Schiratti Commander Gold
By Ken St. John (21 October 1997)
chiratti Commander Gold
(SC) is a collection of flightsim tools which will greatly add to your
enjoyment of Bill Gates' Flight Simulator versions 5 and 6. Scenery
and route management are the primary features of the SC package. The
programs are quite handy in this role but, included with the Gold
version are a couple of really neat add-ons which should prove very
exciting to you real flightsim devotees! But, more on this later...
Although the installation is very straight forward and logical, I
found SC to have an amazingly slow installation speed. On one of our
16 meg Pentium 166's the whole process took more than 40 minutes to
load the software from a 10x CD rom! During this process, initiated
from the DOS prompt (SC is a DOS based application), at times the
only indication of a functioning machine was a blinking cursor in the
upper left hand corner of the screen. (Wow - did this bring back
memories!). However, as you'll see below, it's worth the wait and
effort!
During the Setup process, be careful of some of the drill-down menus.
Some routines (like the directory selection) get you in a loop which
is inescapable until you enter something where the defaults used to
be! I would suggest reviewing the location of your FS / Scenery
files before beginning the installation. Pay particular attention if
you're going to use ver. 6 with the long filenames of Win95. This
becomes somewhat of a challenge since SC is using DOS with its
"flight~3" / "flight~1" chopped directory names.
In all honesty, Enrico Schiratti provides for this with an automatic directory search routine which will locate and list all of the applicable directories it finds on all of your hard disks. Your task is to merely select the appropriate directories and SC will log them in for you. I recommend you use this feature!
One last note concerning the root of all evil - that magical 640K of
memory needed to run these types of DOS applications. Here's a quote
from Enrico worth noting: "Basically you can say that you can run SC
on any computer that will handle Flight Simulator." This also means
that the minimum requirements for a successful SC session start with
a properly configured machine. The best rule of thumb here - if you
can run FS then you can run SC. On our DOS machine, with "minimal"
drivers loaded (CDR, etc.) the mem /c reported 550K available to the
user - this was not enough to run either FS or SC! A decent memory
manager seems to be the answer as in days gone by.
The basic function of SC is to display the scenery you have installed
for FS5 or FSFW95. The opening screen for SC is a line drawing map of
the world. As you zoom in it becomes apparent that there is more
detail in certain areas than others - these are your currently
installed FS scenery "areas". These areas are bounded by rectangles
and appear across the world map in their correct position on the
globe. As you concentrate on a single area and continue to zoom in
closer, more and more detail appears until you're looking at runways,
lakes, buildings, etc. Remember, this is a God's eye view looking
down, just as you'd see looking at a map.The sidebar menu allows selection of which scenery items to include in the display. This is a great lesson in screen clutter since it will let you show more information than you could possibly use at one time. The screen/map will also show such things as altitude markers for obstacles over 800', navaid frequencies/names/ID's, runway extension lines (18 miles long - used by ATC to assist in approach control vectoring), runway name/heading, etc., etc., etc. Having all this information in front of you, wouldn't it be great to be able to plot a trip - going from departure airport to VOR to VOR to ILS to destination airport? Well, read on ... !
Select your saved situation and you're on your way! (TIP1: Print a copy of your routing before you leave SC!) (TIP2: If you want FS to come up with your custom situation on startup, save the file as SCSTART.STN and set FS to use this as its startup situation using OPTIONS/PREFERENCES/STARTUP SITUATION.)
One nice feature I found useful is SC's use of a special file called SC.STN. If SC finds this file in its directory, it will use the information it finds in this file to add all of the features normally associated with your personal FS preferences to your saved xxxx.stn file. To create this file, go into FS and configure your aircraft type, etc. as you'd like it to be during your SC flights. Then, save this situation in the SC directory using the SC.STN filename. The position and heading are not important since these will be replaced by your xxxx.stn file - pretty neat!
FS5 provided the opportunity to link two machines together for
formation flying (easier in full scale aircraft - take my word for
it!) or for just watching your friend do touch and goes, etc. (as an
instructor, I never wanted to watch on purpose!). SC has taken this
built in capability and expanded it to allow 2 PC's to interconnect
using null-modem cables, or modems and to allow up to 5 PC's to
interconnect using a basic network. (Their use of the "IPX" protocol
is straight forward and does not require anything more than simple
network cards and coaxial cable - about $29 per card on the open
market).
Remember the map screen above with its runway names and extensions, navaid names and locations, scenery with obstacles, airports, runways, etc.? What a neat place to have little airplanes flying around on your screen showing altitude, heading, transponder codes, etc.! Well, guess what? As your interconnected friends on their PC's fly around using FS, their airplane is represented on your map screen in real time! You can issue instructions to them and they can reply back to you - just like the real thing! (EXTRA FUN: I have to admit, vectoring your friend into a mountain gives you an eerie sense of power!)
The presentation will follow all of the aircraft on the screen,
adjusting itself in size to include everyone in the picture. Or,
conversely and my preferred method, leave the map centered over the
airport and practice turning your friends inside the marker to see
how they handle it! If you select the SCENERY menu option, you'll
see the mountains too (see "extra fun" above!).
If done often enough, say 8 or 9 times a week, flying a 727 into
Orlando International's runway 35 can become downright boring. The
approach is relatively straight forward with no surprises,
particularly when arriving from south Florida. I have often wondered
at night what it would be like to have the same types of obstacles
around the aircraft that I've flown around in, say, Denver. SC
enabled me to find out!Scenery Maker is Schiratti's utility program for creating or customizing scenery for FS. You basically have three ways to go here. You can draw free form shapes, use the supplied scenery library, or roll your own with a professionally done compiler. Supplied with SC is a library of pre-made shapes if that's the way you'd like to go. Or, for the more adventuresome, you can actually draw basic shapes and have SC fill them in with textures. I chose to use the latter method for my Mount St. John. Drawing is straight forward using the mouse and the fill routine works very nicely - I covered my mountain with (what else) trees. Seeing the results of my efforts placed in front of runway 35 was so intriguing, I placed a pre-formed building right alongside - in fact I placed several buildings there - twenty four in all! They looked very similar to those along side of Meigs in FS.
Before
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After
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The only recommendations I would make to the "team" would be to take
another look at the "dead-ends" the user can get into during the use of
menus - sometimes there is no easy way out. A simple "escape" option
would be all that's necessary. Also, during the installation process
a basic indicator which keeps the user informed during the process
would go far to bring this area up to current market expectations.
These are minor points.
One major shortcoming, in my opinion, is that the multi-PC connection features will not work with FSFW95 due to " ... changes embodied by Microsoft in Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 95...". This Win95 limitation is unfortunate owing to the graphics advancements and aircraft available there. We can only hope that Lago can try to incorporate this feature in a future version, although none is planned at this time.
Lago's Ugo Grandolini tells me they are working on a version of SC for FS98 which will correct the inability of SC to display all map details when using FS's native sceneries. He also tells me that users have been very pleased with the scenery designer and appreciate the fact that, according to Ugo, " ... it is the only designer that shows you an existing scenery so that you can see where you are placing new objects."
All in all, a very nice product which will provide hours of enjoyment - I recommend SC Gold as an addition to anyone's flightsim library.
Ken St. John
kens@gdi.net
Visit LAGO's Web site, the publisher of Schiratti Commander Gold.