Terminal Reality Inc.'s FLY! The making of a simulator

Flight Journal, Feb 2000 by Lert, Peter

Meanwhile, I pressed on, beginning with basic aerodynamics and primary maneuvers in the lowly 172. And, sure enough, as I worked my way up through the airplanes, a series of beta versions of FLY!, "burned onto" gold recordable CD ROMs, made their way to my mailbox, each with more aircraft depicted and more features implemented and each with its own little group of new bugs. Unfortunately, the nature of the project's various deadlines (and the fact that I had to meet a different set according to factors such as editorial review and press schedules) meant that I was always at least a couple of cycles ahead of the beta versions and later RCs ("release candidates") I received.

After having reviewed so many such projects, it was fascinating to work "in the belly of the beast" and to see the pressures that actually drive the development of a new simulator. I learned that software developers have to walk a very fine line: on the one hand, their prospective product must offer a level of features and performance that will make it both competitive and attractive to its intended audience (and, in some cases, attractive to the people who will finance its development); on the other hand, if it becomes too sophisticated, the guys in the trenches-those writing and debugging code-won't be able to meet the release date set many months in advance by the marketing department. One of two things might happen: the product gets pushed out the door before all the bugs have been worked out, or it ships so late that it not only misses planned marketing targets but also gets branded by a very critical and demanding public as "vaporware"--or both!

I made a few trips to TRI; during one, I became a part of the product itself. In its quest for realism, TRI opted to provide ATC communications as actual voices-not just text scrolling across the screen. I spent several hours in the in-house recording studio striving for just the right mixture of boredom and irritation in my emotion-packed reading of such classics as "Cleared for the approach" and "Taxi into position and hold." On each visit, the program was further along; toward the end,

I was stunned by the realism of its instrument panels and certain visual effects. Indeed, I have to say that they're way ahead of most of the "real," i.e., full-scale, general-aviation simulators I've worked with over the years (and, of course, all prior generations of desktop simulation products).

I learned, however, that such technology comes at a-sometimes hidden-price. As hardware capabilities improve and "cost per performance increment" continue to plummet, software designers tend to fall into a Parkinsonian syndrome of exploitation. This isn't limited to games and simulations (look at such "bloatware" as Office 2000, for example, with its processor, RAM, and disc-space requirements), but it seems particularly evident in the entertainment market. Whenever a new hardware capability becomes available-say, some kind of super-duper 3D video-display standard-game designers try to incorporate it. This is driven partly by competition: "If we don't do it, those guys over at YoyoDyne will get it to the market before we can "-but I think it's also due, in part, to the demographics of the program developers and their intended markets. After all, we live in an era in which the home computer has replaced the family car as the vehicle with which young males can burn off excess testosterone. As a result, you'll find offerings such as FLY!, whose list price of $49.95 seems ridiculously low to me for such a sophisticated product (and I've even seen it discounted); however, you need a very sophisticated computer to get it to run at anywhere near its capabilities. I wrote the manual and ran-OK, limped-the beta versions on a 20OMHz Pentium 11 with 64 megabytes of RAM and an 8-megabyte 128-bit video card. This was good enough to let me load the program and verify that what I had written in the manual would actually happen on screen, but it was only just barely adequate to actually "fly" any of the airplanes; even then, it provided acceptable frame rates only if I deselected most of the fancy "eye candy" that's one of FLY!'s strongest points. I think that "Dvorak's law," which states that "Any computer you really want will cost $3,000," doesn't quite hold true anymore; you'll probably do fine at about two grand. Even so, unless you either have other uses for the computer or are really into games, it's a significant chunk of money-enough, in fact, to take you well past your first solo flight in a real airplane at almost any decent flight school.