The rumours are old news. A million sites have been shown to have been liars. And the hype has given way to reality. The iPad doesn’t walk on water, hover like a board, or sing you sweet songs while you sleep. No, wait. It can do that last one.

For all the cries of ‘haters’ and ‘fanboys’, it’s hard to shake the thought that something about the iPad isn’t quite… perfection. Whatever you think of Apple and its products, it does a better job on the aesthetics of industrial design than anyone in the business. Keeping devices clean, simple and on target is their speciality. But the iPad seems a bit wrong for some reason.

For mine, that problem is the screen. There’s a few other niggles people are harping about (no multitasking, for one) but in the long game the screen is the most likely ‘miss’ to cause long term grief.

On the question of tasking, power, ports, services, software, or whatever else, these are easy adds. A firmware update here, a new app there, even a 2nd or 3rd gen product, and you have everything you need on almost every front.

But in the iPad context, the screen must remain a constant. Unlike a real laptop, Apple Apps are designed to suit a specific device resolution. Even moreso than resolution, the Apps are most specifically built to match a screen ratio. And the iPad’s 4:3 ratio feels like anything but ‘the future’.

In a world of HD, and on a device centred on content, it’s hard to understand why the iPad has chosen the path of traditional CRT screen ratio.

It even seems to be the main point of why the device seems to look kind of overweight.

The killer moment for this screen comes during the launch demo when a clip from the Star Trek movie was played. The device, already heavy on the black border, sends a 2.35:1 cinema ratio movie down into a very limited frame in the centre of the screen. In reality, this clip would have been playing at a resolution of 1024 x 435. That leaves 43.4% of the screen real estate unused when viewing cinema wide HD content. And isn’t watching HD content something this device was meant to excel at?

Had Apple opted for a 1280 x 720 screen, the iPad would have been looking svelte and the video content would have presented with dramatic impact. A classic LCD widescreen of 16:10 may have also been preferred, which would shift that frame to 1280 x 800 — even more appropriate for viewing web pages in portrait. That said, minimal scaling would have been required to fit any site into a comfortable portrait view at true 720p resolutions.

This feels like a serious missed opportunity. iPad resolution must now be fixed long into the future. To change resolution from here would be to change the game for those already investing in App development for the new platform. So in this new decade, Apple’s landmark tablet is running an LCD ratio most thought disappeared with the 12-inch PowerBook. (I’m not knocking that little wonder, of course. I still run one at home.)

It may seem like a less critical complaint than some, but as already noted, almost anything else can be upgraded. This screen is the iPad’s screen forever. And it isn’t the kind of screen that suggest the iPad is anyone’s perfect content device. For a company that sells a lot of stock thanks to its mastery of aesthetics, Apple seems to have settled for a screen solution that is less than exemplary.

Graphics were crude and focused where it mattered. We needed crisp displays to show detailed instruments. Rendering the first 3D worlds with horizon-spanning draw distances was limited to a few perspective lines. Indeed, the jump to SVGA in the late 90s was a momentous step for flight sims, not so much because the terrain looked better, but because the avionics were more detailed and readable. Flight simmers look down more than up.

Hand in hand with the early technology wins, flight sims helped define the culture and meaning of what it is to be a PC gamer. A good sim’s complexity demanded weeks to master, dozens or even hundreds of keys to remember, 300 page manuals, and with all that, a sense held by the virtual pilot that they really were more sophisticated, more serious, more skilled than a mushroom hopping console gamer. We played sims because, forgive me for stating the obvious — they were simulations of things we could never do in our real lives. One felt that one really could fly, say, a real F-16, as long as it had a 101 keyboard in the cockpit… This was serious stuff, for serious gamers.

Indisputable credit is owed to Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. This single piece of software can rightly be credited with playing a key part in the success, and more importantly, perception of the PC and what it is capable of. It is as much engineering art as it is a thing to be enjoyed.

The very first iteration of Flight Sim was unveiled in 1975(!), as a thesis project for the Apple II, followed up with the commercial release of Flight Simulator 1.0 in 1980, again for the Apple II. Microsoft, then all about software, cannily saw the dazzle value and commissioned Flight Simulator 1 for the PC, which was released in 1982. It was a move that attracted a lot of attention for the fledgling PC, ramming its technological and leisure potential home to punters who previously only thought of the PC as a utilitarian spreadsheet box. Suddenly the PC was sexy and sophisticated in a way the average person could relate to.

FS1, of course, looked nothing like the sims we enjoy today, but it, and the subsequent still-basic versions that followed through to 5.0 in 1993 which was the first to look good , all turned that weakness to an advantage. For, while the world outside the window was a stark grid of textureless vectors, the cockpit was an impressive array of accurate functional avionics. Just like a real plane, in 16-colour EGA. It was flying by instruments alone, a mental challenge, not visual, and this cemented what flight simming is all about, which holds true today as flight model realism plus avionics and cockpit reproduction are still more important than pretty graphics.

Not long after FS1, addon map-packs began to appear, soon representing all of North America in its vector splendor, allowing pilots to plan and fly long distance trips, refuelling at real-world airports. This thinking was another shift for how PC gaming would evolve, which has reached overwhelming maturity today, with the whole world now virtualized in high res.

Microsoft bought the Flight Simulator license in 1988 kick-starting Mircosoft’s commendable commitment to the series, and setting the standard for staying true to a design ethos which would last 20 years.

Since then, every new version has lifted the bar higher – not just for the series, but PC gaming and its maximum exploitation of hardware and software. As each new version had a shelf-life of 2-3 years, a huge degree of performance headroom was built-in, anticipating Moore’s Law and playing to it. No PC can ever run a version of Flight Sim at max detail upon release, but you can just do it after a couple of years of upgrades – by which time a new version will appear. This cycle helped define PC gaming’s relationship with the hardware. It acknowledged that a simmer would go through multiple system upgrades through the life of a version, lifting the game experience each time. It allowed the development team to make each new version a spectacular leap forwards . Flight Sim has always been one of the most sophisticated thing you could ever run on your PC.

Ironically and tragically, this exponential evolution was to become a fatal bind that crushed the series, squeezing it to a sad death when Microsoft shut down its internal ACES development team, laying off the staff in the dark depths of the GFC in January 2009. Player expectations and development complexity had exploded costs and the team size. To exponentially improve upon the outstanding FSX, the last release in 2006, was untenable without a huge team and years of development, all serving a shrinking relative niche.

FSX will live on for many years yet, it’s still unplayable on max settings with even the meatiest rig, and has the support of vast 3rd party commercial and community activity.
Flight Simulator flew high, taking the PC with it, and countless grateful gamers who were able to live the fantasy of flight. We salute it. It is one of the greatest triumphs of technology, gaming culture and enthusiast passion.

Ben Mansill

This article originally published in Atomic.

Joe W-A was miffed when the L4D campaign mod he’d been working on wasn’t deemed awesome enough to warrant him being flown to Valve HQ to preview L4D2. Other modders were, mostly to get them onside as peer-leaders to counter the odd anti-L4D2 community uprising happening at the time.

Anyway, Joe managed to get Gabe Newell to agree to fly to Brisbane, Australia to check out the mod-in-progress — provided Joe paid the airfare. “I was just joking”, said Gabe today. With pure internet inventiveness, Joe got the community rallied and raised the fare in a couple of days.

Today in Sydney, the great meeting took place, and we were privileged to witness it.

Gabe spoke the value of a community before introducing Joe. Said Gabe, of Joe: “Joe understands more about the dynamic of the internet than 95% of the vice presidents.”

Joe then bravely spoke a bit about how it all came about and fielded a few questions. We are thrilled to report that Joe’s a top bloke. He launched this campaign not to draw attention to himself but to simply get Gabe in front of his mod. That’s all. The explosion of interest in his story has him overwhelmed, but not to the point where he lost focus of his mission.

Joe’s about to start a Game Design course at Melbourne RMIT, and we’d bet the farm that he’ll be snapped up quick smart by a smart dev. Probably Valve, for the fairytale to come full circle.

Would Joe do it again? “I’d like to get Peter Molyneaux down here. I’ve got a few things to say to him.”

Hats off, Joe. You’re a champ and an inspiration mate. Well done.

Here we present the historic moment Gabe Newell and Joe W-A meet face to face!

As discussed on Byteside Tech #1, we recently conducted a series of network data tests using the iPhone’s Speedtest.net app.

We had concurrent access to four iPhone 3GS handsets, one on each of the four Australian networks — Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, and 3. Travelling around the Sydney CBD and Sydney suburban areas, we ran close to 150 individual speed tests. Tests ranged from Manly to Homebush, Annandale to North Sydney, and plenty in between.

At each location tested, we ran four tests in rapid succession to try and get a reasonably accurate data set at each location while still pushing onward with the test as quickly as possible. Rapid successive tests would also, in theory, minimise excuses for high latency due to packet connection initiation times.

UPDATE: One thing we forgot to mention is that everywhere we tested we only ran the test when we could find full bars of coverage strength for all networks. So we were never testing good signal versus bad. Data strength may have had its own fluctuations in availability, but for most purposes we felt watching the standard signal meter was the best way to ensure we aimed for a level playing field at all locations.

Note there are almost 40 less data points in the Optus list than the other three. We had a data problem and lost most of our recordings from the first day of testing. But things did perform in a similar fashion on both days, so we’re confident this had very little impact on the overall statistics. You can see in the raw data the exact parallel tests if you want to purely compare test for test.

RESULTS

The summary? You really do get what you pay for. Telstra blows away the competition with speeds almost double the next best network, while the best value cheapest data network Three delivered the slowest results. Indeed Three’s best single result was slower than Telstra’s average.

All that said, even the slowest network delivered reasonable test results. In the context of landline access, wireless speeds were better than a home 512K connection.

Other notable concerns were the very high pings experienced across all networks. If you need low latency, wireless has a very long way to go.

We should note that of the 110 Optus tests conducted, no result could be obtained on nine occasions. And this was a similar experience on the first day’s missing Optus results. So while their final results look quite good, there was close to a 10% failure experience during the period of testing. We marked these results as ‘zero’ for down and up, and left the ping stat blank.

KEY STATISTICS

For all raw data, which includes date, time and GPS coordinates plus more statistical anaylsis, grab the XLS here.