by Tuncer Deniz I met Richard Harvey about 4 years ago at an Apple sponsored game kitchen. At that time Harvey was working on a Mac conversion of Fury3, which was eventually published by Mac Soft. About three years ago, Harvey began working on Fly!, the new flight simulator from Terminal Reality. As project lead on Fly!, Harvey has been a busy man, trying to finish Fly! before the end of the June. But Harvey was nice enough to answer a few of my questions about Fly!, Terminal Reality, and the future. IMG: Can you give us a little background about yourself. How you got started in this industry and so on? RH: The first flight simulator that I even played was A2-FS1 Flight Simulator for the Apple ][+, written by Bruce Artwick and his company subLogic. subLogic went on to release Flight Simulator II, which was really want sucked me into flight sims. During my Apple ][ days, I learned enough from hacking around on my box that I wanted to write my own programs, so I learned BASIC and went on to writing in Pascal. In 1984, one of my current bosses (at the time working for an Apple dealer) convinced me to buy into the "next" wave of computing: Macintosh. My first Mac was a 128K Mac with an Imagewriter printer; I eventually upgraded it to a 512K FatMac (Hertzfeld's Switcher was AWESOME!), then to a Mac Plus, and then my first color Mac -- an SE/30 with external monitor. I followed the whole flight sim line on various computers (FS2, FS4, FS5), as well as other notable sims: Hellcats over the Pacific/Leyte Gulf, F/A-18 Hornet, Su-27 Flanker, Warbirds, A-10 Attack! and A-10 Cuba, and others. General Aviation sims continued to be my first love, because of the focus of replicating the "real" world not only in flying the aircraft, but also in terms of weather, terrain, and landmarks. All along I was progressing my programming career, moving to Object Pascal and MacApp as my first introduction to object oriented programming, then adopting C++ back before it was considered a "serious" language for mainstream development. Most of my programming efforts were geared at more mainstream or corporate systems, but games had always been the original reason I started programming. Through some wonderful twists of fate, I was contacted by my old friend (Brett Combs) when TRI had just formed, as they were interested in releasing a Macintosh version of their first title, Terminal Velocity. I worked with Mark Randel, our president, to create the core Macintosh routines to support our graphics, sound, and I/O libraries. At that point, we had TV up and running on a Mac, and I spent the remaining time wrapping a Mac interface around the product. By the time TV was being finished, Mark had moved me over to PC's doing development on our next title, and Robert Minnis stepped in to take over Mac and UI development. Today Rob is our Macintosh developer, though many of us in the company have our roots back on the Macintosh platform. IMG: Mac gamers were pretty happy to see that Fly! was coming out for the Mac, especially when you consider Microsoft hasn't ported their Flight Simulator games to the Mac in years. Why did you decide to do a Mac version? RH: Once TRI partnered with Microsoft for a series of titles, the opportunity to create Macintosh versions disappeared. Fly! is the first title since Terminal Velocity to be released without Microsoft involved, and so internally we decided what our strategic direction would be for platform support. The changes Apple had made regarding price/performance was finally bringing core performance up to match higher end PC's, which typically are what drive innovation (and I would argue the game industry is the first to take advantage of this performance.) Given our background with Macintosh, the newly re-energized Mac community, and a code foundation that already had core Macintosh support, it seemed and obvious no-brainer to offer Fly! on the Macintosh. IMG: How long have you been working on Fly and what kind of challenges have you had to deal with? RH: This fall will mark about the 3 year point for the original design of FLY! The team itself was not formed formally until the following spring. The biggest challenge for this type of product, and probably why they are not more prevalent, is that to do an accurate GA sim, you first have to design an entire "world" for the aircraft to exist within. Most military or "fantasy" sims can define their own borders, or confine flight within a small area. For GA flight, you want to model the whole world, complete with ground elevations, satellite imagery, clouds, rain, snow, winds, lightning, sun, moon, stars, buildings, bridges, water, roads, etc. You literally are recreating the real world to properly implement a GA flight simulator. IMG: What sets Fly! apart from all the other "flight sims" on the market? RH: I'd probably put "attention to detail" as our claim to fame. We decided very early in the project to focus on details, from cockpits and systems to the flight model to the visual world. Some sims believe quantity is better than quality; we feel that a handful of extremely detailed aircraft, with proper systems and flight models, is the key to long term success. IMG: Fly! will be a simultaneous release on Windows and Mac. How difficult is it to do development on both platforms at the same time? RH: Less difficult than some companies would have you believe. Once you invest the time to get cross-platform support in your core technologies (3D engine, sound, I/O, networking), the bulk of "duplicate" effort from then on is really centered on testing. IMG: The inclusion of USB on the iMac and B&W Power Macs seems to have rejuvenated peripherals like the CH Flight Sim Yoke (which we just received in the mail). Does Fly! support these and other USB devices? RH: Yes we do. Given my background with these types of products, I'm very aware that there are hundreds of input devices out there people are using for their sims. In the GA genre, it's even very common to find people custom building their own yoke assemblies. We wanted to make sure our input device support was flexible enough to handle most devices. You'll find that even though Fly! does not yet have a plane that takes advantage of all the features, we have direct axes support for ailerons, rudder, elevator, toe brakes, 4 throttles, 4 propellers, 4 mixtures, and trim. Also, all program keys can be reassigned and customized by the user, and any available key command can be mapped to any button on any input device. IMG: The iMac is a huge success and Apple seems to be back. What has impressed you most about Apple's turnaround? RH: Apple woke up again to the realization that the home market, particularly the entry level market, cannot be ignored. Back in the days of Jean-Louis, Apple management felt that focusing on high end products, particularly those with higher margins, should be the primary focus of the company. They learned painfully late that this was not the case. Jobs seems to be doing a very good job finding ways to keep Apple innovative while making a profit on lower margin hardware. Hopefully they will not become too comfortable, because there are still areas where the Mac needs some serious attention (higher speed system bus, absolute 100% PowerPC-native OS, particularly solving problems with I/O throughput in the file system, etc. IMG: Will Terminal Reality be developing more games for the Mac in the future? RH: If the response to Fly! is any indication for the demand for entertainment products on the Macintosh, I'm sure we'll keep the Macintosh in our plans for future titles. IMG: Why challenge Microsoft in an arena pretty much dominated by Flight Simulator? RH: We have wanted to do a GA flight simulator for many years (for Brett and I, it goes back over 15 years). However, we waited until home PC technology reached the point where we could do the sim we envisioned -- true satellite imagery, extremely detailed aircraft, global coverage, among others. Although Flight Simulator continues to be a best seller, the technology at the core of that product is extremely dated, and Microsoft has had trouble advancing the foundation of this product since Flight Simulator 5.0. We would not have even started FLY! if we did not think we could deliver an extremely solid feature set to advance the genre. Flight Simulator certainly will not disappear overnight, but they are beginning to get very serious competition, and just looking at their announced feature set it is obvious they are taking FLY! very seriously. IMG: Will add-on packs that are available for Microsoft's Flight Simulator be compatible with Fly!? RH: No, they will not. However, the bulk of the Flight Simulator file formats have been publicly available for years. We will also be releasing our file formats for aircraft and scenery creation. This might be a great opportunity for some weekend programmers out there to look into! But, we certainly do not intend to let FLY! wither with no add-on support ourselves, and you will see in the coming year. And, since your audience is Mac users, they might want to know that we explicitly made sure that all of our file formats are FULLY cross platform -- if someone creates a scenery set or aircraft on the PC, you'll be able to use it with the Mac version with no conversion necessary. IMG: What will the future hold for Fly! after its released? Can we expect future updates? RH: Yes, definitely, both in the form of advancing the core product, and through the addition of more and different aircraft, scenery areas, and some other interesting technologies we're keeping up our sleeve for now. IMG: The Mac version supports RAVE and Glide, is OpenGL planned? RH: We're investigating OpenGL support for all of our products, Mac and PC alike. Now that OpenGL is getting support from hardware manufacturers in the form of stable drivers for 3D cards, it's now more reasonable for us to dedicate time to this instead of solving 3rd party hardware compatibility issues ourselves.