Computer Flight Newsbriefs #31 Spring 1992 subLOGIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- for dealers, distributors, aviation VIPs and dedicated computer pilots ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Current News ------------ A New Generation of Scenery Revolutionary new advances in our development and display technologies are inaugurating a new generation of scenery databases for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator and SubLOGIC Flight Assignment-series simulations. Multi-disk Scenery Collections provide a continuous, uninterrupted flow of visual details within the pilot's field of view at any altitude and airspeed. "Saturation coverage" of the entire scenery area is much more realistic than the spot coverage on previous Scenery Disks. Flight simulation users who like to fly by visual navigation especially will appreciate the abundance of new types of scenery within the coverage area. This new generation of scenery is accompanied by greatly improved support documentation. Large three-color maps show the location of major scenery details for visual navigation. A new plotter/quasi flight computer makes it easy to calculate distance, heading, true airspeed, wind correction angle and enroute time for any flight. A representative sampling of airport approach charts (with corresponding aircraft position and configuration settings) offer a quick introduction to each Scenery Collection. California Scenery Collection Released! This monumental achievement will forever change many people's perception of Scenery Disks as just an "add-on" to their flight simulation program. The states of California and Nevada encompass an area of incredible geographical diversity. California Scenery Collection recreates many of these physical features in detail, from the sunny beaches of southern California to the snow- capped peak of Mount Shasta, from the farmlands of the San Joaquin valley and forests of Redwood National Park to the arid Nevada Great Basin and scorched desert terrain of Death Valley. The rugged and majestic Sierra Nevada mountains are as hazardous as they are beautiful, with the tallest peaks at elevations above 14,000 feet. The Cascades, the Coast Ranges and dozens of other mountains, highlands and foothills also will challenge your flying skills. Explore the sprawling urban megalopolis of greater Los Angeles as you take off from Santa Monica Muni, fly over Beverly Hills, past the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium, then head south over downtown L.A. to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Make an unscheduled landing at the seven-mile-long dry lakebed runway used by the space shuttle at Edwards AFB. Or take a sightseeing flight out to massive Hoover Dam at Lake Mead, then let the brilliant lights and flashing neon signs of Las Vegas guide you to a night landing at McCarren International Airport. California Scenery Collection is the newest, most sophisticated scenery yet from the SubLOGIC scenery design team. In fact, California Scenery Collection contains so much scenery that we had to expand the Microsoft Flight Simulator program's standard 16K RAM scenery data storage capacity up to 28K to accommodate the full density and complexity of the scenery on these disks. A hard disk installation program included with California Scenery Collection automatically copies a new driver to the MFS subdirectory so the program can access the larger California scenery databases. Floppy disk users can load California Scenery Collection directly from floppy disk by copying the driver to MFS program disk #2. Owners of SubLOGIC's New Facilities Locator program can take a quick guided tour of California Scenery Collection simply by using the NFL menu settings listed on each airport approach chart. NFL will automatically place your aircraft on final approach into each airport you select, giving you a quick and easy preview of many California Collection scenery highlights. Acclaim for Great Britain Scenery Collection! Customer response to Great Britain Scenery Collection is incredible! After all the work we put into updating our technologies, it's especially gratifying to receive such enthusiastic praise from registered owners. Comments like "Superb," "Can't wait for more!," "Great job! All scenery should be this good," and "Excellent graphics - especially runways, taxiways, airports, cities, etc," show that you truly appreciate the results of our efforts. Many Great Britain Scenery owners say that they also appreciate the convenience of being able to use New Facilities Locator to instantly move to any location in the scenery database. With NFL it's easy to set yourself up on final approach to runway 24 at Scotland's Inverness Airport, then continue on the same heading to explore Loch Ness and surrounding mountainous environs. Or select an ILS RWY 09R approach to Heathrow Airport for a pilot's eye view of the richly-detailed city of London. Or transport your aircraft several miles south of DVR VOR for a breathtaking glimpse of the fabled White Cliffs of Dover. GB documentation lists NFL menu settings to instantly place your aircraft on guided approaches into Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Isle of Man, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Southampton and many other cities in the UK and Ireland. ------------------ New Product Update ------------------ Flight Controls & Rudder Pedals While the much delayed Flight Controls were almost released in late 1989, we felt they lacked the smoothness and perfection of feel needed before we could put the SubLOGIC name on them. The Flight Controls design has been nearly perfected, but the need for a timely release of rudder pedals to enhance aircraft control in our upcoming Flight Assignment: Air Force simulation now has made rudder pedals our top priority. A second generation of rudder pedals have the proper geometry and feel we've worked so hard to perfect. These pedals are made of steel tubing pivoting on metal bearing surfaces, supported on a stained oak base and center column. This device is not cheap to produce, but its substantial feel and precision tooling should delight customers. While the list price of Flight Controls and rudder pedals has increased substantially because of these design and development perfections, each outstanding order will be filled at the price in effect when the order was received. Rudder pedals now are scheduled for release in June 1992. Flight Assignment: Air Force We don't have space in this issue of Computer Flight Newsbriefs to continue the description of our upcoming Flight Assignment: Air Force simulation. One thing we can say -- we expect its introduction will be the biggest event since Microsoft Flight Simulator Version 3.0 was released nearly four years ago! All of us here at SubLOGIC are excited and highly motivated to do our best work on this project. Flight Assignment: Air Force will be released only when the product meets and exceeds our highest expectations. Check the next issue of CFN for further details. Southwest/South Central U.S. Scenery Collection We've already started work on Southwest/South Central U.S. Scenery Collection, which will provide continuous coverage of the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. As with California Collection, our scenery designers will spend a lot of airborne time exploring and getting a feel for the terrain that makes up this area of the country. Many customers have asked how the boundaries of the new U.S. Scenery Collections were chosen, since the different Collections vary greatly in area Area coverage is determined based on the percentage of Flight Simulator and Flight Assignment: A.T.P. users located in each area of the country. This way each Scenery Collection should appeal (in theory, at least) to approximately the same number of flight simulation owners. Dividing the country into seven areas with equal sales potential increases our incentive to complete each Scenery Collection and simplifies the production logistics of providing complete, detailed coverage for the entire United States. ---------------- Marketing Update ---------------- Instrument Pilot's Scenery More distribution channels and software dealers are starting to carry the Instrument Pilot's Scenery sets! Thanks to your requests, a lot of dealers have realized that there's a sizable market of dedicated Flight Assignment: A.T.P. users who desire a saturated overlay of airports and radio navigation aids, and Microsoft Flight Simulator users who want a complete instrument flying environment. Together, the IPS East U.S. and West U.S. sets contain every public-access airport, radio nav-aid and airport instrument approach located in the continental United States, accurately positioned at its exact latitude/longitude coordinate location. In a surprisingly short time, these IPS sets have gone from being available only by direct order from SubLOGIC to the shelves and special-order catalogs of a surprisingly large number of dealers and mail-order houses in the U.S. and Europe! Thanks to all for your support of SubLOGIC and serious flight simulation application products. --------------------------- SubLOGIC Product User Notes --------------------------- Why a New SubLOGIC "World" Coordinate System? The limitations of our original "world" coordinate system became a major stumbling block when we started writing a latitude/longitude conversion program during the development of ATP. This isn't surprising when you consider that the original system (still used in Microsoft Flight Simulator Version 4.0) was created by pencilling grid lines on a 30"x48" Rand-McNally Cosmopolitan map of the United States. Developed nearly ten years ago for the purpose of providing spot scenery coverage in four different areas of the country, this coordinate grid did not foresee the level of accuracy required for continuous global scenery applications. Nevertheless, all Scenery Disks prior to SD#12 used this rough coordinate system to determine the placement of scenery details. A mathematical latitude/longitude conversion of North/East coordinates derived from this system is innacurate at best (as illustrated by the compounding errors that creep in when you convert the same set of coordinates back and forth multiple times using Microsoft Aircraft & Scenery Designer). We quickly realized that we'd have to revise the original coordinate grid to establish a usable standard worldwide system for future scenery development. Our new latitude/longitude driver is extremely accurate, with worldwide coordinate definitions that should serve the needs of the flight simulation community for a long time to come. This new coordinate system and lat/long conversion program is now available at no charge for other companies to use in supporting software applications. Using IPS with Your Flight Simulation Program This article describes several methods you can use to simplify switching back and forth between Scenery Disks and Instrument Pilot's Scenery sets with Flight Assignment: A.T.P. and Microsoft Flight Simulator. Flight Assignment: A.T.P. ------------------------- The simulation allows you to load either IPS files that will be integrated with the default ATP scenery or converted Scenery Disk and Scenery Collection files. Scenery Disk/Collection files cannot be integrated with IPS. One option is to keep all scenery files in a hard drive subdirectory called SCENERY and put all IPS files in a separate subdirectory called IPS. On program startup the CONFIG.ATP file is set to look for scenery in the C:\SCENERY subdirectory. Make another configuration file called CONFIG.XXX and change the "scenery =" parameter in this file to search the C:\IPS subdirectory. Write a batch file that will rename CONFIG.ATP to CONFIG.TMP, rename CONFIG.XXX to CONFIG.ATP, and rename CONFIG.TMP to CONFIG.XXX. Every time you run the batch file, the current CONFIG.ATP file will be renamed CONFIG.XXX and vice versa. In effect, each running of the batch file causes ATP to search the opposite subdirectory for scenery files. Only scenery files or IPS files will be listed in the SCENERY LIBRARY sub-menu at any given time. This eliminates potential prioritization problems that can occur when multiple scenery files cover the same scenery area. Another option is to keep both types of files in the same subdirectory, making sure that IPS files are always the last files in the subdirectory (and the last files listed on the SCENERY LIBRARY sub-menu). Turn on the scenery auto-load option when you want to load and use converted Scenery Disk or Scenery Collection files with ATP. Turn off the scenery auto-load option when you want to use IPS files, and manually load the appropriate IPS file for the area of the country through which you're flying. Microsoft Flight Simulator -------------------------- The simulation allows you to load IPS files or converted Scenery Disk and Scenery Collection files from the hard disk MFS subdirectory. Neither IPS files nor Scenery Disk/Collection files can be integrated with default MFS scenery. One option is to make sure that IPS files are the last files in the MFS subdirectory (and the last files listed on the SCENERY LIBRARY sub-menu). Turn on the scenery auto-load option when you want to load and use converted Scenery Disk or Scenery Collection files. Turn off the scenery auto-load option when you want to use IPS files, and manually load the appropriate IPS file for the area of the country through which you're flying. A second option is to create two batch files so you can alternate between scenery files or IPS files exclusively. Create one batch file (e.g., IPS.BAT) that changes the extensions of all scenery files from .SCN to .XXX and the extensions of all IPS files from .XXX to .SCN. Create another batch file (SCENERY.BAT) that changes scenery file extensions from .XXX to .SCN and IPS file extensions from .SCN to .XXX. Only scenery files or IPS files will be listed in the SCENERY LIBRARY sub-menu at any given time. This eliminates potential prioritization problems that can occur when multiple scenery files cover the same scenery area. Keep in mind that both batch files will have to be modified whenever you add a new scenery file or IPS file to your MFS subdirectory. AdLib Sound Driver Update We're up to version 2 of an AdLib sound driver for Flight Assignment: A.T.P. The current driver is available on one 1.2M 5.25" or two 720K 3.5" floppy disks. We've underwritten its distribution by bundling it with a self-running ATP/Great Britain/New Facilities Locator demo program. We will continue to devote a percentage of our engineering time to the development and improvement of new sound drivers. We've also initiated development of another driver that will let owners of Flight Assignment: A.T.P. and Flight Assignment: Air Force use the MALLARD Sound, Graphics & Aircraft Upgrade program's sound drivers with any Flight Assignment-series simulation. Customer Service Update The last issue of Computer Flight Newsbriefs described some of the policy and procedural changes we'd made in our customer service department. Several additional refinements have been implemented since then to improve the operations of this vital link in the company organization. Standard operating policy now ensures that all customer feedback is passed onto and read by the senior operations and engineering managers. Customers who telephone us with product feedback have their comments written in a permanent logbook. Be assured that your comments, suggestions and criticisms are being seen by those in charge of program design and development. Additionally, in April '92 we will implement a new written response policy to acknowledge receipt of all customer feedback. Due to the heavy volume of registration card notes, letters and phone calls we receive, we can't guarantee a personal response to your comments, but we will at least send you a letter to let you know that your feedback was received and noted. Your feedback gives us invaluable insights into what you like and dislike about current flight simulation products (ours and others), and is one of the most influential factors in determining the course of future SubLOGIC product development. We appreciate your taking the time to let us know how we can improve our current products or tell us what you'd like us to do next. Thanks, and keep it coming! ----------------------------- SubLOGIC Product Availability ----------------------------- FLIGHT SOFTWARE IBM 5.25" IBM 3.5" Amiga Atari ST --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Flight Assignment: Air Force | * | * | * | * | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Flight Assignment: A.T.P. | 59.95 | 59.95 | * | * | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Microsoft Flight Simulator ** | 59.95 | 59.95 | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Flight Simulator II | | | 49.95 | 49.95 | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| SUPPLEMENTS | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| New Facilities Locator | 39.95 | 39.95 | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Collection: California | 59.95 | 59.95 | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Collection: South W/C U.S. | * | * | * | * | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Collection: Great Britain | 59.95 | 59.95 | 59.95 | 59.95 | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Collection: Set A | 59.95 | 59.95 | 59.95 | 59.95 | (Scenery Disks #7, #11, Japan) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Collection: Set B | 59.95 | 59.95 | * | * | (Scenery Disks #9, #12, "Hawaii") | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Instrument Pilot's Scenery: West U.S. | 99.95 | 99.95 | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Instrument Pilot's Scenery: East U.S. | 99.95 | 99.95 | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| "Hawaiian Odyssey" Scenery Adventure | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| "Western European Tour" Scenery Disk | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Japan Scenery Disk | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Disk #7 (Washington, | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | Charlotte, Jacksonville, Miami) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Disk #9 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | (Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Disk #11 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | (Detroit, Lake Huron) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Scenery Disk #12 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | 29.95 | (New York, Montreal, Halifax) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Demo Disk Set (ATP, Scenery Set A, B, | 12.95 | 12.95 | | | Great Britain/New Facilities Locator) | | | | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| FLIGHT HARDWARE | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Flight Controls I | 329.00 | 329.00 | * | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| Rudder Pedals | 129.00 | 129.00 | * | | --------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------| * Release date to be announced. These products are coming, it's just too soon to say when. ** Marketed by Microsoft Corporation. Available from SubLOGIC. the Computer Flight people -------------------------- subLOGIC 501 Kenyon Road Champaign, IL 61820 USA Telephone: (217) 359-848 U.S. Order Line: (800) 637-4983 Fax: (217) 352-1472