Product Reviews

Hey, it’s been a while! How’re things?

Life sprung up and swallowed a whole bunch of my time these past few months, but there’s just too much happening in the FS world right now not to blog about it. And what day better than good old Friday, the gateway to the weekend. In no particular order, here are some recent FSX developments that have lit my fires:

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Howdy, and happy 2011! It’s been a busy last couple of months in my neck of the woods, so I haven’t written here as much as I’d like. The backlog of things I wanted to talk about has grown heavy though, and it’s time to push some of it out onto the blog.

Sometimes these posts practically write themselves. I started making some notes about things that interested or impressed me this last week, and a theme emerged: innovation. It turns out that even though FSX is no spring chicken, enterprising developers are still surprising us all with the cool new things they can get the sim to do. Here are three examples I came across in the last few days, in no particular order: guns, grass, and GUI.

Vertical Reality’s TacPack

How’s the saying go? Join the army – travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them! Only this time it’s the Air Force you’ll be joining. Up until now, combat aircraft in FSX have been neutered. They looked good, but they were pretty much limited to taking off, blasting around at top speed, and landing again. Apparently, that’s all about to change thanks to Vertical Reality, the makers of 2010’s acclaimed F/A 18 “Superbug”. Here’s their promo video:

If what they’re planning comes to fruition, I predict a whole lot of stuff will start exploding soon.

Vegging Out with Orbx

You probably noticed that Orbx has a bit of a green thumb. Starting a while back, their sceneries have begun to sport some luscious vegetation, from enhanced trees, shrubbery, and even tall grass. They weren’t the first ones to grass up a scenery package, but they’ve taken it farther than anyone else, and (to my eye, anyway) done it more convincingly. As anyone who follows them knows, however, the word satisfied has apparently been cut out of their dictionaries. Enter: particle system grass.

Even though I work with them, I honestly have no idea what the capabilities of this new grass tech are. The only mention I’ve seen of it is in the “2011” post on the Orbx forums, but the pic shown was enough to make my mouth water. It seems to be an entirely new kind of grass placement, with much heavier and more realistic density – perfect for GA fliers who like turf strips. Will it blow in the wind as it does in some other games? No idea. Even if it just stands there looking pretty, it’d be a huge improvement over what we have now. Time will tell.

IdealFlight: Fly Right, Fly Now

Here’s another product that just popped up on my radar all of a sudden a few days ago. It took me a little reading to figure out what it was supposed to do, but once I got it I was delighted. In a nutshell, it solves a problem that some of us with less time to fly than we’d like often face: we want to fly realistically, with all the prep and planning that entails, but there’s just not enough time. So, we cut corners. Often, I’ll hop in a simple plane and just bore holes in the sky for an hour or so, with no real plan. It’s fun, but not all that fulfilling.

IdealFlight does a whole bunch of stuff to alleviate that problem. It’s a sort of “front-end” for the sim in which you set up a pilot profile, choose your favorite plane(s) and airport(s), then ask IdealFlight to aut0-generate a flight for you. The program creates the flight plan and brief, loads it into FSX, sets up your plane with the proper amount of fuel, and starts FSX with you at the airport, ready to fly. Optionally, it even generates the weather, including some fairly advanced wind simulations – see their site for more detail.

The program also creates a menu entry in FSX through which you can save flights in progress, including panel states. Once you land, IdealFlight makes a note of where you left your plane, so the next time you fly it can pick up where you left off and generate a new flight. There’s also a built-in facility to speed up flight between legs for the hurried among us.

None of what this program does is revolutionary in itself, but I’m very impressed with the way all the features work together. The interface takes a little getting used to – it’s clean, but a little wonky – and the website could be rewritten to make it vastly clearer what happens and when. Given that, I was able to figure out most of the features without too much hassle, and the resulting first flight was a blast. For approximately $25, I call this a good deal. You can download and try it for free, minus a few of the features, then decide if you agree.

Okay, that’s about all for now. As we dig deeper into winter, I’ll try and make the updates here a little more frequent. Until next time, happy flying!

Men don’t like to ask for directions. We’ll do just about anything to avoid looking lost, including spending billions on an array of satellites and creating a global positioning network just so we never have to admit to some gas pump jockey that we have no idea where we are.

Flight simmers are no different. I’ve got aeronautical charts on my desk, I use the built-in GPS frequently in flight,  and yet I’m always on the lookout for new tools that will help me navigate. That’s why I was immediately intrigued when I heard about iGmap, a new application for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch, from FSWidgets. It combines paper maps (for the US, anyway) with a moving-map functionality, all of which fits into the palm of your hand.

The software has two parts; a server that runs on your FSX PC, and an application that runs on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The iPhone can display 10 different styles of map, including what looks sort of like Google’s maps, shaded terrain (like the FSX GPS), and even sectional charts or terminal area charts for the US. Once fully connected to FS, it shows an airplane icon that indicates where you are in the virtual world, which is centered on-screen.

To use it, you run the FSWidgets Network Pack (the server) which is free of charge. This is the software that communicates with FSX or X-Plane to get your current position and heading. You start your flight, then click “Start Server” on the Network Pack. Now your computer is broadcasting your position over your home WiFi network.

Then you start up your iPhone/iPod and launch the iGmap app. Enter the IP address of the server and port (as listed on the Network Pack screen) and click the little aircraft button to connect to FS. And just like that, you’ve got a little moving map in the palm of your hand.

Why is this so cool? After all, we’ve already got the built-in GPS, right? Well for one thing, it provides the sectional chart view, which is rich with all sorts of valuable information like navaid frequencies, airport elevations and so forth. And I have to admit, I just think it’s fun that all this tech fits into something I can hold in my hand and reference during flight.

The setup on the software was incredibly simple and doesn’t seem to have any impact on frame rates. The iPhone app sells for $9.99, which is more than fair given the functionality offered. Even though it looks good and is very legible on the small screen, I can see how it’d be dynamite on a larger iPad screen. Hmm… oh god, my wife is gonna kill me.

I’ve only used iGmap for one evening’s flying, so I haven’t had a chance to try out all its features yet. Looking at the screenshot of the Network Pack, I see there’s a tick box for “send traffic data”, so it’s possible you can see the traffic on the hand-held as well. Now that is an interesting prospect…

Bottom line, I like this thing. Sure, you have to already have an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad for it to be of any use to you. If you do have one of these lying around, I’d highly recommend looking into this app. It’s the best ten bucks you’ll spend all week.

It bears noting that every time I sit down to write this review, I find some reason to put it off. The most common reason is that I’m having some issue with EZCA that I want to iron out—something I’m sure I just don’t understand, because it just can’t be the way this add-on works. First, I read the manual again. Then I go to the forums. Eventually, the answer always seems to be yes, that’s how it is, just live with it. If that sounds like an auspicious start to a review, let me add this: I love this add-on. L-O-V-E it. But as usual, love is complicated.

There are very few add-ons that I would consider essential to enjoying the flight sim experience. A good yoke, rudder pedals, and my TrackIR spring to mind. Without them, flying would be so diminished as to be barely worth the effort. And while EZCA doesn’t quite ascend to this level for me, it’s pretty damn close. I think that’s why I keep sticking with it through various frustrations; there’s so much raw potential to ratchet up the realism.

What is it?

First off, a quick intro to what this thing does. Essentially, it’s a replacement for the built-in FSX camera system. Every view you normally use, VC, exterior, fly-by, tower, can be re-created in EZCA. In addition, if you’re a TrackIR user like me, you have to remove FSX’s native ability to control your TIR unit and turn it over to EZCA instead. From then on out, the add-on calls the shots — quite literally. This is both EZCA’s greatest strength, and its biggest shortcoming.

What it Does Well

Handing over control of the views allows EZCA to introduce my absolute favorite feature: camera effects. The effects are what makes EZCA a must-have in my book. When dialed-in properly, camera effects do an incredible job of simulating real-world bumps, shudders, and the effect of gravity on the pilot during maneuvers. Ever since learning to fly for real, one of my chief complaints about FS is that aircraft seem to move through the air as if on rails. In the real world, the atmosphere is like a living thing, always shifting and changing, pushing and pulling against the airframe. Finally, with EZCA’s effects, the sim feels like this as well. It’s a difficult thing to write about, but easy to show. Here are some examples:

The effects are divided into three categories. RND (Random) movements are auto-generated, and are used to simulate things like ground bumps during taxi, and slight dips and rises during flight. DHM (Dynamic Head Movements) simulate the effects of specific actions on the human body, such as the bouncing that accompanies turbulence. These effects are driven by specific weather and physics events. CR (Camera Resonance) movements simulate camera jolt caused by events such as a hard landing. Make a soft touchdown, and the camera doesn’t move much – clap the wheels down hard, and things really get bouncy.

Each of these effects categories have multiple options for changing how they appear in-sim, which can be configured on a specific camera basis. For example, the shake of a touchdown will be less pronounced in a large, heavy jet than in a 172. You can configure the cameras to reflect that, which is pretty nifty.

Room for Improvement

Now for the negative. This flexibility comes at the cost of complexity. Working with EZCA is wonky, to put it mildly. Each plane you fly has to have its own cameras installed and configured, and while the add-on installs cameras for all the default planes, you’re on your own as far as add-on aircraft go. Unless I miss my mark, most of us spend almost all our time in add-on planes, which means a fair bit of configuration. The easiest way to add cameras is to export one of the default planes’ versions, switch to an add-on, and import the settings. As an annoying side note, importing a camera only sets its position; you have then import its effects separately. I hear this will change in an upcoming version, so hopefully that won’t be a setback for long.

Fortunately, custom cameras are easy to tweak once they’ve been imported. Just choose the camera, use EZCA’s key commands to move the view back and forth, forward or backward, and up or down, then click the edit camera key twice. From then on out, the camera assumes the new position and orientation.

This brings me to another annoyance: hot keys. Maybe it’s just my setup, but EZCA seems very hot-key intensive. I see why it needs to have keys for all its various movements and options, but the way the interface is set up, you also need to have a key or joystick button (or both) assignment for each individual view as well. I already had so many keys assigned to my various FSX commands that I had a hard time finding any available for quick use with EZCA. As a last resort, I pulled an old Belkin Nostromo game pad out of my closet and put it to use as an EZCA-only controller. That seems to be working fairly well. Using EZCA makes it obvious why the MS developers decided to have view cycling keys rather than a separate key for each view; otherwise there are just too dang many of them! Again, in fairness, the EZCA devs have said they’re adding camera cycling into an upcoming build, so that’s another problem that will probably fix itself.

Mostly, I fly from the VC. Because of that, my main focus when initially setting up EZCA was getting the VC views right. There are two other classes of view, however: external and world cameras. The external views are much like FS’s built-in options, with the addition of being able to modify the position, angle, and distance. World cameras are rooted to a specific spot on the globe, a feature that could really come in handy for video makers. However, world cameras also have significant restrictions that the developer says are FSX limitations, mainly that they can’t be altered much once set, and must be set individually by aircraft position, requiring a restart of FSX between each placement.

Final Word

As it turns out, re-creating the FS camera system is a complex, multi-layered process. Given that complexity, I think EZCA does an admirable job. The interface needs some serious streamlining, and the documentation could do with a good going-over as well. The control panel that drives everything isn’t available in full-screen mode, so you have to drop into windowed in order to change anything, which gets old quickly. Also, I’m not convinced that the camera switching is much of an improvement over the built-in FSX method, and it seems as if a lot of EZCA’s functionality is tied up in reproducing something that already worked fairly well. Having said that, the camera effects are so over-the-top fantastic an improvement that I think it’s worth putting up with the rest of the niggles just to experience them. This video is a great comparison of flying with and without it:

As of version 1.15, there’s full support for TrackIR, and EZCA works with the head tracker hand-in-glove, expanding and enhancing its options. In fact, it seems to me that EZCA delivers much smoother head tracking than FSX did by default, which in turn makes flying seem more fluid.

The developer seems dedicated to improving the product, and is active and responsive on the support forums. That bodes well, and a I have no qualms about recommending EZCA. For anyone who has it, I’d be interested in hearing of your experience as well.

For more information and to purchase EZCA, visit Flight1. If you want to do your due diligence before purchasing, you can also visit the support forum.