Armchair Aviator Awards

By Andrew Herd (30 August 2005)

have been handing Armchair Aviator Awards out over the years for Flight Simulator addons which I feel either represent the pick of the pack, are particularly innovative, or have a lot of pizazz, but the rapid rise in quality standards that has taken place recently means that a single grade award isn't appropriate any more. The 'old' AAA (much of the design of which was done by Ruud Faber of FScene fame, by the way) ended up being given to an increasingly wide range of packages which sometimes had little in common - at one end, I gave the AAA to good, solid package that ought to please everyone, at the other were some fantastic pieces of code that were quite simply the best in their class. Not being a great believer in rating type awards, which tend to end up giving everything 90%, or four and a half points, I stayed with the old AAA, hoping that the developers of products which had been awarded it would be duly rewarded by increased sales, and users would know that if they bought a package with an AAA, they wouldn't be disappointed.

As far as I can tell from the feedback I get, the idea has worked, but the market has outgrown the original AAA system, so the award is going to evolve.

This is the old award. Ruud and I spent many evenings pondering the design, on the basis that most flight simulation awards make the Nobel peace prize look like something given for underachievement. I had already settled on the armchair aviator idea, but Ruud, design guru that he is, went out and found the chair and a wing and a world and glued the three together to produce something distinctive, which has an understated appeal that pleased both of us.

This 'old' AAA has been awarded to a list of products that I still stand by, but given that what was once a trickle of Flight Simulator addons has grown to a flood and I review at least fifty of packages every year, the award is going to have to be replaced. There are still some reviews featuring it in the pipeline, but they should have finished feeding through by early Fall 2005 and after that, the new series awards will come on line. The old awards still count, by the way, I am not taking them away, although remember that they only apply to the specific versions of the packages that I reviewed - publishers shouldn't be claiming AAAs for FS2010 packages when they were awarded to the FS2002 version. Unlike good wine, software does not necessarily improve with age and I have seen one or two addons that have gone backwards over the years, usually as a result of changes in the development team, or even because of a change of developer.

What are readers to make of products which don't have an award?

Good question.

My practice is not to review products on FlightSim.Com that don't have any virtue at all, so if you see a review, it is because I thought the package was worthy of consideration. One of the things I try to bring out in reviews is the different qualities I find in products - so for example, a brave attempt by a fledgling developer to simulate a plane that no-one else has ever seen fit to bother with would get a review even if it had some rough edges, assuming I could find time to fit it in, and as long as the product was at least equal in quality to the default planes.

If a product doesn't have an award then, it doesn't mean to say it isn't worth buying, quite the reverse, it might be very good indeed, but something in the mix will have let it down. To give an example, where plane simulations are concerned, less than totally convincing panels are the number one culprit and it is surprising how many developers release packages with background graphics that make me want to ask, 'If you are planning on selling this, why not take some time out to learn how to use a graphics editing package first?' It is a hard fact that there is plenty of good freeware out there and one of the distinguishing features of payware should be that it is considerably better than its nearest freeware rival, but there are developers out there who do not seem to be aware of this and, more disturbingly, many buyers. I appreciate that some bits of FS products are harder to do than others, notably flight models, but getting panel and gauge graphics right is such a basic skill that every payware team should include someone whose skills are up to the task. If they don't, they should be asking themselves whether they are ready to do payware.

Another reason why packages don't get awards is because they are too bugged to be reliable. High end FS addons are so complicated that one or two patches are the rule, but the present record is seven and counting. I have learned to forgive minor stuff, because the small sizes of development and beta teams make it difficult to trap every single bitty problem - even the great touchstone of FS big iron, 767 Pilot in Command, needed a couple of patches before it could truly be said to be finished.

So if a package has the new first level, 'Blue' AAA shown here, it means that it is much better than average, has minor bugs at the most, looks real, feels real, sounds real and represents value for money, in as much as anyone can judge that.

The Blue award replaces the old AAA shown up top and if a product has one, it means you can buy without risk of wondering what it was you paid for - the package will be substantially better than anything that came with the version of Flight Simulator current at the time of the award and, if it is payware, it will also be significantly better than any rival freeware extent at the time. If the package is freeware, a Blue award means it is well ahead of the pack, though it may not be as good as rival payware - the reason for this being that I always cut freeware developers some slack, on the basis that they do it for nothing and you can't apply the same standards to a volunteer outfit as you do to one with a paid staff of six.

Next is the Silver award. This is a classy item which will be awarded much less frequently than the Blue. If a product has a Silver AAA, it means it is special enough to stand out from the pack and that I think that you are going to have a lot of fun using it. There are only a few developers out there capable of coding software to the standard that might attract a Silver and I don't expect them to be achieve the standard consistently. One of the problems with the original AAA was that I ended up giving it to just about every Flight1, DreamFleet, Captain Sim and RealAir product because those guys never seem to let their standards slip - so the award became routine and ultimately there was no way of distinguishing the best thing one of those four ever did from products of theirs which were merely good.

The Silver says that you are looking at a very impressive package which leaves the competition for dead and if this is an area of flight simulation that interests you, you ought to be coming up with reasons not to buy it, rather than the other way around. It won't mean that the package is absolutely the best one of its type available, there may be other products in the same class with Silvers - for example, given the rate that simulations of Boeings are released, it is hard to imagine that we won't see some absolutely outstanding packages in the future, and so it is just about possible that you might find two versions of the same plane being given Silvers - but such cases will be few and far between.

If a freeware package gets a Silver, it will almost certainly have blown my socks off. Freeware teams can't generally code to the standard I have in mind here and if a product achieves it, you can guarantee that Barbara will have been yelling at me that my dinner is going to be fed to the dog if I don't get my ass downstairs soon and that when I did get downstairs, her eyes will have glazed over as I told her why I have been glued to the armchair in my office. Payware or freeware, Silvers will be awarded to products which so totally capture the feel of a plane, or of a place, that reality is only a step away. Silvers will be given products regardless of complexity, as otherwise I can see a situation arising where the award only ever ends up going to heavyweight 100 Mb plus addons and I don't want to shut out the smaller players and the more interesting 'period' packages.

Now... the Gold.

The Gold award will be rare. If a package gets one of these, my socks will have been totally destroyed in the explosion and my dinner will be inside the dog. My first feeling on loading the plane, scenery, utility, or whatever, will have been 'Yeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaa!!!!' and that feeling will have persisted until I finished writing the final word of the review. The product will be an FS classic and you can pretty much guarantee that it will not be improved upon for a long while - famous last words here, but I only plan to hand out a few of these, ever. If a package merits a Gold, people will be talking about it in the forums in years to come, 'Do you remember WidgetSim's rocket assisted Piper Cub? You know, the one that got the Gold award and meant Andrew's dog had to be put on a diet?' I jest, but a Gold will mark a product as being a real one of a kind, coded to a standard that even the best developers can only hope to achieve once in a blue moon.

So that is the scheme of things. What I plan to do is - assuming Nels Anderson can find the time to post it on FlightSim.Com - is produce a list of packages which have won each award, with links to the reviews. That way, if readers want to see what I think are the best of the best, then there will be an easy way to do it. The Silver award list will be a kind of moving take on the 'top ten', while the Gold list will be a short list of classic 'must haves'. Yeah, it will be based on my personal choice, but I have written this piece to explain how I make my decisions, so that readers and developers can see the system that lies behind them. FlightSim.Com operates other award systems, notably the Developer's Award for freeware (given by users, so your vote counts) and the Excellence Award, and thanks to a hard core of enthusiastic writers, we have more reviews on this site than all our rivals put together, so get reading - and if you see a really great freeware addon that no-one else has noticed and think the world know about it, get writing (-: