So near, and yet so far...

Flight Journal, Jun 1999 by Lert, Peter

As I write this in January, it looks as if the highly competitive market for desktop PC flight simulations is not only undergoing a period of consolidations but, like Gaul, can also be divided into three parts. At the top end is a dwindling number of "serious" high-end flight simulators. Priced at about $300 and up (sometimes way up), these software packages are usually specific to a single aircraft type, have very accurate flight and weather modeling and often have photorealistic instrument panels. They include features such as track logging for formal flight instruction situations; indeed, some of them, when used with even more expensive dedicated hardware interfaces, qualify with the FAA as personal computer aviation training devices (PCATDs) and can be used to log a limited number of flying hours that can be credited toward an actual pilot's license. Occupying a special niche in this arena are a couple of less expensive products that will each merit a 'Virtual Pilot" article in their own right:

AeroWmx's 747-400 Precision Simulator and Laminar Research's astonishing X-Plane.

The lower end of the market includes an ever-increasing plethora of military and combat "flight simulators." Note the quotation marks: while a few have surprisingly adequate flight modeling, and some have "wargame" campaign planning engines with the complexity of a Tom Clancy novel, many are little more than arcade games complete with action-movie explosions, apocalyptic sound effects, crash-proof airplanes and unlimited ammunition. Even the "serious" offerings generally have an arcade mode, and judging from their intended market (and the paucity of multisyllabic words in their instruction manuals), that's the mode in which they may well spend most of their time. The latest wrinkle here is that after killing off all the enemies provided by the software, you can log your game on to multiplayer Internet sites and try your hand against your friends and neighbors.

The middle market segment-in both price and sophistication-is harder to define, but for the past couple of years, it has been dominated by Microsoft's Flight Simulator 98 (FS98). There have been other contenders in this arena, including Flight Unlimited in its various versions, but Pro Pilot (PP) made the biggest initial splash because in addition to a "saturation bombing" marketing campaign, it came from Sierra Online, which was then the 500-pound gorilla of the game industry. But the loudest splashes come from throwing the heaviest objects into the water-the ones that sink immediately, as did the initial version of PP. It was just another case of an overly ambitious product rushed too quickly to the market

Well, Sierra is back (in the guise of its Washington-based Dynamix unit) with a new version-Pro Pilot '99 (PP99), and the good news is that it's a very significant improvement over its predecessors; the bad news is that, once again, it shows signs of having been pushed out through the hangar door before all the dope had dried. This is doubly unfortunate because, first, it's a "strike two" situation, and second, in that many of the errors I found aren't fundamental disasters but are maddening little things that would have been easy to fix.

When I first installed the program, I found myself, almost against my will, favorably impressed: it has a great deal of capability and some very usable features. But glitches that I thought might have been due to my installation errors persisted through several removals and reinstallations, even though I followed print and screen instructions to the letter. For a while, my computer spent more time reboot ing than actually running the program! For example, one of the major improvements is that the program now supports 3DFX and Glide Drivers at up to 800x600 resolution. My computer, however, normally runs 1024x768 (on a 17inch monitor). The program would run only if I manually reset the resolution to the lower value before starting it; otherwise, it would attempt to reset the value itself and then crash the entire system.

The program is also fairly resourcehungry. The package suggests a 133mHz Pentium, 32MB of RAM and 100MB of available disk space as a minimum standard, but it recommends a 233mHz processor, 64MB of RAM and fully 550MB of disk space (half a gig!) as a more reasonable value. When I attempted to run an image-manipulation program at the same time (to get screenshots), performance suffered. Ultimately, I gave up, since the program would not allow screenshots when running in full-screen mode. While loading the program (which seemed to take forever), it showed a static photo of snow-covered mountains; since I live in Colorado at 9,650 feet, that's what I see all the time-usually associated with hours of driveway shoveling.

The program does some things quite well. I was pleasantly impressed by the smoothness of the frame rate, even when showing elaborate terrain; PP99 uses a fairly dense grid of USGS elevation information. Most terrain is depicted as small polygons with the usual CAD-like buildings, but there's considerably more realistic satellite-based terrain around several urban areas.