Flight Sim Toolkit

The Good
Flight Sim Toolkit (or FST) is an incredibly powerful and feature-rich toolkit for designing flight simulators. At the time of its release, it provided the basic tools for creating very sophisticated games and gave those tools to the average consumer. FST allowed you to create custom aircraft, worlds in which to fly, and scenarios with which to challenge players. Five editors were included in the package - World, Shape, Color, Cockpit, and Model. Although the editors ran in Windows 3.1, the finished simulations that you were capable of making ran in DOS. The finished simulations looked very beautiful in cutting edge SVGA graphics. One of the most exciting features of FST was the ability to save your programs as stand-alone games. Hypothetically, you could create your own flight simulation games to share with the world.

The Bad
First of all, let me preface this by saying that even back in 1991 I was fairly computer literate and had played many, many hours of flight sims. At the time I was teaching myself some basic programming skills. I was – and continue to be – interested in graphics programs such as Corel Draw and Paintshop Pro. In short, FST seemed tailor made for someone like me. It didn’t take long, however, for me to realize that if FST was very sophisticated, it was also very complicated. I cracked open FST’s manual and read it through, cover to cover, only to be disappointed. The documentation was so inadequate that it made understanding even basic functions a chore. The only way to figure out FST was to explore the program first hand, through trial and error. Unfortunately, exploring the program was not easy. Not only was it very complicated, but it was very buggy. Over the years I installed this program on three very different machines, and tried ever so patiently to make it work, but it was always prone to locking up or crashing without warning. Trying to navigate my way through FST became an exercise in aggravation.

FST is something that a flight sim fanatic would dearly love to make work. Legions of fans around the world stuck with FST for many years, producing a number of small freeware flight experiments. I have no doubt that great things can be accomplished with this set of tools. Simis and Domark used the program, in part, to create the game Mig-29 Super Fulcrum. In retrospect, however, it almost seems like Simis and Domark took a look at the tools their programmers had developed in order to make games, decided to box them up as FST, and send them out with scarcely any thought to documentation or support. After FST’s release, Simis and Domark promised to update the program with multiplayer capability, but never got around to it.

The Bottom Line
FST is a feature-rich, complicated and buggy program that just doesn’t deliver what it promises. You may spend a lot of time and effort with this program and get very little payback.