Simming La Vida Loca

An informal interview with Allen Kriesman, the man behind Ultimate Terrain.

Jarn: Can you please tell a little about yourself, Allen?
Allen Kriesman: Well, I am a forty-five year-old Texan, with a wife and two sons (seven and ten). I have been in the software development business for about twenty years. I was about half-way thru college majoring in Geology when I was introduced to an Apple II computer, in 1985. One of the very first software programs that I purchased was an early version of Flight Simulator from SubLogic. I began writing gaming simulations myself in 1985, using Basic. At that time I decided to change my college major to Computer Science. I love my career and cannot imagine doing anything else.

Right now my life is pretty hectic, with very little free time. To keep my sanity I play on a recreational ice-hockey team about two times a week (he can be seen proudly wearing his team jersey in the photo).

How did you end up Ultimate-Terraining?
I have spent most of my professional career developing software applications pertaining to GIS (Geographic Information Systems). As a GIS developer, I often have access to different types of commercial data-sets that provide various mapping features. While performing GIS development several years ago, using detailed road data, I considered the possibility of using the road data in FS9. The commercial data is very expensive, so in order to be able to use the commercial data for personal entertainment, I had to create a viable commercial product that would pay for the data, and so USA Roads for FS9 was born. The initial negotiations for the data took months, because the commercial vendor (GDT, now Tele Atlas) had never before been approached regarding the use of their detailed road data in flightsims like MSFS. USA Roads was an unexpected hit, and other developers were immediatly “inspired” by it.

While the accurately placed roads provided many benefits, they also exposed other features in FS2004 that were not so accurately positioned, such as lakes, coastlines and landclass. So, rather than work on creating road enhancement products for areas outside of the USA, we began work on the Ultimate Terrain series. The goal was to provide more of an all-in-one solution, with detailed roads, water, landclass and other features.

Is UT your main activity or do you also have a daily job?
At this point I basically have two full-time jobs. Scenery Solutions is indeed a full time job for me, but I’m also fortunate enough to have a regular job, which is very similar in nature to the work I do with flight simulators. There is quite a bit of a crossover between the two jobs, which is beneficial to all parties involved.

When the corporate world has had enough of me I am hoping to expand the services provided by Scenery Solutions. Over the last couple of years, Scenery Solutions has had offers for projects outside of the MS-FS series, but I personally just don’t have the time to follow up on them right now.

Do you ever fly for real?
I have always had a dream of getting my PPL. Despite my wife’s initial concern over aircraft safety, she now supports my goal of flying. Of course, free time is an issue for me, so any PPL studies are on hold right now.

Back to UT, why should FSX users install Ultimate Terrain considering the now respectable roads-and-waterbodies database FSX has come armed with? Do you ever think UT could become superfluous?
Yes, there are better roads in FSX and generally better water areas. However, our UTX product line for FSX provides much, much more. It’s a tremendous bargain, with something that should appeal to any user. FSX only provides roads for highways and most major roads. This is only a small fraction of the available roads worldwide. If you want all the roads, you have to get a product like UTX. In addition, we spent a lot of time working on the road presentation. FSX also contains moving traffic now, but this traffic only occurs on undivided freeways. UTX adds traffic to all freeways, highways and major roads (both divided and undivided).

As you mentioned, the FSX water features have also been improved, but only in the major metropolitan areas of the USA, Canada and Europe. The water in our UT and UTX series of products is still the best anywhere. And it offers complete detailed coverage across the entire large region, not only in the metropolitan areas. FSX is also very weak when it comes to stream data, whereas UTX provides a huge amount of accurately placed streams to go along with our water polygon features. Coastlines in UTX are also greatly improved over those in FSX. We provide a much more accurate representation of the water features, with rocky coastlines, sandy beaches (many drawn to their actual size and shape), concrete piers, breakers and even a texture for inland dams.

Roads and water features are only a part of the UTX series of products. We feel that our landclass representation of the cities is the best available, with some new custom textures that are used in UTX for things like shipping grounds, universities, commercial and industrial centers, multi-family buildings, zero-lot housing, etc. Our unique night lighting environment generates actual light points are used to simulate street lights and stationary intersection traffic.

So as you can see, UTX is much more than just roads and water. We feel that the attention to detail will always make UT a viable product for FSX and future versions of Flight Simulator. Moreover, we are constantly tweaking our source data for flight simulation purposes, based on our customer-feedback procedure.

Could you briefly describe how UT is produced?
The Ultimate Terrain series is a very large product. The size of the final product and the massive amounts of source data used make the UT series a time-consuming and difficult product to develop and maintain. The storage space for all the source data that we use in our products is getting very close to the one Terabyte mark.

Basically, the UT/UTX production process is divided into three general stages:

1. Source data acquisition stage
2. Database creation stage
3. Compilation of data into scenery files

The Source data acquisition stage consists of acquiring the raw source data needed for the various UT/UTX features. Most of the time this data comes from commercial data vendors. However, we occasionally use freely available data that can be found on the Internet. Sometimes existing data is not available for our needs, so we also use paid contractors and in-house developers to digitize custom data from resources like satellite imagery.

As soon as we acquire new source data, we write applications that convert the raw source data into a common database format that we have defined for each UT/UTX feature (like roads, railroads, water polygons, etc). Once the raw source data is converted, the source data is archived and removed from our servers. We arrange our database files along boundaries that are consistent with scenery files in FS9/FSX. All features, especially water, have to be edited by hand before the data can be properly used within FS. We use a variety of commercial and in-house software tools to edit the data.

The actual FS9/FSX scenery files are created using SDK tools provided by Microsoft. So the last step in the development process consists of converting the data from our database into a format that can be compiled using the SDK tools. Again we have a series of custom applications that were custom-written for this purpose. Whenever we enhance our product during testing or during the creation of patches, we repeat the same process of editing the database, converting the database to a SDK-readable format, and compiling again.

The Ultimate Terrain series is now over two years old, so our developing, testing and updating processes are both stable and optimized. This results in a much cleaner product as compared to our initial release several years ago. Just like the FS series has evolved over time, our products also continue to evolve and improve.

Proceed to Part II