

Hal9000 — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 20:00:00 GMT

Take a Little Trip, Take a Little Trip With Me

To the cool, cool water of the semi-pirateless Caribbean . . . In reality, my only excursion to the region was a week on St. Martin / Sint Maarten for my honeymoon, most of which was spent lounging at the Sunset Beach Bar on the beach, the one with some of the best airplane watching anywhere in the world.

(For those familiar with the island that know of Orient Beach - find your own link - the answers to your three questions are "Yes", "No, are you kidding?!?", and "Unfortunately, mostly wrinkled old German men.")

First thing Monday morning, however, I'm going to have to make a virtual return to the area, this time to take a look at the presumably fictional Cabo Cay, thanks to one of the more interesting and original Flight Sim add-ons to come out in recent memory, Smugglers of the Caribbean.

A few bits from their press release:

"Smugglers of the Caribbean - Cabo Key" is an add-on package set in the Caribbean on a small uncharted island just north of Havana. It is part 1 of a multi part series of add-on aircraft & scenery packages which will all be set in the greater Caribbean Area and will all tie in with each other. For us it was important to provide a full simming add-on “package” to MSFS2004 rather than merely a scenery or an aircraft. Our package includes a rideable ground vehicle, a boat and an aircraft and of course scenery and something to do. Smugglers of the Caribbean gives you an uncomplicated set of wings, set in a visually realistic environment.

When doing smuggle runs take off from base and rendezvous with the Pan Americana, a cargo vessel used by the clan to smuggle contraband to Europe. Drop your cargo and get back to base. Be sure to stay under flight level 1000 to avoid detection by radar, yet be aware of Coast Guard vessels patrolling the area. Once a month you have to take a boat ride to Miami or to one of the close-by islands to get spares and supplies.

This package includes photo textured scenery of Cabo Island, with its short and challenging landing strip, a Cessna Caravan 675, a "Gofast boat" and a 500cc Quad ATV. Also included is the Pan Americana, anchored a 30 minute flight north of Cabo Key, waiting for your delivery and AI traffic flying to and from your island such as Coast Guard patrol boats patrolling the area.

When my friend, flight sim texture genius and fairly new Horizon pilot Justin Lamb sent me the link, my first thought was that maybe my other friend Bill Lyons (creator of some of my all-time favorite add-ons) had finally turned evil or been replaced by a Bizarro version of himself. (Bill's add-ons always include a boat or a car, some great scenery, etc, but they tend to involve roughly 100% less smuggling.)

If anyone has a clever religious metaphor that they're not using about how and why the Lamb made me think of the Lyons, let me know. Otherwise, lets call it coincidence and move on.

Anyway . . . My second thought was how strange it was that they'd happened to use one of our rejected marketing slogans, inspired by the new FSX missions system we've been working on: Flight Simulator X: Something to Do.

My third thought was about how excited my friend Jim (not that one, the other one) is going to be when he sees this. (It's not Orient Beach (with or without the wrinkles) Jim, but it is a step in that direction. Give my love to Donna!)

My fourth and final thought, so far, was the absolute unadulterated (pun intended?) joy I will feel when I submit an official Microsoft expen$e report (product research) on Monday for €25, payable to Pimp Aviation.

I can't wait to put these guys on our Beta.

Weather or Not

Hal9000 — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 04:39:00 GMT

A lot of people have posted wish list threads and sent in suggestions for things they'd like to see in the next version of Flight Sim. Most of us that work on it do the same thing. Our internal wish lists usually, but not always, start with bugs that were postponed from last time.

One of the individual features I was most heavily involved with on FS2004 was weather. In fact, tdragger blames me for the ugly way that visibility layers interact with terrain. I fought for that, and, yes, I'd do it again, because, bad as it was, it was better than not seeing anything at all . . . which was the only other choice.

The fact that tdragger, as the program manager in charge of weather at that time, was the only one with the actual authority to make the choice to go with my recommendation is inconvenient, and I won't bring that up here . . . Instead, I take my share of the responsibility with pride. Fire away!

Anyway, Blogger-in-Chief Jason Waskey just sent me back an old email of mine in which I listed, hastily, my personal "Top 10" (that naturally goes to 11) wishes for weather in FSX, and suggested I post it here.

How many, if any of these changes will we get in this version, or the next, or the one after that?

I can't say.

When I say I can't say, I don't mean it like I can't say big words like "deoxyribonucleic", "obtufiscation", and "mayonnaisse".

I also don't mean "I could say, but I won't, because I enjoy keeping secrets". I mean I can't say because A) some information hasn't been announced, and 2) for some of these, I just don't know yet.

With all that baggage put out there, here's my Weather Wish List, in no particular order:

“Real” overcast – full on 8/8 coverage with no holes.
Better interaction – visibility + terrain.
Gradual transitions in and out of visibility layers.
Multiple visibility layers.
Improved precipitation curtains (ie, no more curtains.)
Falling precipitation affected by wind.
No more impostors (2d "walls" of distant clouds that we draw when 3D cloud percentage is less than 100%), even on low-end.
Fog when METARS demand.
Rainbows.
Wind smoothing ala FSUIPC.
Better forming / dissipation effects for clouds.

Time will tell, but wouldn't it be nice . . . ?

Comparing Apples to Really Expensive Apples

Hal9000 — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 17:54:00 GMT

Gone Tropos?

There was an interesting post in the new FSX forum on AVSIM the other day expressing hope that the airport environments in FSX will look as good as those seen in a promotional video for commercial flight simulator builder CAE’s Tropos visualization system.

A link to the promo video can be found here.

The full thread can be found here.

Like a number of people on the Flight Sim team, I’m very familiar with CAE products. I’ve flown a number of their simulators, we’ve even had the chance to meet some of their team members. As can easily be seen in their promo video, or firsthand, if you’re lucky, they do beautiful work.

The first time we saw the Tropos promo, a lot of us on the team essentially echoed the sentiment on the forums – I wish we could (or were going to, had time to, could guarantee our customers had the hardware to) do that!

The video shows some fantastic features – layered fog, smog, great runway / taxiway textures, wonderful falling and blowing snow, gorgeous ice effects on runways, and landing light effects that, because they use a real light map and not just an overlaid night texture like we do, are seemingly perfect. And you can’t overlook that wonderfully fluid performance, even with the compression artifacts in the video clip.

Let's set aside the fact that CAE’s products sell from 20 to 50 units a year for somewhere around eleventeen trillion dollars, they have a lot more computing power and storage than we do and complete control over the hardware, while our products sell . . . more than that, need to run on some pretty ridiculously low-end hardware, and, after a year or two, can be had at Wal-Mart for about the same price as a case of State Fair Corn Dogs (the official Corn Dog Of NASCAR).

We'll also ignore the fact that CAE builds a number of airports for familiarization purposes in excruciating detail, while we build . . . all of the airports in the world and everything in between in varying degrees of excruciation. Not to mention the fact that CAE gets to walk around the tarmacs of said airports, taking pictures and even measurements, etc, while we . . . buy books, snap photos on business trips, and stare at pictures from places like Airliners.net and Windows Live Local.

With those things comfortably cloaked in denial, there is one additional disclaimer:

I think CAE does spectacular work. They deserve every dime they make, their products are fantastic. I am a fan. The paragraphs that follow reflect neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, especially its lawyers. The subsequent ramblings are intended simply as an intellectual exercise, and must not be used against me in a court of law.

Bearing all of that in mind, I decided to take a short break from testing the animation of the float retraction system on the FSX Goose, and watch the CAE promo video again, this time, as a tester. My inner skeptic (who lives just across the hall from my inner pretentious b**tard) just couldn’t automatically accept the premise that their stuff is “better”.

So, I took a look with a different assumption – how would I improve on it? Did they make any mistakes? Are we doing anything “better” than they are? I gave myself half an hour, watched the video a number of times, and this is what I came up with:

Their sun effect is static and it tends to look cold and small – our new “bloom” is much prettier, and I think even our FS9 sun was more credible.
The sky doesn’t change color during the accelerated sunrise scene – the lighting changes so it gets brighter, but it starts and ends a maybe-oversaturated blue. We couldn’t get away with that, at least not without bundling a copy of ActiveSky in every box.
Their clouds are flat, 2D, FS2000 era sprites. Ours . . . aren’t.
Aircraft shadows are extremely heavy, and dark, almost black all the time and don’t lose intensity in fog (in other words, they do this just as badly as we’ve done it, but our shadows at least aren’t as heavy to begin with).
Not all of the aircraft and ground vehicles cast shadows – it looks like they’re not rendering shadows when the viewer’s angle to the vehicle gets too close to zero.
Some static ground objects don’t cast shadows either, but some do.
Shadows remain fixed underneath those aircraft and ground objects that cast them – they don’t move or change size based on the position of the light source (the sun, in this case).
Shadows don’t interact with other lights properly either – the taxiway lights get darker and harder to see when they are in an aircraft shadow, and the headlight lobes of the ground tugs and baggage carts actually draw underneath the aircraft shadows.
Speaking of shadows, there’s no self-shadowing of the aircraft – you can watch the sun shine “through” the vertical stabilizer when the Emirates A380 taxis on the icy runway. We haven't modeled self-shadowing in any released products either . . .

(Note: I hate to seem so obsessed with shadows, but we shipped FS2000 without aircraft shadows because not everybody who was in a position to make decisions agreed that it was a problem that needed to be fixed. We ended up having to release a patch, which has a dramatically higher cost (in time and resources) than people realize.)

The surrounding terrain is using some pretty low-resolution DEM.
Summer and Winter, but what about Spring and Fall? And Hard Winter?
Certain ground objects have no night textures at all.
Specular lighting, but no reflections on aircraft models. In FS9, we did reflections in chrome, for example, using an artificial environment map. <Edited to reflect Jason's comments below.>
Gorgeous bump-mapping and specular, but again, no reflections, on the icy runway.
No touchdown smoke (we could probably afford to give them some of ours since we use too much.)
No articulated bogies on the A380 landing gear. They’re supposed to do that weird A380 “hang forward” thing.
There’s something wrong with the way they’re animating the compression of the landing gear as well – watch the bit where the Emirates A380 lands very closely: at the moment of touchdown, the airplane jumps and seems to be forcibly repositioned. It looks to me as if the simulation engine is taking into account a compressable landing gear, but that’s not reflected in the animation.
They could use some more variety in their trees. I don’t remember the numbers, but in our building, in the hallway just down from the restrooms, we have pictures on the wall of all of the currently available Autogen trees. There are a lot of them.
Aircraft control surfaces don’t move – no flaps, no spoilers, no fun. If ours didn't, my work this week would have gone a lot faster.
Landing lights don’t cast a beam in the fog (watch the 747 land in the snow). It's arguable whether no effect is worse than an ugly one . . .
Great snow trails, but where’s the spray from the wheels?
Taxiway lines are inconsistent – some areas are really smooth, in other areas, if you look closely, they’re really faceted – just a few straight lines with hard angles making up a curve. Overall, I’d say subjectively that our best is pretty close theirs, and our worst is a good bit better.
No sloping runways . . . I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I guess Austin still wins this round.

So, what’s the verdict? Will FSX look better than Tropos? In some ways yes, in some ways maybe, and in some ways no. After looking at the promo video with a more critical eye, I can say that, in toto, it’s definitely not a slam dunk in favor of CAE, even discarding all of the disclaimers I laid out at the beginning. When all is said and done, however, I haven't proved anything here, other than the highest truism in software: there's no such thing as "zero bugs."

Most importantly, of course, I’ve based my observations and opinions entirely on some pretty limited information, but I’m not the first flight simulation fan that’s ever done that. And that's one area in this imaginary and slightly irrational competition between us and them where I'm happy to say we win, hands down: we have orders of magnitude more dedicated, enthusiastic, and passionate customers than they do.

On the Other Hand

Hal9000 — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:40:00 GMT

If you really want to see what the life of a software tester isn't like, you could dive into the nearest cultural dumpster and flush 87 minutes of your life down this cinematic low-flow toilet . . . No, I haven't seen it, but in the tradition of self-styled experts everywhere, I refuse to let that stand in the way of my proferred opinion.

It's interesting to me that Allen Covert's character is billed as the "World's Oldest Video Game Tester", because he's . . . 35.

Briefly and uncharacteristically setting aside the "video game / simulation" semantics, I was born in May of 1968, which makes me . . . more than 35.

Thankfully, my boss, Steve, is slightly more more than 35 than I am.

Adam Sandler, if you're reading this, I'm willing to consider an out-of-court settlement.

Not Such a Hard Day's Night . . .

Hal9000 — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:10:00 GMT

It occurred to me that I don’t spend a lot of time here talking about what I actually do for Microsoft on the Flight Simulator team. It has occurred to a number of people, especially my unbelievably dedicated and vaguely effluvial next door neighbor, self-appointed Blogstleutnant Jason, not to mention my patient-yet-eager audience of teeming several, that I don’t spend a lot of time here period.

Sorry about that, but I'm just thinking of the right words to say.

Anyway, I'll try to offer some more detail in upcoming posts, especially now that the cat we affectionately call FSX is officially out of the bag we call . . uhh . . . well, we don't have a name for it, and thus another metaphor dies.

My official job title is Software Test Engineer (not “Professional Blog Avoider” as some might suspect.) Well, that’s really just one of my titles – you can see two more here, thanks to my generous and patient friend and Flight Sim MVP Nick Whittome. Others include former police officer, raconteur, bon vivant, Renaissance man, Uncle Hal, Rubberhead, the Piffle, and cutey-pants.

Some people, even some pretty esteemed colleagues in the still nascent software testing industry, will tell you that what I do as a Test Engineer, or tester, is to break software.

I don’t agree, not even a little. I say it was broken when they gave it to me, and it was my job to point it out. I suppose I just don’t like the image of testers as a finite number of monkeys with a finite number of hammers, inelegantly bashing away, when, in reality, my job requires too much research, creativity, and peculiar expertise to be accomplished through brute force. To put it another way, I think I am a very special monkey, with a damn fine hammer.

I can write a little code here and there:

10 PRINT “Heckfire!”

20 GOTO 10

30 REM OR DON’T

but I’m not a developer. In fact, I’m not qualified to even say the word “code” in the presence of people like Susan, Tim, Steve, the rest of our development team, or the guy who restocks the famous free drinks in our office kitchen.

I can mess around a bit in Photoshop (see my self-portrait below) a little bit and use phrases like “bump mapping”, “anisotropic filtering”, and “that is so gauche - ooh, is my beret crooked? ” without sounding like a complete imbecile, but I am not an artist. I sit in awe of the work of people like Jason, Adrian, non-bloggers Aaron, Kevin, Pete, John, etc. Many of them are even proficient in multiple media, which blows my mind – one of our walls at home is proudly adorned with a Waskey original, in oil. (Jason, on the other hand, does not have a framed bug report of mine on his wall. As far as I know.)

In addition to Developers and Artists, we have writers like Brian and Mike, Designers like Paul and Justin, Geo-Data specialists like Bill and Travis, Marketing people like Jerret (seen sitting next to Amy Grant in MY episode of “Three Wishes”), Program Managers like Mike, Mike, Kevin, and Eric, business planners like Scott . . . I can’t do what any of them can do, at least not nearly as well as they can do it.

But I can take their work, the work of some of the smartest, most talented and creative people I’ve ever known, much less had the pleasure to work with, and I can . . . help them make it better.

And sometimes, I don’t even need a hammer.

Blink, or don't, and you'll miss me . . .

Hal9000 — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 18:54:00 GMT

I am an attention miser (perhaps a distant cousin of Heat and Snow) . . . .

I tend to pay it out in very small doses (as my friend Knat said in her brilliant article, How to be Distracted, "Hey look, a squirrel"), measure the value of things in my life by how much attention I'm willing to spend on them (my only real fear is of being bored), and, if there is attention changing hands anywhere in the neighborhood, I'd prefer to be at the center of it.

Since I was a teen-ager, from my early, star-making turn as Silas Ezekial Dobbins (you certainly remember the catchphrases of 1985, "I lak-a-you!" and "Heckfire!") in the Enumclaw High School production of Felicia Metcalfe's thoroughly non-ground-breaking farce, Off The Track and the vocal performance of Simon & Garfunkel's Baby Driver (complete with my famous blistering ukulele solo, and, yes, I still wonder how your engines feel) that helped rocket three friends of mine and me straight to the upper middle of the Western Regional KEY Club talent show, I've rarely missed an opportunity to let people notice me. (I also rarely miss an opportunity to use long sentences and short paragraphs, as my friend Roy points out here.)

November 21st was no exception.

NBC, the network that once tried to boost summer viewership with the mortifying "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" campaign, airs a show hosted by singer Amy Grant called Three Wishes. It is a reality show of sorts, but unlike so many others, it is thoughtful, engaging, upbeat, and, as reluctant as I am to say it, even heartwarming. Like most of the best shows of the type, the basic concept is simple, and could have been written by a four year old: "Nice people do nice things for other nice people, and at the end, the pretty lady sings!"

Unfortunately, most television networks are run by three year olds. This, combined with the fact that A) I actually like the show a lot and 2) NBC airs it in the television dumpster known as 9:00 on Friday night, guarantees that the show doesn't stand a chance. As a matter of fact, the most recent, and most important episode (because I'm in it, but I won't mention that until the paragraph after next) is the last one of the season, and very possibly the last one ever. Thankfully, NBC (pronounced FOX) has ordered up a mid-season replacement, Most Outrageous TV Moments. Television about television, skipping straight to the outrageous parts, without all of that irritating plot, context and production value to slow you down. This is a proactive move on NBC's part to meet the FCC's mandate that all television must be broadcast in ADHDTV by 2007.

Speaking of ADHD, I'm digressing.

Back to November 21st. The producers of Three Wishes came to Microsoft because one of their segments centered around a smart and well-spoken young man called Kiyaan who wanted to be CEO of Microsoft for a day. Like any sensible visitor, after wallowing for a half hour in our secret money room, he headed straight for the Games group. He went to a couple of meetings, and even sat down with Bill Gates himself for a few minutes. At one point, word went out that they wanted some footage of Kiyaan bossing around a lab full of testers playing Xbox360 games. Even though most of us don't work in labs (my office has windows, with a view of the parking lot, but, sadly, not of the gravel pit), and this, the day before the console's launch, was actually the first time I'd ever personally played a game on the 360, it was only right that I should be involved. So, short story long, I sat and played PGR3 while the cameras rolled. When Kiyaan walked in, I was actually the only one to talk to him, so they ended up shooting some of our interaction specifically. My new ten year-old boss offered some thoughtful insights on how he would approach testing a racing game, while my mind meandered around thoughts like "I wish I would have shaved this morning", "I wonder if I'm holding the controller upside down", and "What's my motivation?"

The episode aired last Friday night, December 9th, and, unfortunately, exactly all of my dialogue was cut. If you know just when and where to stare at the screen, you can still see me, sitting right behind Peter Moore as he gives Kiyaan his very own Xbox 360, a day early. I'm sure, however, that the excised footage will be restored in the DVD Director's cut - I'll be in my trailer, holding my breath.

If the episode happens to air again, it's worth watching for more than just my performance as a blurry set piece - one of the other segments coincidentally finds a kid, as part of his wish to go to Space Camp (the place, not the movie that Lea Thompson used to warm up for Howard the Duck, thankfully), flying zero-G parabolas in a 727, courtesy of my friend Peter Diamandis and his Zero Gravity Corporation.

Otherwise, you might catch me as "big guy with beard" in a rerun of the now-defunct Discovery Wings Channel's documentary Flight Sim - click here to see the commercial we got out of the deal. Or maybe even my unforgettable stint as "Jeff the bad guitar player" on Tacoma, Washington's own Spud Goodman show in 1985. I really helped turn that show around - a scant12 years after my appearance, Spud landed both Weird Al Yankovic and Louie Anderson . . . You're welcome, Spud.

It doesn't really matter what you watch, so long as you're paying attention to me.

I'd like that . . . .

Well, yeah it was a little, but I don't think it actually did that . . .

Hal9000 — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:42:00 GMT

What's that smell? Oh, I know . . . it's "old blog".

Sorry about that.

The last post seemed to be pretty well received, and a number of you have asked if we get other email messages like that. Unfortunately, almost all of our customers are sane, rational people with good ideas, and better grammar, so there's not that many good ones to choose from. My personal goal for some as-yet-unannounced future version of our product is to really corner the loathsome and sad segment of the market . . .

I do, however, have two all-time favorites - one of them is lost, buried in an archive somewhere, but it consisted of a series of lengthy diatribes about how the sunsets in Flight Sim are not "anatomically correct". The best part was that the sender started each message with the disclaimer "I am legally blind".

Thankfully, I still have a copy of the other one and, even though I regret pulling out the big guns at this point, I've got to do something to distract the audience so that they forget how long its been since my last post. Here it is, with just one character edited for the family audience:

-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXX
Sent: Sun 2/25/2001 4:41 AM
To: FS Ideas
Cc:
Subject: PROBLEM !

I purchase your flight Simulator 200 game and i get an error that is
not suppored anywhere .... now that shows how cheap your support is
and we have to pay for it .... evreytime i fly around 3 minutes after
my takeoff or even just as i take off i get an Illigal Operation error
starting the following:

FS2000 caused an invalid page fault in
module TERRAIN.DLL at 0167:20c3942b

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY - THIS IS SUX AND SH*TS ME !!!

For the record, he was actually using Flight Simulator 2000, not Flight Simulator 200 (the like trees and mountains edition). Unlike MD, however, I can't be too hard on Mr. X. Nobody wants their software to crash, and his raw frustration and peculiarly constructed profanity still resonate around here, 4 1/2 years later.

Here's hoping that the next one isn't sux, and doesn't do that other thing to anyone.

Tell FS . . . Why I shouldn't Blog on a Sunday Morning

Hal9000 — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 21:32:00 GMT

Every day, we get a number of suggestions sent to our tell_fs@microsoft.com email address. And, when I say “suggestions”, I mean letters from the widows of Nigerian finance ministers, offers for discounted Viagra, complaints about our copy protection, and . . . suggestions. Contrary to popular mythology, we read them all. The majority of the suggestions are great: well-reasoned and carefully thought out ideas from unusually dedicated and passionate customers, the kind of customers any smart business dreams of. Sometimes, though, we get ideas that are unrealistic, complaints that lack any real useful information, and suggestions that are actually offensive.

Yesterday, we got one that is all of that and more. Against my better judgment, I’ll preserve the sender’s anonymity, and refer to them only as “MD”. If you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll parse their entire message, bit by bit:

You should make it so that the scenery changes depending upon what year is entered. Like if its 1940 you'd have the buildings of NYC look all old n stuff.

We’ve actually dabbled in this area in past versions – we used to model the existence and absence of the Berlin wall based on date, for one example, and the eruption of Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii for another. The problem, of course, is that we already build everywhere, it gets almost infinitely more complicated when you ask us to build everywhen. Thankfully, if MD really wants to see NYC looking “all old n stuff”, all they need to do is get a hold of my friend Bill Lyons’ superlative Golden Wings add-on one of my all time favorites. Bill, if you’re reading this, you’d better hurry up and recreate every other moment in time. I’d like it by Christmas, if you please.

Or if the years set to 1400 you'd just see like trees and mountains etc.

Because everybody knows there was nothing in the year 1400 but “like trees and mountains”. I have ancestors who fought prominently in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and, going back further, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. They must have been pretty stupid, fighting actual wars when there was nothing at stake but like trees and mountains.

At the very least ya should make it easier for scenery designers to create time-reactive scenery.

Since I’m far from a scenery expert, I don’t really have a sense for how hard this is now, but I’m happy to agree with MD anyway and say yes, it would be great if we made it easier.

OTHER SUGGESTIONS:

-Make altitudes over 30,000.' more realistic re: temp, air density, etc

Okay . . . I’m willing to bet that MD has no idea what, if anything, is wrong with the way we model these things at higher altitudes, but somebody told them it wasn’t realistic. But, for the record, if I had my way, we’d remove our 100,000 foot cap, and model the atmosphere right on out to where there isn’t any anymore, which brings me to . . .

-Make it so ya can go into outer space or even the moon

We’d love to, in fact, we already did once, but it didn’t sell all that well. Regardless, we’d love to do this again, but remember when I said that building everywhen on top of everywhere is almost infinitely more complicated? Well, multiply everywhere by everything, and that “almost” just disappears.

-More dynamic scenery like the car lights there used to be in FS2000

My friend and esteemed colleague Jason has written about these in particular, but, in general, I agree. The real world is a living environment, and, in an earlier post, I offered my formula for designing Flight Sim: (Reality – Last Version) = Goals for the Next One, or More Reality > Less.

-Cars ya can drive to the airport in

We get this one all the time, and it seems silly at first, but it intrigues me. In my perfect world (where I own all the airplanes and it rains Hot Tamales) multiple titles and platforms could exist in the same world. Why should we literally reinvent the wheel(s), when our neighbors upstairs have already built titles like Forza and Project Gotham?

-Cooler explosions like when the plane crashes wt fire and people running around screaming and woman going like, "Oh my god! MY BABY, MY BABYS ON FIRE!!!". OR HEY, how bout showing like Hiroshima getting nuked if you set the date to the exact moment in 1945 when it happened.

Seriously the time travel thing would be way cool!!

MD, we were doing okay up to this point, but you are a loathsome and sad little idiot. If by some chance you happen to read this, and you can prove who you are, I have a proposition: send me your address and I will personally, out of my own pocket, refund the full purchase price of Flight Simulator 2004, just so I don’t have to think of you as a customer anymore.

Is Something Always Better Than Nothing?

Hal9000 — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 05:00:00 GMT

A good pal of mine, when I was floundering around with muttered apologies for not having written in so long, offered to loan me an excuse, which I'll reuse here: "I'm just a man whose circumstances went beyond his control." Normally, I wouldn't quote Styx, and neither would she, but, as another friend's father once said, I'll take my truth wherever I can find it, domo arigato.

To those of you who still check back here to see if I've jotted down anything new and have repeatedly left scowling in disappointment, I'll borrow from the dearly departed Douglas Adams, quoting the creator's last message to all creation: "We apologize for the inconvenience." To the other approximately 6,567,664,338 of you that don't read this . . . bang the rocks together, guys.

The ranks of Aces bloggers have swelled dramatically since last I wrote - Susan Ashlock (Enguaged), Brian Hunt (Habibi), Adrian Woods (Torgo3000), and Mike Zyskowski (Skyhawk) have all gotten started, and, so far, they're providing interesting and particularly useful posts, exactly like I don't.

I actually do have a couple of real posts in the works, but mainly wanted to fire this one off to make sure that anyone who finds mine follows the links to the others. That, and I wanted to give Jason Waskey a heart attack by actually posting something.

More probably follows.

Are you a Mod or a Rocker?

Hal9000 — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:56:00 GMT

No, I'm a Mocker . . .

First of all, for the record, I don't consider Flight Simulator to be a game. I do believe that it can be used as such, but, like so many other aspects of the product, that is up to the customer - you get out of it what you put into it. If I were to design the box, it would A) be really badly designed, and 2) say something like: "Here's the world, here's a couple dozen airplanes, some weather, some ATC, there's the Internet if you want more (a lot more!) of any of those things - now go do whatever you want. And, no, there probably won't be a patch."

Thankfully, I don't design boxes.

I normally don't like to see Flight Sim referred to as "just" a game, not because I don't love games (I do), but because the implication is usually that it isn't as realistic or as useful for training as another product, or that it's less viable as a hobbyist's platform, that it has no value beyond gameplay. (As an aside, my responses have softened over the years, from "It's NOT a game!" to "It's not just a game!", to "It's not strictly a game, unless of course you want it to be.")

This picture of a competitor's booth just down from ours at last summer's AirVenture in Oshkosh, WI, was an unusually . . . formal example. (Take a look at the two kids in the foreground - notice how intently focused they are, determined not to have any fun at all while using a serious simulator.)

However, when I see articles that talk about games that let you customize features, games that have active communities behind them, games that have been published for years and turned into venerable franchises, I turn into a terrible hypocrite, and get all bent out of shape when they forget to mention Flight Sim. Yes, I'm irrationally convinced that I can have it both ways, but admitting it is the first step . . . .

Case in point: There's a good article on game mods in the "Games for Windows" section of the Windows XP area of Microsoft.com. The author, Joel Durham, offers a good introduction to the idea of mods as ways to add variety and extend the life a particular title. But have to take polite exception with him when he says this:

"The seminal game Quake is really the launching point for modern game mods. Sure, there was modding going on before Quake came out in 1996, but id's supergame was groundbreaking . . ."

Yes, he offers an appropriate disclaimer about modding having occurred before Quake, just the like one I'm about to offer in which I say that I agree that Quake was groundbreaking, and offer proper respect to id for their achievement, acknowledge that I was a big fan from the early Wolfenstein and Doom days, etc.

But, I have to point out here, in front of my rapidly dwindling audience of dozens, that the Flight Sim add-on community in 1996 (which, in another disclaimer I'm likely to forget to include, admittedly didn't really take off until Flight Simulator 98, released in 1997) had already been building up steam for more than six years, since the release of Flight Simulator 4.0 in the fall of 1989.

So, I suppose I would have to add a new tagline to my already horribly designed Flight Sim package: "It's not strictly a game, unless you want it to be, or unless you're talking about games that do cool things that we totally did first and stuff . . . "

Or, maybe, just maybe we can continue to do more and more to advertise and support our add-on community (I just can't bring myself to call them a "mod community", any more than I can call an aircraft texture a "skin"), so that we're not so easily overlooked in discussions like this.

Better that than me designing packaging.

How many D's?

Hal9000 — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 02:42:00 GMT

An interesting new debate on AVSIM today - or, at least, a new debate on an old topic: Will 3D virtual cockpits replace 2D instrument panels?

Read the thread here.

In my opinion, our vision, our design for each release of Flight Simulator could be distilled to a pretty simple equation: Take Reality, subtract the Last Version of FS, and then set about minimizing the difference. Some aspects of that difference are pretty big - we can't do wind in your face, motion (without a lot of extra hardware, and we're not really in that business), and we don't want to actually kill any of our customers if they make a mistake, hard as that may be to believe.

Other differences, though, get a little smaller every time - the scenery, the weather, the aircraft, ATC; no one can reasonably argue that all of these things don't look and act a lot more realistic today than they did 25 years ago.

Even in those, areas, of course, we still have to make compromises and take certain liberties in order to try to squeeze the full 360 degrees of sights, sounds, and feelings of flying an airplane, and cram it into glass square that might only 15" diagonally. That's why 2D panels have pop-ups, virtual cockpits support zoom, and why we include things like pressing "w" for the mini-panel, and shift-enter to raise your seat to see the runway better. Real airplanes don't have pop-ups, pressing the "w" key, if I can happen to find one, doesn't do anything in the airplanes I fly. And yet I argue in favor of those features, and would even go so far as to say that they help make the experience more realistic.

Why?

Because when we're forced to compromise, we also try our best to compensate. In real life, people can look around, crane their necks, use peripheral vision - these things are hard to do sitting in front of a monitor. Not everybody has multiple monitors, motion platforms, VR goggles, or an HDMI port at the base of their skull. So, we compensate, and do what we can to let our customers make the experience their own. If you want 2D, you've got it, if you want 3D, you've got that, too. If your machine isn't the fastest thing around, you can trade some scenery or weather detail for a few precious extra frames per second. If you're not much for landing, then turn off crash detection.

What it comes down to, then, is this: wherever, whenever possible, we compensate by giving the user a choice. "Jacks of all trades and masters of none?" That bristles a little, but I have a lot of respect for Peter, even though we've not met in person, and have to admit that he may be right - as long as he remembers that we have a lot of different customers, and they each prefer their own particular trades.

I think another person I 've always thought highly of, Geoff A., said it best:

"I would say the more options for the end user to customize this sim the way they want it -the better. That after all is why MS has been the most succesful sim-the ability to customize it to your own personal preference."

There are a lot of big names on the thread, some of them make or refer to some of my very favorite add-ons, add-ons that have found their own ways to compensate, so many of them just beautifully. Flight Sim as a product abounds with choices, Flight Simulation as a hobby, even more so.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Full Circle

Hal9000 — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 19:53:00 GMT

As of next month, I will have been working on the Flight Simulator franchise for 7 years. As of next year, I will have been a customer of said franchise (the longest continuously published piece of software I know of) for 25 years. One of the very few tangible, material things that has been a constant in my life that actually predates FS is the family airplane, a 1944 Cessna T-50.

(Another worth noting is the book "Flying: A Golden Science Guide" by Barry Schiff. I've had this since I was 3, and I still learn from it every time I pick it up. Originals are still available here, surprisingly.)

This is the first airplane I ever flew. I was 4 years old, and had to sit on phone books to get my eyes level with the attitude indicator - actually seeing over the instrument panel and flying VFR was years (or at least inches) away. Inside, it's vintage Air Corps utilitarianism meets Packard limousine, outside it's a lumbering bright red classic with two noisy radials that knows nothing about subtlety. It isn't a common airplane – out of about 5500 built from 1939-45, about 24 still fly. Most people mis-identify it as a single-tailed Beech 18, or a miniature DC-3. If they do recognize it, it’s most likely thanks to the "Sky King" TV serial of the 50’s. The airplane is obscure enough that the Flight Sim community has produced only three add-ons of the type that I’ve been aware of over the years. If you missed the irony, I’ll point out that "only three" for an aircraft this relatively obscure is actually pretty impressive . . . .

With that, I have to make a simple statement about Flight Sim add-ons: we love 'em. One of the greatest joys of this job is the "honeymoon phase" shortly after we hit the shelves when we get to take a a bit of a break and sit back and watch all the new aircraft, scenery, utilities, etc, start rolling in. The staggering number, variety, quality, and creativity of the add-ons that are out there are what, in my opinion, help make Flight Sim among the richest, most personal and customizable experiences someone can have sitting in front of a PC.

Anyway, the most recent FS T-50 (aka UC-78, AT-8, AT-17, JRC-1, Crane, "Bamboo Bomber", "Bobcat", "Rhapsody in Glue", etc) comes from Alpha Sim in the UK. It's a nice model, with a clean panel and virtual cockpit, stable flight model, gorgeous exterior, and includes wheeled and float versions and a half-dozen or so liveries for $14.00 US.

Just finding a well-done and full-featured model of this type is unusual enough - the moment I saw it (last December), I was $14 poorer (more than half a share of MSFT stock at today's prices!) and happier for it.

But, unfortunately for those reading this, the story doesn't end there: You see, one of the aforementioned liveries, completely without context, contact, or connection, just happens to be our family airplane. I don’t mean that it just looks like it – the paint scheme is one-of-a-kind to begin with, and, if that weren’t enough, the N-number (a unique registration number, not unlike a license plate on a car) is the same.

Somehow, someway, pictures most likely taken at an air show or fly-in found their way over the Internet (presumably) to the UK and on to a texture sheet, before ending up here, at Microsoft in Redmond, on my test PC, under the (legitimate, I swear) guise of compatibility testing.

Phil at AlphaSim said that they thought their texture artist just made it up. The coincidence didn't seem to strike him as much as I would have thought, but I enjoyed it. It was a nice, and wholly unexpected way to add yet another personal connection to the franchise.

If anyone reading this buys this add-on, be nice to the red one. (Oh, and ours has never been on floats, so you might want to do a little re-mapping.)