Toni Agramont's Balearics Scenery

By Andrew Herd (8 November 2001)

oni Agramont's Balearics scenery was released in May this year. Its scope is enormous, and the zips represent the results of many hundreds of hours of patient effort, but like many freeware developers, Toni has had little acknowledgement, beyond the satisfaction of seeing his efforts downloaded several thousand times. His experience is fairly typical. Freeware designers are the bedrock that flight simulation rests on - without them our hobby would still exist, but the experience would be far less rich. Sure, we could get by with the default planes, and endless airports that all look identical, and yes, there are commercial releases every now and again, but if that was all there was, the sheer relentless sameness of everything would drive me, for one, to look for entertainment elsewhere.

Freeware is a lucky dip. While we are entitled to expect a certain level of competence from payware; when a freeware author releases a package, we just have to take it just as it comes. With payware the purchaser has a right, within certain limits, to ask that software measures up to current standards, is reliable and gives value for money. With freeware, no such rules apply - you have to accept that when you download a zip, you are taking a gamble. It is surprising how often people forget this, and I have eavesdropped on some interesting threads in the forums where the message writers have apparently been unable to grasp the fact that when it all is said and done, they aren't entitled to demand anything at all from freeware developers.

So we should count ourselves lucky that the standard of freeware is as good as it is. While it is true that not all freeware is born equal, and that there will always be teeth-grittingly bad releases, even the most talented developers have to begin somewhere. Tolerate errors today and we may reap the benefits tomorrow; you just never know where these people will end up - look at Eric Ernst.

There is another dimension to freeware - some of its most innovative features have a habit of finding their way into Flight Simulator, after taking advantage of the base program's API in ways that never occurred to the Microsoft team. We need freeware in order to catalyse the development of Flight Simulator itself; and while it is the custom to criticize Microsoft for its buggy implementation of FS2000, the real strength of the program lies in the fact that it is in a state of continuous evolution. FS2002 is just out and already the developers are already thinking of the next version. The very best of freeware evolves with Flight Simulator, with new versions appearing after each upgrade of the main program. Sometimes it beats me why the authors keep on putting all their time into their projects, but I am surely glad that they do.

Another aspect of freeware that many simmers will be unaware of is the cooperative network that exists between freeware programmers. The scenery and the aircraft shown in the screen shots here wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the efforts of people like Dai Griffiths, who developed the Collins nav pack in the Falcon, or Rafael Garcia Sanchez, for his Nova program, or Martin Wright, author of BMP2000, a utility which converts bitmaps - have you heard of any of these names? Unless you are the sort of person who loves delving around in the bowels of readme files, probably not, but they are the unsung heroes of freeware. If BMP2000 didn't exist, neither would a lot of scenery and aircraft that flight simmers take for granted. Nova is a shareware utility which allows programmers to design 3D objects for Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2000 and the Combat Flight Simulator 2, but the output can be distributed as freeware, and I am sure that many people are using Nova products without being aware of their parentage. There are dozens of other people out there who have developed tools and utilities without which Flight Simulation simply couldn't happen, and I doubt that they ever get much by way of thanks for what they have done. Part of the reason why I have written this piece is to say how much I appreciate the hard work they have put in so that we can enjoy ourselves.

I had a ball, flying around Toni's Balearics. The scenery isn't perfect, but the attention to detail is terrific; just about every single lighthouse on the islands seems to be there, let alone the airports and other buildings. The approach to Ibiza is about as visually impressive as anything you are likely to see in Flight Simulator, and short final to Palma de Mallorca isn't far behind. The default scenery has been replaced by mesh, which means that all the ranges of hills which Microsoft forgot are there. With this scenery installed, the approach plates make sense, because there are mountains to avoid, while VFR flight becomes fun because there is so much to see. And as you drop the gear, there are ferries in the ports, and merchantmen further out, and I half expect to see dophins in the sea too.

All this comes at a price - the scenery zips and bug fixes total 10 megs, and you need another 8 megs of Nova textures to get everything working, and it isn't clear exactly which Nova files I needed to have installed, which is a weakness of the system. If there is a major problem with the scenery, it is that it is a frame rate killer, and even on a 1.7 GHz Pentium with 256 Mb of RAM I was still getting single figure rates at times, with the usual long pauses one gets used to when mesh sceneries are involved in FS2000. Nor can you use building ground shadows unless you want to see some unusual artifacts, but warts and all, I like this package, because like its author, it has great spirit. So raise your glass to freeware. Long may it continue.