Lago FSAssist For FS2002

By Andrew Herd (19 April 2002)

herever there are two flight simulator users gathered together, it is written that there shalt be a discussion about frame rates. This particular conversation has the inevitability of night following day, of two Englishmen talking about the weather, and of my dog eating stuff he shouldn't.

While I imagine there must be people who buy Flight Simulator, install it on some killer PC with a shed-load of RAM and then never experience the slightest hesitation, stutter, glitch, blurred landscape, lack of textures, crash, fire, marital discord or post traumatic stress, they must be few and far between. The nature of flight simmers is to behave like my dog, and do stuff they shouldn't. The siren call of doing a bad weather approach into the most detailed airport yet released, in a plane that uses 18 Mb of textures just to draw the panel, is too much for the majority of us to resist, and why not?

Well, why not is because if you like watching slide shows, then you really ought to get out there and buy a projector, rather than trying to simulate it on your PC. I often get emails which run along the lines of, "I have an 450 MHz Pentium with 128 Mb of RAM and a Voodoo 3, what kind of frame rates can I expect if I install FS2002?" The answer, sad to relate, is that Microsoft did not intend man to run FS2002 using a Voodoo 3; but frame rates, which first became an issue somewhere around FS2, are everybody's problem and a question which ranks second only to when Jim Rhoads and Roger Dial are going to release their long awaited G-Max Cessna 421 Golden Eagle for FlightOne Software, a beta of which I have used in the screen shots along with Iain Gallacher's fantastic freeware Prestwick airport and the specially developed FSLandClass file he packages with it.

To be fair, frame rates aren't the be-all and end-all issue with FS2002 that they were in the previous version of the sim. In FS2000, there was no such thing as a high enough frame rate; to use the sim was to sit, shoulders hunched, waiting for the inevitable drop to single figures because a hill had appeared at the wrong moment and I eventually came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a computer fast enough to run it. FS2002 is much cleverer than that, thanks to some inspired thinking by Microsoft. The graphics engine in the current version of the sim prioritises tasks in order to achieve the most fluid and detailed display possible. As far as I can see, the first thing it does is to ensure that the panel displays, given that that is the view most flight simmers use most of the time. Once the panel is taken care of, FS2002 displays the basics of the aircraft and scenery, and only then does it get on and devote processor cycles to eye candy like Autogen and reflective textures. This doesn't sound at all radical until you see it in action - but the measure of how much the display engine has been improved is that the first thing most simmers notice about FS2002 is how much more fluid visual display (in other words, no stuttering) is at any given frame rate. The reason for this is that the FS engine's highest priority is to display what you need to see in order to fly, which means that it will, for example, suppress Autogen near complex airports if displaying it would reduce you to single figure frame rates.

This "smart" display engine effectively turns the whole frame rate question on its head. In FS2000, the answer to the question, "What frame rate do I need?" was easy - as many as you could possibly get. Because the FS2000 display engine wasn't as sophisticated as its successor, the only way to be really safe was to run the sim flat out, squeezing as many frames out of it as you could in order to build in some kind of safety margin which would protect you when you ran into trouble. The trouble was that while the sim performed extremely well at high altitudes in clear skies, where the display sub-system had little to do, it massively under-performed at VFR altitudes, which is one of the many reasons why the FS community more or less turned its back on that version of the sim. The irony of FS2000 was that it supported a quality of scenery which it didn't have the capacity display; as Wilco found out to their cost with their visually stunning Airport 2000 Volume 3.

The measure of how much things have changed in FS2002 lies in an unassuming little slider hidden away in the display settings dialogs. I am sure that thousands of users have looked at this control and wondered what the hell it is for. Well, the answer is that it is the biggest secret in FS2002, because the lower you set it, the better things get.

What? Can we rewind a little here? The lower you set it, the better things get? Surely you mean, the higher you set it, the better things get?

Nope.

The ironic truth about FS2002 is that once you can achieve an average frame rate of 18-20, there isn't any point letting it rise any higher. In fact, it can be counter-productive to let it do so.

Let's go through it line by line. While there is a certain amount of dispute about what is the lowest frame rate compatible with smooth operation of FS2002, if you set up the sim without telling the user what the maximum frame rate is locked to, few people can detect frame rates of less than 18 per second (Lago's view is that 15 is acceptable, but I'm not so sure). For argument's sake we'll take an example of a 1.7 Ghz PIV with the frame rate locked down to 20. Now imagine that the computer in question could actually run a frame rate of say 60 had it not been locked to 20 - what happens to all the spare cycles that would have gone into generating the "extra" 40 frames per second? The answer is beautifully simple; they go into Autogen, fetching textures, mesh data, lighting and so forth; all of which contribute to smoothing the visual display. The amazing truth is that by locking the target frame rate down to the lowest possible level, you actually get a better FS "world" on a fast machine. On a slow machine, locking the frame rate down doesn't have such a dramatic effect, but the principle remains the same, and the way to boost fluidity is to start pulling the display sliders back until such time as your PC regularly meets the target frame rate requirement. If you want a more detailed review of exactly how this process works, visit this link.

Neat, yet not gaudy, as the baboon said, painting his backside blue. I digress.

Okay, enter Lago. I know it isn't often that you read half way through a review before hearing anything about the product, but this stuff is important. FSAssist is designed specifically to optimise the FS2002 display. Although it has a "frame rate wizard" the one thing it doesn't do is to speed up frame rates; instead it lets you manipulate them to give you the most fluid and detailed visuals possible. The core of the product is the wizard, but it also has an autosave and a pushback module that comes complete with its own truck and a choice of marshals.

FSAssist costs 15 Euros, or around $13, so it isn't going to break the bank. The package is available from Lago's website, and at 2 Mb makes for a quick download. Installation is automatic and gave me no problems. Once installed in FS2002, it is necessary to register the software by entering your full name, the registration date and a registration code which Lago forwards by email. After that, FSAssist can be called from the Lago item which appears on the FS2002 menu bar. This menu offers four options - the frame rate wizard, autosave, "pushback and engines", and "pushback". The last two options might seem a little superfluous, but I am sure that anyone who has ever used the FS2002 pushback control in anger will be aware that it isn't exactly foolproof.

Looking at the options in turn, the frame rate wizard provides a convenient, one stop dialog for setting all the display options that can make or spoil your day in FS2002. These are: target frame rate; AI traffic percentage; Autogen density; terrain mesh complexity; global scenery quality; and scenery complexity. In a default FS2002 installation, these options are spread across three different dialogs and for some reason it is difficult to set frame rates lower than about 24 or 25 using the slider that Microsoft provide. FSAssist also has options to display an information bar and to play a warning if the average frame rate drops more than 25% below the target frame rate for a significant period of time. Even experienced users will have an interesting time watching the information bar, because it gives an insight right into the guts of FS2002. The bar makes the package a superb tool for scenery designers, and anyone working with ATC development, because it makes it a cinch to check if things like scenery density levels are correct. It is even rumored that the FS design team at Microsoft are using it.

The best way to use the frame rate wizard is to set a target frame rate and then go for a flight with the settings bar active. If the reported frame rate matches the target wherever you go, you just wasted your money, but if you are running the sort of PC that most of us can afford, it is more likely that it won't, in which case you need to start playing with the scenery settings. There are two ways to do this. The first is to use the sliders in the frame rate wizard dialog, the second is to use the hotkey setup that Lago have thoughtfully provided with their product. Assuming you have set NumLock off, the numeric pad keys can be used to "nudge" the scenery settings mentioned in the paragraph above up or down until you are happy with the results. The main use for this is to speed up display on underperforming machines, but there are occasions when it can be used to improve display quality on fast machines, which is useful. For example, if you do a long flight at FL340 with no display problems, and then run into trouble on approach to KLAX, then you can reduce the scenery complexity and reduce Autogen to bring the frame rates back up enough to give you smooth scrolling on final. The one problem with these adjustments is that some of them cause the dreaded FS2002 reload dialog to appear, which definitely does not speed operations up any.

The autosave module doesn't really require much explanation - it provides an option to automatically save a flight every one, five or ten minutes. There is a limit on the total number of files that may be saved per flight, which is vital, as otherwise a transatlantic trip would fill your hard disk. In FS20002 the saves have sensible names like "FSAssist Backup 2002.02.19 - 08:05" which makes them pretty easy to find when that eight hour bad weather epic goes pear-shaped on short final. Depending on how fast your PC is you may notice some slight hesitation when autosaves are occurring, which is normal for FS.

Pushback is something you either use all the time or is a feature for which you can never quite remember the hotkeys. The FS2002 pushback may be fine in principle, but it is cursed with weirdness and it is good to see an alternative. Lago's module is about as sophisticated as they come and in addition to allowing you the choice of starting engines during the push, allows you to set final heading and pushback distance precisely, thereby avoiding those embarassing encounters with aircraft's empennage. Not only do you get a pushback truck (sadly it appears out of nowhere, but then how are Lago to know which scenery you are using?) but if you look carefully you also get a pushback man, who talks to you. The final option in this module allows you to position the pushback truck correctly, bearing in mind that the nose wheel position varies from plane to plane - this parameter can be stored in the program's .cfg file. Lago even offer a second pushback man, should you tire of gazing at the first.

And that is FSAssist. Whether you think it is a useful purchase or not will depend to a great extent on your hardware setup and your specific flight simulation needs. If most of your flying is done in basic GA planes at regional airports and you have a powerful PC, then it is debatable how much need you would have for this add-on, unless you pine for a good autosave facility. But on the other hand, if you are trying to drive big iron for a VA using a sub-1 Ghz Pentium, then FSAssist is worthy of consideration.

If I have a criticism of this utility, it is that once you understand the frame rate issues in FS2002, some of the need for the wizard evaporates, but there is no doubt that the hotkey function for adjusting scenery settings on the fly can be extraordinarily handy. Were it not for the fact that FS2002 has a pernicious tendency to reload everything the moment scenery settings change, the hotkeys would be pure joy - the idea of being able to turn off the trees so you can get the bird smoothly onto the runway may not be "as real as it gets", but it surely takes some beating when it works. As Mathijs Kok from Lago told me, "The fact the the FS2002 user interface makes it almost impossible to change settings fast and kills the whole idea of adjusting the settings to exactly what you want at that time. Sometimes you want a lot of traffic and ATC and other times you want great mesh and trees. What FSAssist does is give you the option to change these settings very easy, and we hear from our customers that they DO tune FS to specific flights now, when they had never done so before. Lago think that this kind of flight tuning might become an important part of FS and having seen the program in action, I am inclined to agree.