From: rdd@rascal.ics.utexas.edu (Robert Dorsett)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.simulators
Subject: Scenery upgrade review...
Date: 7 Oct 1992 15:35:32 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

This may be of interest...



From: rdd@cactus.org (Robert Dorsett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games,rec.aviation
Subject: Review of scenery upgrades for Mac FlightSim 4.0
Date: 30 Dec 91 08:26:50 GMT


REVIEW of BAO/Mallard Scenery Upgrades for Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 
(Mac version).

Copyright (c) 1991 by Robert Dorsett.  All rights reserved.


This review will tell you what you get when you buy the Macintosh 
Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 scenery disks.  It also contains a number of 
opinionated comments about how the disks are marketed.


Titles of the disks: 
        Scenery Upgrade I for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
        Scenery Upgrade II for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
        Scenery Upgrade III for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
        Scenery Upgrade IV for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Publisher:
        Mallard Software
        550 Edmonds
        Lewisville, TX  75067
        214-436-0044

Cost: $59.95 each, direct; $30 each through MacConnection.

Overall value rating: 2/4.


IN THE BEGINNING, Sublogic produced a variety of scenery disks for its 
Flight Simulator II software.  These complemented the scenery supplied with 
the distribution software, by filling in the "gaps" between the sectors 
normally supplied.  They provided many, many more airports and navaids 
than were available on the standard distribution.  There were a dozen or so 
of them, originally, for most of the platforms FS II ran on, and most were 
priced at $19.95.

When Bruce Artwick split with Sublogic a couple of years ago, he apparently 
got to take the scenery disks with him: now, we see the resulting company, 
BAO, taking up where Sublogic left off.  They are using Mallard as a 
publisher/distribution channel.  The "new" sector files are colorized, in a 
format that FS 4.0 can handle, and, like the old disks, are generally much 
denser than the regular distribution sectors.

The various upgrades are as follows.  Note that the state classifications are 
approximate; they shouldn't be viewed as exclusive--there's considerable 
overlap.

Upgrade I
        Scenery Area 7:
                Bahamas
                Delaware
                Florida
                Georgia
                Maryland
                New Jersey
                North Carolina
                Pennsylvania
                South Carolina
                Virginia
                Washington, DC
        Scenery Area 9
                Arkansas
                Illinois
                Indiana
                Iowa
                Kentucky
                Maryland
                Michigan
                Minnesota
                Missouri
                North Carolina
                Ohio
                Tennessee
                Virginia
                West Virginia
                Wisconsin
        Scenery Area 11
                Indiana
                Michigan
                New York
                Ohio
                Ontario
                Pennsylvania
                Quebec
                West Virginia

Upgrade II
        Scenery Area 12
                Connecticut Airports
                Maine Airports
                Massuchusetts
                New Brunswick
                New Hampshire
                New Jersey
                New York
                Newfoundland
                Nova Scotia
                Ontario
                Pennsylvania
                Prince Edward Island
                Quebec
                Rhode Island
                Vermont
        Scenery Area Hawaii
        Scenery Area Japan

Scenery Upgrade III
        Scenery Area 7 (see Upgrade I).
        Scenery Area 12 (see Upgrade II).
        Scenery Area Europe
                Southern UK
                Northern France
                Southwestern Germany

Scenery Upgrade IV
        Scenery Area 9 (see Upgrade I).
        Scenery Area Hawaii (see Upgrade II)
        Scenery Area Japan (see Upgrade II)


The upgrades are basically what one pays for, with good points and bad 
points.


The good:

They do, indeed, provide one with a way to fly around in additional sectors.  
They don't cover the ENTIRE United States (nothing for the Southwest!), but 
those who live in the Northeast or Midwest should be very happy. :-)

The packing materials are very nice.  The artwork on the covers is superb; 
the boxes the disks come in are the nicest I've seen used with entertainment 
software. :-)



The bad:

No particular order: 

1.  The scenery density occasionally stressed out the SE/30 I used to review 
them.  I suspect they would run slowly on a IIfx.  This is with dynamic 
scenery, shading, etc. turned off.  Some areas ran fine; others were 
nightmarish.

2.  There is an awful lot of repetition.  Four upgrades, three sectors an 
upgrade, 12 sectors, right?  Nope: 7.  One only needs to buy Upgrades I-III 
for a complete set, and even then will experience some repetition.  Neither 
the packaging nor the documentation points out this problem; indeed, the 
packaging is customized for each "upgrade," each with different cover art, 
featuring the "new" standard FS 4.0 aircraft.  "I" through "IV" suggests 
uniqueness: buy each one, get a bit closer toward the whole "package."  
Nothing's further from the truth.

The order form on the FS 4.0 distribution disk does not mention the 
repetition, but does list the sector titles in a somewhat jumbled fashion, 
>From which the user can then theoretically figure it out for himself.  

3.  If one *should* buy the requisite three upgrades, one is quickly awash in 
inconvenient charts and three independent manuals.  In addition, the *total* 
size of all these sectors is only 1.2M or so--enough to fit on two 800K disks, 
or one, if compressed.  For convenience, I'm sure many people would rather 
pay for an integrated set--preferably one with an indexed, bound manual 
with laminated charts

4.  The manuals (and charts) are cheap, stapled photocopies.  A jarring 
contrast to the quality of the boxes.

5.  Nowhere on the boxes, or the manuals, is there an "overview" illustration 
to display what, precisely, the various sectors cover.  As one might gather 
>From the above listing of sector file contents, there's some overlap in the 
states: half of Virginia might be in one sector, the other half in another.  
Even Government aviation-related charts have "overview" legends; it's a 
*basic* necessity.  If one should decide to fly in Florida, one has to look 
up Florida in the tables in one of the three sector-description booklets; 
there's no way to rapidly find a sector (Florida is in the file "SD-7 World
Scenery").  This really damages the overall utility of the supplemental 
sectors.  Once one has the correct sector loaded in, though, FS4 supports the 
"Airports" dialog facility, just like the distribution sectors.

6.  There's no way to *integrate* sectors with other extant scenery files.  
Thus, one has to explicitly load a sector, if one wishes to use it.  This 
ISN'T convenient.  And, as mentioned in (6), above, without an overview chart, 
one really doesn't have a clue of which sector area to load if one flies "off 
the world."  Considering what a good job was done with the user interface of 
the Mac version of Flight Simulator, it's a shame they didn't consider this 
problem.

7.  This is a purely subjective impression, but I feel that the scale problems 
which afflicted Flight Simulator 1.0 databases may also be appearing in 
the scenery disks.  The FS 4 distribution scenery doesn't have any problems: 
but a lot of the runways I picked at random in the Upgrade scenery seem 
reeeeeallyyyy loooong.  Especially when comparing runways with those in the 
distribution scenery (e.g., JFK 24R).  But I suppose the flip side is that 
the distribution runways may be too short. :-)

8.  A correspondent noted that the documentation does not contain ILS fre-
quencies; similarly, all navaid frequencies are not noted--and some ADF's
that ARE noted don't seem to be in the database.  Those undocumented ILS's
which do exist frequently suffer from the same "canted" localizer problem as 
the regular distribution scenery--often as much as 20 degrees off.  I agree
with his criticism of the lack of ILS approaches at ALL major airports.


Part of the expense of the ugprades is ameliorated by the fact that each of 
these $60 upgrades effectively includes three of the old $20 Sublogic disks.  
But does one get a contiguous geographic spread?  Nope.  Scenery Disk 4, for 
example, is the Chicago sector, plus *Hawaii* and *Japan*.  The mind boggles.  
I disagree with the apparent presumption on the part of BAO that the way to 
sell these things is through a "permutation" approach: speaking for myself, 
what I'd want is *coverage* by region.  Their objective seems to be to make
the "sexy" sectors (Europe, Hawaii, Japan) as accessible as possible, which 
is a fundamental flaw: they get "old" pretty fast.

There *are* some new frills in the BAO disks.  But one's got to wonder at 
what point they'll stop capitalizing off old work: it can't have been too 
difficult to do the translation to 4.0 format.  All the charts are the *same* 
charts used with FS II; the manuals are similarly based on old work.  Even 
the nomenclature used--SD 7, SD 12, etc.--is the same that Sublogic used 
(Mac users will no doubt wonder where the other scenery is).  There's not a 
hell of a lot here that's new and original.  

There's nothing wrong with making money, but this is essentially old stock, 
and doesn't justify the sky-high costs involved, should a user decide to buy a 
set.  It's nice to see the sectors made available, but this is an exploitative 
marketing scheme.  The true afficionados get to spend up to $240 (for a 
program which is only $60, retail!) for four disks, and five spare sets of 
charts.  But even if all the upgrades were bundled in an incredibly cheap 4-
for-1 special, they just aren't convenient to work with.

IMHO, we're seeing the lingering effect of marketing decisions made when 
disks had 140K to 340K capacity, nobody compressed data, and nobody had
hard disks.  Old policies die hard.  Next time, I recommend they try for an 
*all-in-one* set.  From a publishing viewpoint, it's cheaper, there's less 
opportunity for package assembly error, and they'd probably sell a lot 
more sets.  They can start milking us when they produce something new and 
original (like Southwestern US IFR coverage, which I don't believe Sublogic
ever got to doing, either :-)).

It's probably too much to hope for BAO to shift its marketing strategy, but 
at the very least I hope we'll (a) see a public domain sector-compiler, to 
alleviate some of the functional inconvenience; and (b) "integrated" 
documentation for those few who buy all three "real" upgrades.  And let's 
have decent charts this time, guys.  Third-generation 1984-vintage 
photocopies don't cut it.


Obligatory disclaimers: I have nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft, BAO, 
or Mallard.  Obviously. :-)



More sour grapes, then, from...




---
Robert Dorsett
UUCP: ...cs.utexas.edu!cactus.org!rdd