FLY2! News von Richard Harvey

[Rodger Christmann]

TRI_Rich Apr-28-01, 10:32 AM (EDT)
"Status 04-28 9AM CDT (Please Read)"

Well, it looks like it has been a LONG 24 hours for everyone, and probably we'll see quite a bit of activity here over the weekend. I wanted to post to let everyone know I am keeping track of the threads, and wanted to share some thoughts on some of the more common problems I'm seeing raised. Believe me, I understand your frustrations.
(1) Boxed materials. First, the reason there is only a small quick start guide instead of a large printed manual was strictly due to the requirement from Take2 that all materials fit into a DVD case for European distribution. Take2 would not allow us to use different materials for different markets (i.e. a printed manual in North America, but not in Europe) because they wanted to have consistent cost of goods in all markets.

So, instead we came up with the idea of having a "living" manual online, both in PDF and HTML formats, that we could continually update based on user experiences (if you remember the 1.0 manual, many users came up with great additions to clarify or extend areas, but we had no way to communicate these at large). However, the manual was the first victim of our forced release -- the writer, Peter Lert, will not be done with the manual for about another 15 days, so it will be near the middle of May when the materials are available through the web site.

As for a single CD, once we knew TerraScene scenery would not be ready by our master date, there was no need for additional CD's. The bonus aircraft and map paks we are making available now were created since we went gold, so we didn't have those available to put on a second CD.

(2) Patches and add-ons.

Most of you have already seen the additional helicopters and maps available through www.iflytri.com. The first patch was released last night to the Gathering to put online. Since it is still not up this morning, I can only assume they are dropping the ball. I will try to stir someone at their site to get the files uploaded and online. The patch is about 3MB in size.

Also, the first TerraScene cities were also released to the Gathering for upload last night. The first cities available will be San Francisco and New York. Washington D.C. should be available on Tuesday. We'll continue with additional cities over the next few weeks.

(3) Performance.

I know it is difficult to ask your patience on this one, but I believe our beta testers have been giving good advice here to not jump to conclusions too quickly. The original Fly!, Fly! 2K, and MSFS 2000 all required some "playing" with settings to find optimal frame rates. I've seen some users post with almost identical hardware to another, yet one is getting great frame rates and the other is a slide show. These should be solvable issues.

That said, it is also fair to point out that most flight sims have a much longer "life" than other products, and begin to sorely show their age over time as hardware improves. We designed Fly! II to push the edge in areas to make sure it would continue to look fresh as new hardware (such as the GeForce 3) arrives later this year. If you are attempting to get all the visual goodies on a 16MB video card, it simply will not work without severe frame rate penalties. I know that is a tough pill to swallow, but today 32MB video cards are the standard, and by the end of the year some manufacturers will have 128MB video cards on the market. We've tried to have a fair balance of features to offer users on both ends of the hardware scale.

(4) Flashing textures.

Although not 100% the case, in general if you see a flashing texture on the ground or on your aircraft fuselage, Fly! is having to upload more textures than will fit on your video card in a single frame. This would typically happen if you "tricked" Fly! that you have >32MB on your video card and activated high resolution textures. The only way to make this really have a chance of working is to go to your Scenery options dialog and turn down (or off) the high detail radius. You can also try slightly tweaking the visibility distance slightly lower. If you want to try to keep high detail textures, you can do things like disable the reflective/moving water to recover about 30 texture slots on the video card.

(5) Crashes.

Thankfully it does not appear we have the Fly! 1.0 stability problems. Yes, there do appear to be some bonafide crash bugs, though one is only on exit and another did not seem to have a reproduceable case. I'm documenting all the ones reported here so we can have testers pound on those areas and see if we can replicate them and get them fixed ASAP. If you do experience a crash, by all means please post here with as much detail as you can remember on what you were doing at the time of (and just before) the crash.

It also appears that Fly! II is searching local hard drives (like 1.0 did) for additional scenery and maps. This is a bad thing, since some 1.0 scenery is not compatible with Fly! II. If you have any folders named "Scenery" at the root level of any other local drives, you need to move or rename them so Fly! II will not attempt to load scenery from these folders.

(6) TerraScene.

We are currently working on 2 TerraScene issues. First, we are updating the new editor to support slicing/creation of TerraScene sceneries. It will replace the old "FlyEdit" capabilities. The new slicer not only has to slice day and night lights, but for Fly! II also has to slice multiple resolutions and create water masks. We currently have the slicer working, and are squashing bugs in the elevation mesh importer. Our goal is to have this to you in the second patch if all goes well. This would allow you to begin creating TerraScene areas in the Fly! II format at higher resolutions.

We are also making code changes to allow Fly! to use existing TerraScene areas. This will involve a converter, because Fly! has to rename the old textures and also generate the "distance" textures that are used to show far visibility. We expect it to take, on average, about 15-20 minutes to convert a pod to the new format. I'm hoping we can have this available in about a month.

(7) Scenery Editor.

Yes, the Scenery Editor is included with Fly! II. I will make a separate post today going over the functionality and how to use (and share) your creations.

(8) Reviewers.

Yes, the team shares the concerns posted here about how Fly! II will be perceived/reviewed. We've had to accept that we will have about as much control over that as we did over our date. So, the best we can do is simply focus on moving ahead and doing our best for you.

(9) Publishers.

I believe I can safely share that if we can find a way to move forward with Fly! III, we have no intention of staying with our current publisher. Enough said.


Well, these topics are just the tip of the iceberg I'm sure. Although I have some "honey-do's" to take care of this weekend, I'll be checking in throughout the weekend and logging details as they arise. We have the whole Fly! team, as well as a core of our original beta testers, still 100% focused on tuning, fixing, and extending Fly! II to reach our original vision.

Richard Harvey
Terminal Reality