Is Something Always Better Than Nothing

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

From the Archive – 11/09/05

A good pal of mine, when I was floundering around with muttered apologies for not having written in so long, offered to loan me an excuse, which I’ll reuse here: "I’m just a man whose circumstances went beyond his control." Normally, I wouldn’t quote Styx, and neither would she, but, as another friend’s father once said, I’ll take my truth wherever I can find it, domo arigato.

To those of you who still check back here to see if I’ve jotted down anything new and have repeatedly left scowling in disappointment, I’ll borrow from the dearly departed Douglas Adams, quoting the creator’s last message to all creation: "We apologize for the inconvenience." To the other approximately 6,567,664,338 of you that don’t read this . . . bang the rocks together, guys.

The ranks of Aces bloggers have swelled dramatically since last I wrote – Susan Ashlock (Enguaged), Brian Hunt (Habibi), Adrian Woods (Torgo3000), and Mike Zyskowski (Skyhawk) have all gotten started, and, so far, they’re providing interesting and particularly useful posts, exactly like I don’t.

I actually do have a couple of real posts in the works, but mainly wanted to fire this one off to make sure that anyone who finds mine follows the links to the others. That, and I wanted to give Jason Waskey a heart attack by actually posting something.

More probably follows.

Posted in Egocentric | Leave a comment

Monday Mourning

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

From the Archive – 10/17/2005

It was a lousy way to start a week, and a terrible reason to get back to posting here after an 11 day absence . . . I found out this morning that two students from Seattle’s Aviation High School, Brittany Boatright and Kandyce Cowart, were among the three people killed in the crash of a Piper Cherokee 140 near Paine Field in Everett, WA on Saturday. The two were participating in an EAA-sanctioned “Young Eagles” flight – a program in which young people are matched with willing and experienced pilots to give them their first flight. To date, the program has flown more than 1.2 million students – before last Saturday, those flights had a perfect safety record. Those statistics are admirable, even incredible, but they’re not of much comfort today.

Our team has a close relationship with the staff, faculty, and students at AHS. They use Flight Simulator in a number of ways in their curriculum, and they’re brought here to Microsoft in groups meet the team and tour our facility. In addition, I sat on an advisory committee to advocate for the school to representatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and served on a panel of judges for students’ final project presentations as part of their History of Aircraft Design class. My proudest moment, however, came just 5 weeks ago, when I was honored to be the keynote speaker for the opening day of their second school year, welcoming a student body that had just doubled to two hundred. When the principal introduced me as, among many other things, “ . . . one of the school’s best friends”, all I could think was “Well, the feeling is mutual.”

I have friends on the board like Erik and Ron, friends like principal Reba and visiting teacher Gus . . . I’m sure they’d all agree, however, that it is the students that are most remarkable. Friends of mine that I’ll mention only by the nicknames I’ve assigned them, like “Monkey Story”, “Falco”, “Extra Canopy Bug Guy”, and, umm, “Andrew”, and of course, my key operative in the student body, “Cheesy”.  These are not average high school students by any measure – they are among the most intelligent, engaged, focused, enthusiastic and (they may not like me for this) mature and polite people I’ve ever known, of any age.

Like most people, sometime in my earlier-thirties, I woke up in the morning with an official case of adult cynicism, and that’s when I started using phrases like “these kids today”, “when I was your age”, and “I fear for the future”, and actually meaning them.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to meet first a hundred and then another hundred teenagers and be so quickly and easily proven completely wrong.

And then . . . what a tragedy when their numbers are suddenly, randomly, and senselessly down by two.

I didn’t know Brittany and Kandyce personally, but, if they attended the first day of school, they heard me say, in among my other rambling and tangential remarks, how lucky they were – lucky to have found an amazing school, lucky to have found a way to wrap their education in passion, and most of all, lucky to have the leadership and experience of the newly-minted sophomore class to guide them. It was hard this morning not to feel especially bitter about that, asking myself if I still thought any of them were lucky. Of course I do, just as I feel lucky to count an entire school full of amazing people among my friends.  And just as I would have felt lucky if I had gotten the chance to meet Brittany and Kandyce before they . . . left.

It sounds like a terrible cliché, but Aviation High School really is like a big family – more to the point, they’re like a friend’s family that welcomes you as one of their own, without the baggage, and that you spend time with by choice, not simply because of an accident of birth. 

Being a family, they will feel these losses more strongly than some schools might. Thankfully, being a family, especially one of such unusual character also means that they will find that much more strength, and be in the position to help each other cope, to see each other through.

One of the many things that seems so unfair is the fact that they didn’t need a tragedy to bring them together – they were already close, already strong. One of the many things that makes me feel so terribly guilty is that it did take a tragedy to move me to write about the school here. My friends deserve better.

We don’t know yet what caused the crash, and may never know all of the details with any certainty. Eventually, that will matter, but not today – no amount of investigation, no detailed analysis will restore three lives ended early. There is some comfort in the old and tired bromide that says that Brittany, Kandyce, and the pilot, Mr. Hokanson, died doing what they wanted to do. Right now, that doesn’t do much to offset the shock of a happy and exciting beginning turning so abruptly into a dreadful and tragic ending. But, over time, it will help.

According to one media outlet, the AHS students’ most recent quote of the week was from the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, side one (back when albums were albums and had sides), track 2 – “With a Little Help from My Friends”.  I applaud their taste, not leastwise because they chose a song that’s not only before their time, but before mine, making me feel at least a little younger in the process. With that in mind, I’ll close this with the clumsy and hastily assembled words I wrote for the card that accompanied the flowers we had sent to the school this morning:

“To the staff, faculty, students, and families of Aviation High School:

None of the best things in life are without risk, but that lesson should never have to come at such a terrible price. You will all get by with a little help from your friends – just please remember that you have friends here, too.”

I assume that information about preferred remembrances will be forthcoming, and I will do my best to promote and support those efforts as they emerge. In the meantime, I’d recommend that anyone that is so inclined consider doing whatever they can to support and promote the cause of aviation education – the Richard Harvey Scholarship would not be a bad place to start.

UPDATE:

This article mentions that:

"A fund has been established to help the families of the two Aviation High School students who died Saturday in a small plane crash. Donations may be made by check to “Brittany Boatright & Kandyce Cowart” and deposited at any branch of U.S. Bank."

The US Bank account number for the fund is: # 1535 5735 1472.

For those who want to remember the pilot, Eugene Hokanson, as well, I’d recommend a donation to and / or membership in the EAA.

My thanks to all who have written and / or commented with words of support.

Posted in Thoughts | Leave a comment

Are You a Mod or a Rocker?

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

No, I’m a Mocker . . .

From the Archive 10/06/05

First of all, for the record, I don’t consider Flight Simulator to be a game. I do believe that it can be used as such, but, like so many other aspects of the product, that is up to the customer – you get out of it what you put into it. If I were to design the box, it would A) be really badly designed, and 2) say something like: "Here’s the world, here’s a couple dozen airplanes, some weather, some ATC, there’s the Internet if you want more (a lot more!) of any of those things – now go do whatever you want. And, no, there probably won’t be a patch." 

Thankfully, I don’t design boxes.

I normally don’t like to see Flight Sim referred to as "just" a game, not because I don’t love games (I do), but because the implication is usually that it isn’t as realistic or as useful for training as another product, or that it’s less viable as a hobbyist’s platform, that it has no value beyond gameplay.  (As an aside, my responses have softened over the years, from "It’s NOT a game!" to "It’s not just a game!", to "It’s not strictly a game, unless of course you want it to be.")

This picture of a competitor’s booth just down from ours at last summer’s AirVenture in Oshkosh, WI, was an unusually . . . formal example. (Take a look at the two kids in the foreground – notice how intently focused they are, determined not to have any fun at all while using a serious simulator.)

However, when I see articles that talk about games that let you customize features, games that have active communities behind them, games that have been published for years and turned into venerable franchises, I turn into a terrible hypocrite, and get all bent out of shape when they forget to mention Flight Sim. Yes, I’m irrationally convinced that I can have it both ways, but admitting it is the first step . . . .

Case in point: There’s a good article on game mods in the "Games for Windows" section of the Windows XP area of Microsoft.com. The author, Joel Durham, offers a good introduction to the idea of mods as ways to add variety and extend the life a particular title. But have to take polite exception with him when he says this:

"The seminal game Quake is really the launching point for modern game mods. Sure, there was modding going on before Quake came out in 1996, but id’s supergame was groundbreaking . . ."

Yes, he offers an appropriate disclaimer about modding having occurred before Quake, just the like one I’m about to offer in which I say that I agree that Quake was groundbreaking, and offer proper respect to id for their achievement, acknowledge that I was a big fan from the early Wolfenstein and Doom days, etc.

But, I have to point out here, in front of my rapidly dwindling audience of dozens, that the Flight Sim add-on community in 1996 (which, in another disclaimer I’m likely to forget to include, admittedly didn’t really take off until Flight Simulator 98, released in 1997) had already been building up steam for more than six years, since the release of Flight Simulator 4.0 in the fall of 1989. 

So, I suppose I would have to add a new tagline to my already horribly designed Flight Sim package: "It’s not strictly a game, unless you want it to be, or unless you’re talking about games that do cool things that we totally did first and stuff . . . "

Or, maybe, just maybe we can continue to do more and more to advertise and support our add-on community (I just can’t bring myself to call them a "mod community", any more than I can call an aircraft texture a "skin"), so that we’re not so easily overlooked in discussions like this.

Better that than me designing packaging.

Posted in Flight Sim Centric | Leave a comment

How Many D’s?

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

From the Archive – 10/01/05

As of next month, I will have been working on the Flight Simulator franchise for 7 years.  As of next year, I will have been a customer of said franchise (the longest continuously published piece of software I know of) for 25 years.  One of the very few tangible, material things that has been a constant in my life that actually predates FS is the family airplane, a 1944 Cessna T-50. 

(Another worth noting is the book "Flying: A Golden Science Guide" by Barry Schiff. I’ve had this since I was 3, and I still learn from it every time I pick it up. Originals are still available here, surprisingly.)

This is the first airplane I ever flew. I was 4 years old, and had to sit on phone books to get my eyes level with the attitude indicator – actually seeing over the instrument panel and flying VFR was years (or at least inches) away.  Inside, it’s vintage Air Corps utilitarianism meets Packard limousine, outside it’s a lumbering bright red classic with two noisy radials that knows nothing about subtlety. It isn’t a common airplane – out of about 5500 built from 1939-45, about 24 still fly. Most people mis-identify it as a single-tailed Beech 18, or a miniature DC-3. If they do recognize it, it’s most likely thanks to the "Sky King" TV serial of the 50’s. The airplane is obscure enough that the Flight Sim community has produced only three add-ons of the type that I’ve been aware of over the years.  If you missed the irony, I’ll point out that "only three" for an aircraft this relatively obscure is actually pretty impressive . . . .

With that, I have to make a simple statement about Flight Sim add-ons: we love ’em. One of the greatest joys of this job is the "honeymoon phase" shortly after we hit the shelves when we get to take a a bit of a break and sit back and watch all the new aircraft, scenery, utilities, etc, start rolling in.  The staggering number, variety, quality, and creativity of the add-ons that are out there are what, in my opinion, help make Flight Sim among the richest, most personal and customizable experiences someone can have sitting in front of a PC.

Anyway, the most recent FS T-50 (aka UC-78, AT-8, AT-17, JRC-1, Crane, "Bamboo Bomber", "Bobcat", "Rhapsody in Glue", etc)  comes from Alpha Sim in the UK. It’s a nice model, with a clean panel and virtual cockpit, stable flight model, gorgeous exterior, and includes wheeled and float versions and a half-dozen or so liveries for $14.00 US.

Just finding a well-done and full-featured model of this type is unusual enough – the moment I saw it (last December), I was $14 poorer (more than half a share of MSFT stock at today’s prices!) and happier for it. 

But, unfortunately for those reading this, the story doesn’t end there: You see, one of the aforementioned liveries, completely without context, contact, or connection, just happens to be our family airplane. I don’t mean that it just looks like it – the paint scheme is one-of-a-kind to begin with, and, if that weren’t enough, the N-number (a unique registration number, not unlike a license plate on a car) is the same.

Somehow, someway, pictures most likely taken at an air show or fly-in found their way over the Internet (presumably) to the UK and on to a texture sheet, before ending up here, at Microsoft in Redmond, on my test PC, under the (legitimate, I swear) guise of compatibility testing.

Phil at AlphaSim said that they thought their texture artist just made it up. The coincidence didn’t seem to strike him as much as I would have thought, but I enjoyed it. It was a nice, and wholly unexpected way to add yet another personal connection to the franchise.

If anyone reading this buys this add-on, be nice to the red one. (Oh, and ours has never been on floats, so you might want to do a little re-mapping.)

Posted in Flight Sim Centric | Leave a comment

Full Circle

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

From the Archive – 9/29/2005

As of next month, I will have been working on the Flight Simulator franchise for 7 years.  As of next year, I will have been a customer of said franchise (the longest continuously published piece of software I know of) for 25 years.  One of the very few tangible, material things that has been a constant in my life that actually predates FS is the family airplane, a 1944 Cessna T-50. 

(Another worth noting is the book "Flying: A Golden Science Guide" by Barry Schiff. I’ve had this since I was 3, and I still learn from it every time I pick it up. Originals are still available here, surprisingly.)

This is the first airplane I ever flew. I was 4 years old, and had to sit on phone books to get my eyes level with the attitude indicator – actually seeing over the instrument panel and flying VFR was years (or at least inches) away.  Inside, it’s vintage Air Corps utilitarianism meets Packard limousine, outside it’s a lumbering bright red classic with two noisy radials that knows nothing about subtlety. It isn’t a common airplane – out of about 5500 built from 1939-45, about 24 still fly. Most people mis-identify it as a single-tailed Beech 18, or a miniature DC-3. If they do recognize it, it’s most likely thanks to the "Sky King" TV serial of the 50’s. The airplane is obscure enough that the Flight Sim community has produced only three add-ons of the type that I’ve been aware of over the years.  If you missed the irony, I’ll point out that "only three" for an aircraft this relatively obscure is actually pretty impressive . . . .

With that, I have to make a simple statement about Flight Sim add-ons: we love ’em. One of the greatest joys of this job is the "honeymoon phase" shortly after we hit the shelves when we get to take a a bit of a break and sit back and watch all the new aircraft, scenery, utilities, etc, start rolling in.  The staggering number, variety, quality, and creativity of the add-ons that are out there are what, in my opinion, help make Flight Sim among the richest, most personal and customizable experiences someone can have sitting in front of a PC.

Anyway, the most recent FS T-50 (aka UC-78, AT-8, AT-17, JRC-1, Crane, "Bamboo Bomber", "Bobcat", "Rhapsody in Glue", etc)  comes from Alpha Sim in the UK. It’s a nice model, with a clean panel and virtual cockpit, stable flight model, gorgeous exterior, and includes wheeled and float versions and a half-dozen or so liveries for $14.00 US.

Just finding a well-done and full-featured model of this type is unusual enough – the moment I saw it (last December), I was $14 poorer (more than half a share of MSFT stock at today’s prices!) and happier for it. 

But, unfortunately for those reading this, the story doesn’t end there: You see, one of the aforementioned liveries, completely without context, contact, or connection, just happens to be our family airplane. I don’t mean that it just looks like it – the paint scheme is one-of-a-kind to begin with, and, if that weren’t enough, the N-number (a unique registration number, not unlike a license plate on a car) is the same.

Somehow, someway, pictures most likely taken at an air show or fly-in found their way over the Internet (presumably) to the UK and on to a texture sheet, before ending up here, at Microsoft in Redmond, on my test PC, under the (legitimate, I swear) guise of compatibility testing.

Phil at AlphaSim said that they thought their texture artist just made it up. The coincidence didn’t seem to strike him as much as I would have thought, but I enjoyed it. It was a nice, and wholly unexpected way to add yet another personal connection to the franchise.

If anyone reading this buys this add-on, be nice to the red one. (Oh, and ours has never been on floats, so you might want to do a little re-mapping.)

Posted in Flight Sim Centric | Leave a comment

Is This Thing On?

Posted on January 18, 2007 by halbryan

From the Archive …(9/27/2005)

I’m a terrible role model.

You see, 20 minutes ago, MS Flight Simulator art lead and artist extraordinaire Jason Waskey came into my office and refused to leave until I transformed myself from someone who wasn’t sure if "blog" was a noun or a verb into someone who reluctantly realizes it’s both.

So much for being an adult and standing up to little things like peer pressure. 

Kids, do as I say, not as I do. And don’t make me come up there.

Jason promised me that there would be no actual effort involved, that I could simply copy and paste some random things from old email messages and make this a halfway interesting destination. I don’t believe him, but then I never do. In that spirit, then, this being my first post ever, I’ll copy and paste a short bio that has been used to describe me at certain speaking engagements:

Hal Bryan is a licensed pilot, super genius, notary public, former police officer and current software test engineer in Microsoft’s Games Studios. He’s been testing software for more than 8 years, as both a contractor and full-time employee at Microsoft, working on Windows 98, Flight Simulator, Combat Flight Simulator, and other game/simulation titles.

With that, I suppose I have now blogged. Watch this space for infrequent updates. Or don’t.

Posted in Flight Sim Centric | 1 Comment