FS2004 - A Century Of Flight Part 5: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

By Andrew Herd (18 July 2003)

y now, if you have been following this mini-series, you should have a good idea of what is new in A Century of Flight. While the previous articles have showcased particular features, this piece takes a look at the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of changing over to the new version.

The first machine I ran a copy of Flight Simulator on was a Tandy TRS-80, back in something like 1979 and I have installed more or less every version ever since, give or take a couple. In the early days a new version meant good and bad news. The good news was that you didn't have to reinstall all your favorite add-ons, the bad news was that you had to buy a completely new machine to run the sim on.

Why didn't we have to install all our favorite add-ons? Well, there weren't any - it was at least the mid-eighties before any add-ons appeared, the late eighties before there were enough to worry about, and the mid-nineties before the freeware revolution got started - purely and simply because that is when the World Wide Web became accessible. OK, some freeware and public domain add-ons did exist prior to that, but you had to get it from places like CompuServe and download costs were unbelievable. Strange though it may seem, Flight Simulator has a far longer history of payware add-ons than it does of freeware ones, which only began to appear in any numbers about eight years ago, when the Web presented us with an easy way of distributing them.

Whatever. In the good 'ol days, when simmers didn't shave or inhale, a new version of Flight Simulator meant a new computer, it being commonly held that Microsoft designed the sim to run on hardware that hadn't been invented yet. That was way back when a new operating system was released to take advantage of each new processor and we slogged our painful way through half a dozen generations of MS-DOS and 80x86 processors (remember the 80386SX anyone?) before we got something called Windows which consumed the entire resources of every computer within a five mile radius. That was sometime around 1985 or so - it gives pause for thought to remember that it was ten long years after that before Microsoft were brave enough to get finally get FS running on their favorite operating system.

Enough of history. I say this because although you read bitching in the forums about the way new versions of FS won't run on older processors, we can be thankful that we don't all have to throw out our systems, because that is how it used to be. In those days, a new version of Flight Simulator wasn't so much an incremental build on the feature set of a mature application as much as a scorched earth attack on the old code, and new versions had little, if anything, in common with their predecessors. The downside of Flight Simulator's maturity is that add-ons are legion and a major issue with every recent version of Flight Simulator has been 'Will my FSDS Westland Woodpigeon run on it?' Or similar - there really was a Westland Woodpigeon, by the way, but it didn't do too well, could have been the name, maybe. But as you will have gathered from the pictures here, there are add-ons that work extremely well in FS2004 and many transfer across with few obvious problems.

But some won't. According to the FS development team, if an add-on has been coded according to the rules given in the Software Development Kits (SDKs), then if it ran on FS2002, it should run on FS2004. I don't think I would be breaking any confidences if I said that the team went out of their way to invite notices of add-ons that didn't work, so that they could do what they could to ease the situation. The end result has been pretty successful, the one fly in the ointment being that many of the really big selling add-ons were only big sellers because they didn't so much break the SDK rules as trample all over them. The reason why they were made like that was because it allowed their developers to add features that could not otherwise have been been incorporated. One good example of this was the hugely popular FSD Pilatus Porter, which didn't make it into FS2002 because it needed an extensive rewrite and the developers had no time to do it (though I am told a payware version will appear for FS2004); another is the mega-selling DreamFleet 737, which needed a compatibility patch for FS2002, but will require a major recode for FS2004.

The reason these two planes did so well on initial release was because the developers thought outside the box - but the penalty of their doing that was that it made the add-ons incompatible with the next version of FS. While I am sure that there are plenty of people who will be upset at having paid for add-ons that don't work in FS2004, the other side of the coin is that they probably wouldn't have bought them in the first place had not the software done all the clever stuff which caused the incompatibility - and, perhaps more to the point, there is no reason why those add-ons can't continue to be used in FS2002. After all, upgrading isn't compulsory; there are still people out there writing add-ons for FS98.

The good news is that the history of FS payware is that it is usually the case that if a product made a profit under one version of FS, it is reasonably likely to be upgraded for the next. I use the word 'reasonably' advisedly, because it isn't always the case and since most flight simulation developers are loose associations of strong willed, incredibly disputatious individuals (how could I write that?), it is not unknown for them to break up and for whole product lines to be lost. It has also been the case that some add-ons which have been incredibly popular with the flightsim community have been financial disasters for the developers. Sinking tens of thousands of man hours into something that sells four hundred copies is not the kind of thing that endears you to your partner, your kids, or the bank manager, however much some end users believe it is their 'right' to see an upgrade - at the end of the day, people who write code have to eat and take time out to enjoy themselves, just like we do.

Freeware is quite another thing. Frankly, I have no idea why the current freeware model continues to survive, given the paradoxical retreat of some of the developers concerned into 'patent' code, when it seems that an open-source model would serve the hobby a whole better, but we could spend weeks debating that (go on, the forums are open, guys). Some freeware lives on from version to version of Flight Simulator, but on the whole that sort of longevity is uncommon and some great add-ons lie gathering virtual dust on the file servers having been overtaken by our driving need to upgrade. So while the good news is that many packages will transfer straight over, plenty of others won't and given the ephemeral nature of freeware, fixes may never appear for some stuff. And when an add-on does transfer, there is a possibility that strange things may happen, like the gear raising, but failing to lower again, and repeated sight of that familiar 'incompatible dll' dialog when FS2004 loads. Even when they do transfer across, third party planes may not fly right - some extra items have appeared in the aircraft configuration files; Microsoft seem to have altered not only lift, but propellor pitch properties. The turboprop model is still as peculiar as it ever was and engine out performance on twins is weird, but such is life.

Scenery is something else. We still live with a generation of FS2000 sceneries that haven't been upgraded to suit FS2002 and the situation with FS2004 appears to be much worse. In extreme cases, scenery can cause an immediate crash to desktop (CTD), in much the same way as some aircraft add-ons do. Lago's Emma Field is a good example of an add-on that behaves like this, apparently because of incompatible dll files. Other sceneries appear to load OK, but don't show up and yet others do load, but with strange effects, missing objects, or such low frame rates that they are effectively unusable; but the most common problem is that sceneries don't appear. Why this should be so isn't clear, but the trouble seems to be pretty widespread and accounts for why you don't see any screen shots - but the good news is that texture based packages do seem to work and I managed to load the UK VFR Photographic Scenery without any trouble at all. Wave hello to Fishburn everyone.

UK VFR shows up another problem, which is that the way FS2004 deals with terrain texturing hasn't been altered and so even on an ultra-fast machine, add-ons which include large areas of custom textures suffer from blurring, and our old friend the 'texture shuffle' is still alive and well. If you fly with the 2D panel switched off (hit W) and look just ahead of the plane, you can admire the textures doing a little dance to get into position before you arrive, an effect which is even more noticeable if you use detailed mesh. In severe cases all you get is a sort of multicolored low-res mush in front of you that only comes into focus intermittently.

On a positive note, Microsoft seem to have upgraded the default textures and if you look carefully, houses now line up neatly along the road sides, even in the sophisticated layouts found in town. This presents a real challenge to add-ons like UK VFR because the default scenery looks quite believable from the air and most of my objections to the mickey mouse appearance of the Autogen/default texture combination have been resolved - even if they do shuffle a little.

If you check out the image here, you can see how much has been changed. Look at the way the trees line up along the road running back from the 310's right wing tank towards the corner of the shot, for example. Trees also line up to form hedges along the sides of fields and they do the same on riverbanks - and while you probably won't notice this at first, I can't tell you how much better it makes the landscape feel. Take a look at the buildings lower right and notice how they maintain their relationship to the parking lots next to them. Looking at that shot, I am prepared to believe that careful LandClassing could now produce FS landscapes that look OK even to pilots who are familiar with their real world equivalents.

The flip side of this one is that with the exception of the detailed airports included in the package, the default scenery only looks really believable if you have never seen the place you are flying over, or peer at it slitty eyed and give it the benefit of the doubt. But given the sophistication that land classing achieved in FS2002, the future for cheap VFR navigation looks pretty good for A Century of Flight - which takes me on to utilities, another area where the news is mixed. The bad news is that any utility which accesses the guts of the weather engine in probably kaput, though this hardly matters given the vast improvement in the FS2004 weather. FSUIPC is, as we know, becoming payware, after many years of freeware development by Pete Dowson. FSNavigator is also being upgraded. Very few AI traffic utilities are likely to work straight out the box, because the AI parameters have been enhanced; a good thing, even if it is a trifle inconvenient (there is an interesting bug in the AI traffic which causes them to vanish if you sit your plane on or near the threshold and wait). Add-on gauges are a question of trying an installation and seeing what happens, but although most of the simple GA dials should work OK, it is already becoming clear that many of the sophisticated GPS units are going to need an upgrade - which means that some add-on planes will fail to work purely because they have incompatible gauges.

The new 'active' virtual cockpits (VCs) are a serious improvement on what we had before and it is theoretically possible to fly a plane entirely in this mode - but the catch is that you better had have a powerful machine because using the VC can cut frame rates by up to 75% depending on graphics settings. The problem is worse at some screen resolutions than others and may relate to gauge size. However, when it comes down to it, there is no contest between even the new VCs and the 2D panels, especially in the historic planes. Unless there is some huge advance in this area, it seems likely that the 2D panel is going to be with us for at least one more version of FS.

As I mentioned in one of the previous articles, ATC still has some way to go. We need more voices (Microsoft should go out and record a voice set off the controller at Lakenheath last Sunday, who sounds like a cross between Meg Ryan and Kathleen Turner - I would have gone on hold until I ran out of gas just for the pleasure of listening to her); the system has trouble vectoring planes in crosswinds; it often assigns climbs to GA planes before descending them onto the localiser; and of course there is that 15 mile final problem, which is kind of tedious in the Cub. But we are getting there.

Heaven is going to have to wait again, but I guess that's nothing new. I run FS2004 some of the time and FS2002 the rest, but I am gradually transferring the stuff that works into the new version and once the SDKs are out, a steady trickle of patches and upgrades should begin - keep checking FlightSim.Com so you don't miss any. My absolutely final, no taking it back opinion? Even if you ignore all the other enhancements, the weather engine alone is such a vast improvement on anything that could be achieved in FS2002 that it is no contest, really. Enjoy.

Read Andrew's FS2004 preview article.