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Interview With Allen Kriesman Conducted by Vic Baron About You Tell us a little bit about yourself and the sorts of things you have done or enjoyed besides flight simulation? Hello, this is Allen Kriesman and I am the owner of Scenery Solutions LLC. We are the creators of the Ultimate Terrain family (UTX) of products and also the new Xtreme Cities product lines. Our first commercial product, USA Roads for FS2004, came out in 2004, which started our commercial venture into the MSFS flight simulator market. Prior to 2004, I was a developer supporting the Fly! Simulator platform, before its unfortunate cancellation. I am a very happily married 54 year old living in Texas. I have two teenage boys. I work as a software developer (using C++) during the day. At night and weekends I am usually working on Scenery Solutions related work. I am a little busier than I would like to be. Actually, a lot busier. When did you first get involved with flight simulation and what got you interested in it? Prior to 1983, I was a floundering college student with ever changing majors. In 1983 I was first exposed to a personal computer running Flight Simulator 1.0. When I saw the power of the PC, my future was determined. At that time, I started teaching myself programming. I eventually graduated from college (University of North Texas) with a BS in Computer Science. You could say that Flight Simulator 1.0 helped to decide my career path. I have been a flight simmer ever since. Do you have any real world aviation experience, fly any planes, or own any aircraft? I still have hopes of getting my PPL eventually. However, I have been saying this for about 10 years now. Free time is always an issue. Who do you consider your mentors in the flight simulation development world and why? I am glad this question was asked, because there have been so many people that I have respect for in this hobby. As I mentioned, my first venture into flight sim development was working with the Fly! Simulator. I was the creator/developer for the scenery development system called Terramodels For Fly!. It was during this time when I worked loosely with the late Richard Harvey, who was the lead developer for Fly! Richard Harvey was one of the finest men that I have ever met. I learned a lot from him when it comes to business ethics. Primarily, I learned that if you are honest and up front about things to your customers, they will be more understanding and patient. It wasn't just about money with Mr. Harvey. Fly! was his baby and he spent endless hours working on it right up until his passing from Cancer (at the age of 27). I still owe this man a lot. I previously mentioned my initial foray into FS2004 with USA Roads. At that time, I was the new kid on the block when it came to MSFS development. I needed some assistance with a few technical things after crossing over from Fly!. I clearly remember several individuals who were very helpful when I ran into a few technical difficulties unique to FS2004. In particular, I would single out Holger Sandmann and Richard Ludowise. You've been developing for long time and your work has been recognized with many awards. As well as some FlightSim.Com awards, there was even a favorable review of your product way back in August of 2005. Tell us what you think some of the highlights of your career have been or how your work and technology has changed since then? Yes, I think the best years for me were 2005 thru 2008, when Ultimate Terrain won a total of 6 industry awards. Enhanced vector terrain and landclass products are still very, very important when enhancing FSX/P3D. However, the success of Ultimate Terrain has resulted in a lot of product clones over the years, which attempt to offer the exact same feature sets. Most of these developers come and go. But, there is now always competition. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I try to tell myself that as much as possible. I am always looking for new and creative development ideas. I feel that we have a bunch of unique ideas to implement over the next couple of years that I am excited about. Development What other types of designs and projects have you worked on over the years or have you focused on only scenery related products? I have always been interested in scenery related design, because I am a visual software developer. Even though I enjoy creating, I really have no creative talent in my hands. My handwriting is terrible and the only humans I can draw with a brush are stick figures. With 3D modeling tools, imaging tools like Photoshop and custom software creation, anyone with imagination can produce creative works. What were some of your favorite developments and why? I am really proud of what we have accomplished over the years. We were the first developer to update FS2004 roads using accurate commercial data. We were then the first developer to use accurate, licensed commercial data for things like landclass, ground polygons, enhanced water, railroads, etc. However, I am probably most proud of the Terramodels For Fly! development environment that I created back in 2002. This product was extremely cutting edge and made use of Microsoft's Terraserver product in ways that were not previously thought of. "Terramodels For Fly!" has even been referenced in existing patents. 13 years later, Terramodels is still being used to create scenery among those remaining Fly! diehards. In fact, the new Xtreme Cities product lines that we see as our future are based on a much newer and powerful version of the old Terramodels concept that we have developed. What software packages, tools or utilities to you use during your development? Unlike most scenery developers, we use very few existing off-the-shelf software products at Scenery Solutions. As a C++ developer for over 25 years, I take a different approach to scenery creation in this industry. Instead of using canned software, I write a lot of custom applications to perform a specific jobs. GIS software (i.e. MapInfo, ArcInfo, Global Mapper, ERDAS) are necessary tools. However, they never match 100% of your needs and the end result is that many more labor hours are needed to achieve the desired task. What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of a project and why? Challenges are the things that keep me motivated personally. I am not really a patient person when it comes to performing repetitive tasks. I would rather spend my time creating and debugging software applications that can automate a process, rather than doing repetitive work like hand-editing. For me, the biggest challenge is probably locating and licensing the best source data that I can find for our products. Locating the data is not the only issue. You then have to work out an equitable agreement to license the data, which can be very difficult and lengthy. The FSX add-on market is not as lucrative to data vendors, compared to other uses of their data such as GPS units, which license commercial data annually at a very high cost. The GPS unit developers can afford higher royalty payments, because their market is huge. Nearly everyone has a GPS or Smart Phone using GPS data. In comparison, very few people buy PC flight simulator add-ons. In what ways do you see development changing in the future? I really don't see a lot of change at this point, unless the core FSX platform is rewritten to take advantage of newer technologies. Perhaps this will occur with a version of Prepar3D down the road. Do you have any plans to develop for X-Plane? I am not so sure about porting Ultimate Terrain over to X-Plane, because the X-Plane terrain system is designed much differently than FSX. I have been in discussions with the X-Plane developers over the years, especially Ben Supnik. However, we have not begun any serious development. I do keep X-Plane in the back of my mind when designing our newer, future products. And, there are a few planned products that may port over much easier. You have released new versions of Ultimate Terrain recently. Do they support Prepar3D natively? We have recently released new 2 versions of UTX: UTX USA V2 and UTX Europe V2. Both of these products add updated features over our original 1.x versions. In addition, both of these products include a unique multi-platform installer tool. The installer tool allows the user to install UTX on any and all of the following simulator platforms: FSX, FSX Steam Edition, Prepar3D before V2.5 and Prepar3D V2.5. Will all Scenery Solutions products be available in Prepar3D? Yes, that is the ultimate goal. All of our V2 versions of UTX will provide the same multi-platform installer as currently available in the USA and Europe versions of UTX. We are currently working on UTX Canada V2. After that, we will be working on UTX Tropical America & Caribbean V2. Does Prepar3D present any unique challenges to you? To this point, the only real challenge that Prepar3D has presented had to do with the locations of important datafiles. The data file locations have changed even between Prepar3D versions. We also found that Prepar3D V2.5 does not appear to like certain graphic file formats that are supported in FSX. With the release of Prepar3D and FSX Steam Edition, there are more platforms to support. Is this difficult for you? This is an important question and one that I would like to take some time with. In the past, we only had to focus support on one platform, which was the boxed version of FSX. Now, we have to deal with up to 6 different simulator configurations. Boxed FSX, FSX-Steam Edition standalone, FSX-SE with an old copy of FSX installed previously, Prepar3D V2.5, Prepar3D prior to V2.5 and lastly FSX-SE as a DLC product through Steam. The distribution and support process has become more difficult, because each of these platforms have moved their configuration files to different locations, possibly with different file names. As a developer, the last thing you want to have to do is maintain and distribute 6 unique copies of every product version that you are marketing. This is a potentially troubling situation from a version control standpoint, if not handled properly. We realized that we could not solve this situation cleanly with the existing retail software packages. So, we set about developing our own custom multi-platform installer. Supporting all 6 possible platforms is still somewhat time consuming. But, our multi-platform installer really minimizes the chance of mistakes, because all the core UTX files for all platforms are still stored in a central database. Company / Products Do you have a team and if so how many people work with you and what are their roles? The permanent Scenery Solutions team consists of myself and my business partner, Jeff Parker. Jeff assists in product development and is the primary level of support in our support forum. Jeff is both invaluable and irreplaceable to Scenery Solutions. Even though the core Scenery Solutions team is small, each product release involves much more than just Jeff and I. All of our products are sold as Flight 1 products. Flight 1 handles all of our advertising, distribution, e-commerce and general support. For several of our products, we have had outside partnerships with other developers in the hobby. You've mentioned that you have active partnerships with all the premier developers of map data products, such as Tele Atlas, Navteq and DMTI Spatial. Tell us about how you work with them and benefit each other? As far as I know, I was the first developer to approach these companies with the intent on using their data in an entertainment software product. This was done about the time FS2004 was released. Once I had the initial contract worked out with GDT (now TomTom) it was easy to work out similar contracts with other data vendors. With Navteq (now known as Here), I helped them setup a new gaming department that handles licensing that is more appropriate for the gaming and entertainment industry. These companies do get royalties from each UTX product sale. But, our partnership has benefitted them in other ways also. Because UTX provides a highly visual way of displaying the commercial GPS data, FSX with UTX have been used by the data vendors in various trade shows and educational exhibits. Normally, these companies demonstrate the road, water and other GPS data in 2D digital maps. But, seeing their data in 3D with the correct textures applied has a much greater visual impact. What makes your products unique from other scenery packages? Value has always been our top priority. Using in-house automation we can release large scenery areas at a reasonable cost. I also think that continued support of our product lines is a big plus. A lot of developers come and go. We have been in the business for over 12 years now. So, product stability is a huge plus. Products like Ultimate Terrain USA, Europe and Canada have been gradually enhanced over a period of almost 10 years. These products cover very large areas and it can sometimes take many years for our users to locate and report small anomalies, like a misshaped river in a remote area that is rarely flown. Every time you create a new vector product like Ultimate Terrain, based on new data, you risk the potential of introducing scenery anomalies because no data is 100% clean. How do you choose your next design or project? Since our products are normally dependent on the availability of quality commercial data, we typically release products as new data becomes available to us. However, we also have to consider the potential popularity of product regions. If we can't provide adequate returns to our data vendors, they won't allow us to license the data again in future updates. There are a lot of freeware data sets that are used in Flight Simulator products. Freeware data use is becoming more widely available and better as time goes on. However, we try and restrict our products now to using only commercial data when possible. The commercial data is much cleaner and generally more detailed than freeware data, resulting in fewer anomalies and reduced development time. I read recently that the global GPS market is expected to be worth over $26 billion by 2016. That is big business and the data vendors that provide the GPS data can afford to spend a lot to insure the accuracy of their data. Freeware data obviously does not go through the same rigorous quality control process. Products like OpenStreetMap are a brilliant concept. And, it is very useful at times as a free option. However, OSM is edited and updated by volunteers. So, it can produce inconsistent results at times, especially when it comes to things like road classifications. Future How do you feel about the future of flight simulation in general? Personally, I am cautiously optimistic. While the 3rd party market is still large, the base PC simulator products are not really being enhanced outside of X-Plane and Prepar3D. Flight simulators are not keeping up with advances in the gaming industry. This is understandable when you consider the huge cost of developing and maintaining a flight simulator, compared to most video games. And, the return on the investment for most video games is substantially higher than flight simulators. With that being said, it is really stunning that a software product released in 2006 (FSX) can still have this much longevity. Of course, I believe that this can be attributed solely to the large add-on market that still exists, constantly refreshing the old simulator technology. However, there is only so much a 3rd party developer can do at times. We still have to play be the rules set by the base simulator. For example, prior to FSX being discontinued, we were asking the Aces team to strongly consider increasing the precision of the landclass tiles in FSX. Had there been a FSX 11 product, I honestly believe that Aces would have accomplished this. The increased landclass precision would have allowed us developers to create a much more accurate landclass rendering of urban and rural areas. What new technology are you thinking about creating next or problems in scenery design you would like to solve? We have actually invested over 6,000 hours of development time over the past 4 years in creating new software that will be used in future products outside of Ultimate Terrain. Our initial Xtreme Cities product released offered a glimpse into our future. We want to provide detailed urban areas with commercial buildings, houses and other objects in their real-world locations, while still retaining good frame rates. The technology that we have developed provides a unique approach to rendering custom object scenes in a very efficient manner, which is both higher on detail and easy on frame rates. Right now we are focusing on updating all of our Ultimate Terrain product lines. But, we hope to begin work on our new product lines in the fall of 2015. What can sites like FlightSim.Com do to support you and the hobby better? I feel that sites like FlightSim.Com are a main reason for the success of this hobby, because they pull the vast amount of public information together into a single point of access. Without these sites, we would have a much more fractured community. And, it would be much more difficult for developers to reach potential customers and vice-versa. There are so many 3rd party products available. And, sites like FlightSim.Com provide product reviews that educate customers and help them filter out products that they may otherwise purchase by mistake. What would you like people to know about you, your work or products that we have not covered? I would really like to thank all the fantastic customers that we have had over the years. It has been a great ride and a real pleasure enhancing your flight sim experience. I can honestly say that I have more fingers on my right hand, then those customers that we have had to censor in our forums over the last 11 years. If we have to censor only 1 customer every 2 years, then we must be doing something right. Thank you so much for your continued support over the years. Allen Kriesman Scenery Solutions Shop Scenery Solutions Products