DreamFleet/FSD Cessna 172

By Andrew Herd (4 October 2000)

he Flightsim Developers / DreamFleet 2000 Cessna 172 represents the completion of a trio of freeware packages that the developers can honestly claim to be among the best aircraft ever to be released for FS2000. The 172 follows on from highly acclaimed replacements for the default Microsoft 182S and 182RG panels. The 182S panel caused quite a stir when it appeared early this year, and gathered a variety of awards, but it was eclipsed by the considerably more sophisticated 182RG panel, which followed two months later.

The new package makes a similar leap in complexity and in recognition of this it has been released as four different files. The largest contains the complete aircraft, panel and sound package, weighing in at a massive 23.5 Mb [dfsdc172.zip]. The aircraft and sound package alone make for a 13 Mb download [fsdc172a.zip], while the panel on its own is a weighty 10.5 Mb [df1721_0.zip]. Finally, the operating handbook, which is comprised of scans of an actual manual, is a relatively conservative 2.6 Mb [df172poh.zip].

You will be pleased to hear that after such a massive download, installation is very straight-forward and with the exception of the operator's handbook, each file unzips to reveal a setup file, which installs the contents automatically when you double-click it, as long as you can point it to your FS2000 directory (in general this is in C:\Program files\Microsoft games\FS2000).

The panel is very much in the DreamFleet mould, and represents an actual 1984 vintage 172, complete with scuff marks, weird stains, general wear and tear and accumulations of dust and dirt that make aircraft of a certain age so personable.

The main panel bitmap is outstanding, with the exception of a small area just above the top left hand padding curvature, where some pixellation is visible against blue skies. There is a lush avionics fit, including two nav radios, ADF, transponder and a Navomatic 300A autopilot. The latter instrument is borrowed from the DreamFleet 182RG and is beyond the wildest dreams of most real 172 owners, who have to cope without such expensive refinements. In fact the majority of 172s lack any kind of autopilot at all, and those which do usually only run to relatively unsophisticated single axis machines. The radios are particularly well executed, with readouts which are legible without any need to press your nose on the monitor, and they show a standby frequency with a transfer button just like the real thing; while the flight instrumentation and switchgear is about as faithful to the original as it is possible to be within the confines of an FS2000 cockpit.

The panel night lighting is almost faultless and very relaxing to fly with - if you want to see what it looks like, click here.

For technical reasons, only the clock and the altimeter can be 'zoomed' for accurate adjustment; a reduction from the four zoomable gauges on the 182RG. Personally I would have gone for zooming the heading and VOR1 indicators, because the graduations on the navigation instruments are only just discernable, making it difficult to know for sure if you are properly set up for a radial intercept. To be fair, this is a problem which affects almost every FS2000 panel and it is a reflection of the difficulty of reconciling detail with standard Windows screen resolutions. The default Microsoft cockpits avoid the problem entirely by departing from reality and using very large displays - I suspect legibility troubles will be with us until designers can assume we all run 21 inch monitors at 1600 x 1280!

Clever use of hotspots makes it possible to view the lower panel, the DME, the GPS, and to zoom the aforementioned instruments. You can remove the yoke by clicking on it and several of the screenshots here were taken with it hidden. The lower panel hotspot is the cigar lighter, which tickles my fancy for some reason. One of the beta testers appears to have stolen the lighter itself and Lou Betti would appreciate its return, by the way.

One problem with the design is that the panel fills the forward field of view and you will have to fiddle with it to get an adequate take-off and approach view. The reason for this is the inclusion of the switchgear at the bottom of the upper panel in the main panel view; while this is perfectly logical, it may have been better to include it on the lower panel and improve the forward view. You can of course use shift-enter a few times to pan the panel down and ctrl-space to pan it back up again, if you need to. That being said, the panel is a perfect height for IFR training and such is the popularity of the 172 that it is likely to see a lot of service by flyers around the world for this very purpose.

The virtual cockpit is, well, a virtual cockpit. For those of you who like this sort of thing, and run FS2000 on a Cray II to get acceptable loading times, it is exceptionally well drawn - even the doors open, although sadly they blow shut once you have 40 knots on the clock, denying me a chance to get a shot out the door with the aircraft in flight. Sadly, the virtual cockpit code is not one of the strong points of FS2000 and although the design team have clearly put in a huge amount of work here, it will have to wait for FS2002 and 1.4 GHz computers before we can appreciate their efforts in all their glory. Meanwhile, you can cut the loading times to acceptable levels by opening the view keys to open each view at the beginning of the flight - at least that way they are likely to be cached when you need them in a hurry.

The aircraft is the baby of the Flightsim Developers team, and as you might expect from their recent Piper Cub, it is one of the nicest 172s around, featuring a snazzy white, blue and red scheme. All the control surfaces are animated, and the prop is particularly pleasing to watch, especially at tickover. Ground handling is about as good as can be achieved in FS2000, without any excessive dipping on braking, and with the usual rather snappy turns to rudder. Given the variations in feel which all the possible different control systems FS2000 allows, the flight model seems about right to me, with very sedate handling, ladylike stalls and a general overall feeling of stability (I flew it with a CH Products USB yoke and pedals by the way.) Night lighting is nothing to write home about and although all the relevant switches are present in the cockpit, the impact on the outside lighting is less than one might expect.

The sound set is very complete, with samples attached to most of the switches, the doors, and even the gyro. The engine has separate start up sounds and while in general the samples are of adequate length, they are slightly quiet to my ears, but this is probably personal preference. You can always turn the noise levels up.

Documentation is absolutely outstanding. Install docs are minimal, given the automatic setup, but fifteen text documents and graphics describe the operation of the sim in detail. While the documentation is comprehensive, rather less attention has been paid to it than to the aircraft and panel (you can see where the team's enthusiasm lay) and it is presented as a series of text files; an html version with in-line graphics would have been easier to get to grips with. The icing on the cake is that a copy of a real 172 operations manual is available as a separate download.

DreamFleet states that the 172 will run on machines with as low a spec as a 300 MHz Pentium with 128 Mb of RAM and in general the performance figures bear this out. I compared the 172 to the default King Air, as I no longer have the default 182 installed (replaced by the DreamFleet 182S, as it happens). I would calculate that the 172 causes a 15-20% hit on frame rates compared to the King Air, a loss which isn't material on a 733 MHz machine, but which makes the sim marginally usable on the slower machine, especially in spot plane view. It was noticeable that there were times when the frame rate dropped quite considerably, and clearly there is a gauge somewhere in the package that really tries the processor out, but these dips were only momentary. Loading times on the 300 were quite long - 22 seconds or so, so if you like fast loads you might like to think about this. Add in some clouds and I suspect that the 300 MHz machine would really struggle. A realistic bottom spec would be a 500 MHz system with a high performance graphics card.

I ran the tests in clear skies. Both machines were running Windows 98 second edition, Flight Simulator 2000 Professional Edition, update 2b applied. Specs: 733: Intel Pentium 733 MHz, 256 Mb RAM, Creative GeForce 2 GTS with 32 Mb RAM; 300: Intel Pentium 300 MHz, 128 Mb RAM, Voodoo 3000 16 Mb RAM.

Overall impressions? If you are looking for a 172 which is good enough to get some practice in for your license, or you want to fly a realistic sim of a light aircraft that just happens to be great fun, the wait is over, though you will need to have a reasonably well specified machine to run it. The next release from DreamFleet is going to be their long awaited payware Boeing 737, and if this 172 is anything to go by, it will set a new standard for realism in FS2000.