What are the things that get you mad in a flight sim?

[LLv44_Mprhead]

Shoulder shooting, kill stealing and ramming. Someone "gaming the game".

 

 

 

I have not played BoS yet. Downloading it tonight so hopefully it has tutorials and better single player than it's predecessor. (Though is long as it runs better I'll be somewhat content)

 

Not sure, but I think tutorials we are going to have are more or less the ones Requiem and others are doing. For proper single player we might have to wait until release.

[Wind]

Being mostly a campaign/singleplayer player (nice tautology..) I have biggest gripes with AI.

Oh, I can imagine how hard it is to code even a simple AI let alone a reactive/relistic one, but..

 

In old Il-2 it pissed me of to no end how even inferior AI planes on novice pulled absurd moves and shot through clouds.

And dont get me started on the AI snipers gunners on bombers...shiiiit...

 

But flying most of the time ground pounders it was absolutely horrible with the AI flak... Like, jeesus...

 

Flying in on treetop level to an enemy airfield in dawn, under the cover of darkness, buzzing at 10m going mach schnell the last 500m

of open ground after the cover of forest...only to meet the undivided attention of all guns on the airfield. 88mm guns (which, btw needs

a dedicated firecontrol, timing the fuses & manual loading and is designed for putting in barrages above,what, 5000ft?) hitting your pilot

in the noggin and 20/37mm guns hitting the same entry hole with dead on accuracy.

No calculations for crew skill levels, surprise, supression fire or turret travel was ever made. A 20mm flak could travel their barrels at

speeds about 360´ degrees/ second.

Peppering the AAA positions with your B-25J with its 18 .50cals had about the same effect as throwing about moist dildos at an orgy.

 

 

So, yeah, I would really like the flak & AI gunners to have a even remotely realistic behiavour as you cant rely on you AI flight comerades

to even take off properly. Once witnessed my nro.2 cock up his takeoff and mess up his plane just at the end of the runway.

Like, 5m away from the end. The rest of the flight, 6 planes just sat on the tarmac and idled while watching the how the muppets ran

away from the almost intact plane.

 

Sigh..

[Brano]

What gets me mad? Particulary here with BoS? People coming in with zero knowledge about Soviet Union or Russia (like it was/is blackhole of the world?) crying about how much snow there is,how flat and dull the country is and asking "is it for real?"'

[BSS_Mudcat]

Flying all the way to a target and getting taken out by flak before firing a shot..

 

This +1000 or worse when you are about half a second from your drop and get taken out

[Langer]

Flying online MP for 1/2 hour looking for an probable bandit. Finding one and planning my attack. Engaging and shortly after we both wind up in fierce dogfighting. Switching from attacker to defender in seconds and back. Up and down, round and round, achieving some hits, my heart about to jump out of chest, legs shaking, holding my breath and with the crossair dead middle about to make the kill when ...... a friendly flys by shoots and ends our great battle. Would had made my day...

[-TBC-AeroAce]

+1 for last post but I do often watch/cover people and if I see them starting to lose the fight I will jump in so maybe im a bit hipocriticle

Edited July 7, 2014 by AeroAce

[Praetor]

Head ons, and panic spin defense.

[BlitzPig_EL]

Funny thing about head ons...

 

I will never initiate one, but I will never, EVER, break off first from one, even if that means a collision.

The reaction is always the same from the numpty that starts it. Why didn't you break off!!!???!!!

 

I always ask why he didn't. Gets 'em every time.

[Gambit21]

Flying online MP for 1/2 hour looking for an probable bandit. Finding one and planning my attack. Engaging and shortly after we both wind up in fierce dogfighting. Switching from attacker to defender in seconds and back. Up and down, round and round, achieving some hits, my heart about to jump out of chest, legs shaking, holding my breath and with the crossair dead middle about to make the kill when ...... a friendly flys by shoots and ends our great battle. Would had made my day...

Heh - I have to admit I've been that guy a time or 2.

Back in the day, once in a great while, I'd fly on War Clouds out of boredom because CoOps were slow.

On one particular occasion after spiraling to maybe 14k above my base in a 190, I went hunting. After a while, far below I spotted a knife fight right on the deck.

I rolled over and dove from 14k right to the deck at maybe 850kph or better. Got a good tally on the enemy La5 turning and burning with a friendly, buffeting from

all that speed, I lined up a quick, instinctive burst, sawed his wings off and zoomed back up to the heavens before anyone ever saw me, including the friendly.

I got a good laugh out of that, but the friendly in question probably felt much like you did.

[Hylo]

<snip>

Damn, this came out long. TL;DR - BoS could have much broader appeal and be a better overall game if it wasn't so focused on pleasing one vocal subset of players to the exclusion of others.

 

I really, really, really like this post. I like the spirit in which it is written, and as a player, I can totally understand why you believe this.

 

I can also tell you that as a developer at an organisation that produces a software system which is used by a number of large financial institutions, this is only half of the story. I would actually argue it's probably more like 10% of the story.

 

Players, however, didn't ruin the flight-sim market. Mostly the game publishers and partly the developers did, leaving only a small slice of the blame for the people who were left (us!) after the first two took the fun-submarine to crush-depth.

 

Point for consideration #1:

Most people don't know what the actually want or what would make them happy. If they got what they thought they wanted, they would just be disappointed.

 

Point for consideration #2:

Game development companies choose what they want to make!

 

The reason the combat flight sim industry is as it is is because of 2 main factors:

1. Game development is becoming more difficult, more expensive and more specialised.

2. The organisational culture of software development companies makes it very difficult to make a coherent product.

The first factor is the easiest to explain and most of you will know where I'm going so I won't take long over it. Gaming technology exploded in the late 90s and the tools are only just catching up with the technology now.

The amount of effort required to create art assets and gameplay mechanics to the standard that players are accustomed to has increased significantly year on year, but equal savings have not been made in the time required to reach a given standard (without shelling out megabucks). 

Equally, game developers and publishers have discovered by way of Darwinism that:

• Most people are stupid and it doesn't take complicated game mechanics to satisfy them
• Even the people who aren't stupid are far more concerned with the shiny shell that sits over a game than the meat within. This has created great storytelling experiences but as time has gone on has led to more and more "interactive movie"-like games.
• Due to the above, game developers have also realised that it only requires a semblance of interactivity to make players feel involved in an experience - take Assassin's Creed. The combat in that game was either press the right hotkey to "jump at somebody with a big knife and then they die", or wait for somebody to attack you and press the "I want to kill this impertinent swine" button. Repeat. The player only pressed one button and the character animations did everything else. People liked it a lot. I was sad at the state of the gaming industry.
• The psychology underlying people's need to entertain themselves with games is perfectly compatible with what I like to call the "addictive behaviour study" school of game development. Producing a game that creates that dangerous curve of diminishing returns over time epitomised by World of Warcraft either by subscription or micropayments is far more lucrative than creating a rewarding game experience. Even when there's no economic motive it's easy to pad out a game experience by filling the world full of meaningless collectibles that unlock game-breaking things in New Game+ scenarios (this was the rest of the gameplay of Assassin's Creed above).
• The first principle of the addictive behaviour philosophy above is that at the beginning of the game, it should be easy to get BIG rewards. At the end of the game, it should be incredibly difficult to get infinitesimally small incremental upgrades.

This leaves flight sims out in the cold because NONE of the money-spinners above apply to flight simulation as it was originally known. It's HARD to make flight sims on the most basic level - the scale, physics and expected level of interactivity are on a completely different level, the game mechanics that are the most fun (like dynamic campaigns) are the hardest to write, flight simulation is empty of storytelling in the individual sense because the great thing about flight sims to most players is the game system, not a one-off, limited-replayability interactive experience.

Critically to the last point above, it's hard to get people hooked on flight-sims because you can't apply the principle of making it easy at the beginning, because by definition there is an initial hump (SHEER CLIFF FACE!) where people get their heads around the basics of flight, navigation, gunnery and tactics - there are so many other more (initially) "rewarding" experiences out there. Getting people to the point where they feel the reward of their time invested is so much longer in a flight sim.

This is the classic "flight sims are doomed because of economics and psychology" argument, we've all heard it before and it's FAR more important than any given group of players.

 

The second part is the meat of what I want to talk about that many of you will not know about.

 

Take the original Il-2 game. The game started off with a small focus, a small number of very well-developed features and a great simulation engine for its time. It was an instant classic with single-player and multi-player appeal.

 

The game had a coherent vision and an experience it wanted to present to the players. This is the the crux of the point I make above about most people not knowing what they want!

It wasn't what people thought they wanted because nobody knew about the game until the demo came out. It was what one man told a group of people to make because he wanted to make the best game.

It was developed by a relatively small group and that allowed the direction of the project to be overseen by an auteur-like leader to produce a simulation that was still a fun game.

 

Even then it had its flaws. The thing that I agree with the most about Bruins' post above is that the initial difficulty curve has NEVER been managed well by a flight sim. Seriously, it's not like good tutorials are hard, every other genre can manage it. Flight sims don't even try.

 

In the sense of the code, a new project is a wonderful, thrilling thing to a developer. You tell yourself you are going to do things right the first time, the whole way through. The code goes together in a very satisfying way because in a project like this you probably wrote most of the area that you are tasked with yourself.

When modules interact there are only 3 or 4 other people to talk to and they have all been around since the start of the project and know what they are talking about. In a small team a proactive lead designer or auteur-like leader can get to everyone and apply his vision to every aspect of the game's development.

 

Once Il-2 was released and the game passed its initial sales rush, lots of things will have happened over time:

The publishers will have realised after the runaway success that they had the basis of a franchise for which expansion packs and new game mechanics could be developed easily. Unfortunately they will also have realised that they had an extensible system that they could add content to while only paying the developer for the art team and some junior developers (coding a new aircraft in a fully-realised system would be relatively easy compared to implementing a new game mechanic).

At the developer, the team will have become larger but the average skill level will have fallen, original team members will have left, the code base will have become more convoluted and impenetrable. Developers will go from having first-hand knowledge of how and why something was done and how it should be used to at best second-hand.

Poor, difficult to maintain code would be reused because it does what it's supposed to do. Copy and paste this problem all over the codebase.

Technical and functional architects responsible for various areas of the game's expansions might replace or take on parts of the once-manageable task of one "producer"-like figure with one vision overseeing everything.

As time goes by the code becomes more and more difficult to extend without extensive rewrites because the number of features that are written to solve the task only on the kind of tight time and monetary budgets that expansion packs and product support require without any reasonable future-proofing will be large. Each technical architect will have his own opinion of how things should be done and these beliefs and techniques will often clash.

 

This is why there were so few genuinely new game mechanics added after Il-2's release, especially from within the development team. Look at DGen as a case in point! The official dynamic campaign engine wasn't even created by the developer! All of the expense is at the start of the development process and before the game is released.

From a publisher's point of view, once they have your money they aren't interested in supporting a product except in the most cost-effective way - adding new content into an existing system.

 

This post may seem very pessimistic but that's because it's the outline of a problem. There are lots of ways to solve this. I may talk about this later if anybody is interested.

Most of the solutions are to do with my other point: game development companies choose what they make. Restrict the scope of what you create and increase the quality and the coherence of the vision behind it.

Edited July 11, 2014 by TheGrunch

[AndyJWest]

Excellent analysis, Grunch. 

[ARM505]

Mildly OT, but this is becoming one of my irritations - the misunderstanding that people have about 'full real' (a terrible term - there is reality, then there.....is not) compared to 'making it fun'.

 

The problem is, flight sims are already a massive investment in time and developement effort - frankly, the simplest of youtube searches will give you everything you need to know about CEM, the physics behind flying etc. To expect a small dev team on a limited budget to develope comprehensive tutorials as well is asking a little much IMHO, and frankly the community does an excellent job of providing factual information (I've just been browsing a cockpit guide on this forum, cockpits are in any case modelled on the original of which their is adequate data online, plenty of youtube tutorials about this specific game, let alone on, say, a 109 in general etc) The game already has options to enable simple engine/radiator/prop/mixture management anyway.........what more can be realistically expected?

 

And the thing is, you really need the 'full real' core model to properly experience the true combat potential of an aircraft, which means it is unavoidably a part of 'the art of fighting' in an aircraft. Take the FW190 for example - they didn't automate a whole bunch of the engine management for fun, they did it to ease the pilots workload when things got heated. If some other aircraft had six different levers to control the engine, prop, oil rad, water rad, mixture, supercharger, then of course it was going to be more of a handful in combat! Disabling the option of CEM (for example) means that the guy in the harder to operate aircraft is in fact getting a helping hand, because, and here's the obvious point - this is all done in a COMPETITIVE environment (online MP)! This statistical/rule argument will always crop up when competition is involved. I take part in competitive shooting competitions IRL, and you of course the same thing happens there - a million different arguements on the rules, and people trying to 'game' them. It's human nature when exposed to competition. And of course in a competitive MP game, everybody must compete on an even footing, hence server enforcement of specific rule sets, which are by there nature a compromise (ie almost everybody ends up irritated about some aspect)

 

So, while I'm not a 'river-counter' type of simmer, if you're looking for the full experience, you need the core engine of the game capable of coming as close as possible to modelling the use of the platforms in question - it's hard to argue any other way IMHO. Warthunder et al try to make a game based on the real world - sims just try to make the real world on a pc. Balance etc is left to us really. Including teaching ourselves how to operate the machines in question. Let's face it, we don't have the same day in day out exposure to the real thing that a real pilot in WW2 had, but we DO have an endless supply of aircraft and an incredible teaching resource at our fingertips (youtube, the sim community in general). It's really not that hard to work out how to operate one particular aircraft if you're on a limited time budget (which I very much am too, two children, long hours at work etc!), so make it your job to learn how to operate the 109, or the Yak only. It's how I learned to play Steel Beasts (tank sim) - just started by using only the M1A1, moved on from there. I try to teach my six year old how to operate the aircraft. With five minutes of basics, he can buzz around the sky a bit. As adults, with endless teaching resources and endless supply of aircraft, we can easily get the basics IMHO, no matter about operating, say the engine, exactly as it was in reality. Maybe it's dependant on your background. I was an engineer, now I fly for a living, so it all makes sense, but it's not that hard if you bite little pieces off at a time, but don't expect to enter into online fighting and be the best, same as if you read the rules of soccer and tryed to play in the world cup - there is a lot stuff to learn, which is what makes the sim world so awesome. It's constant learning. Warthunder etc are quite shallow in that regard. For me, first and foremost, is about learning to operate these machines in the same way as they were really operated, it's an inescapable conclusion IMHO.

[Cybermat47]

What gets me mad in a flight sim?

 

Not that much. Actually, nothing.

 

I guess I'm just easy to please

[Br00ns]

Didn't realize I'd been responded to here.

 

 

 

I really, really, really like this post. I like the spirit in which it is written, and as a player, I can totally understand why you believe this.

 

I can also tell you that as a developer at an organisation that produces a software system which is used by a number of large financial institutions, this is only half of the story. I would actually argue it's probably more like 10% of the story.

 

<snip, but thank you for the kind remarks>

 

 

@TheGrunch: You make some good points and I'm glad to get responses in the spirit of my original post. I particularly appreciate the insight into the development process. Your point about development costs being much higher is well-taken, of course, and I'm not arguing for a moment that many big money-makers aren't stupid games. That said, I think the problem with the audience is less that they're stupid and more that they get treated like they're stupid by an industry that can make insane amounts of money and somehow still seem desperate. It's a crisis of creativity.

 

Let's look at your example of the Assassin's Creed series a bit more closely. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of Ezio trilogy, simple context-sensitive controls and all, because the movement system was a joy to play with and the architecture and setting looked gorgeous. I have a funny feeling that you're less upset by AC in and of itself, and more upset by the fact that major studios seem hesitant to make games WITHOUT simple context-sensitive controls, gorgeous environments, etc.

 

The problem isn't an individual title or even series of titles - as tempting as it is to blame Call of Duty for all the evils of the gaming world - it's just overall creative constipation, enforced in many cases by the people on the money side of things. The industry is so centralized and risk-averse that nobody wants to do anything terribly innovative, opting instead for seventeen new CoDs/Halos/whatevers. This, along with mobile gaming, is also where your more sinister, psychologically manipulative money-makers come into play.

 

So I disagree with the argument that "flight sims are doomed because of economics and also because people are stupid" argument - I think it's both wrong and more than a little bit elitist. I think sims could be a lot more popular than they are, but, as we've been talking about, the people who make real sims don't even try to attract new customers anymore. Sure, BOS is never going to challenge the genuinely mass-market titles in terms of overall sales, but the current state of the industry is at least partially self-inflicted.

 

I was also interested to read your comparison of BOS' development with that of the original IL2 game - although, if I'm honest, it was a little bit depressing, because if BOS is going to evolve along the same lines, that sucks. Without wishing to denigrate the amazing 3rd party content that so many talented people have worked really hard to produce for the original game, it's desperately unfair to sell a game for full price on the understanding that you, the user, have to create much of the content yourself. Plus, since we're talking about accessibility, let's be honest here - modding your game can be a massively time-consuming and irritating process. (I actually wrote more about this issue here.)

 

@ARM505: It's interesting that you're making the argument that BOS and similar games shouldn't be considered "games" at all, in the very same post where you highlight how problematic the term "full realism" is. A couple things:

 

First of all, I think you're drastically minimizing the amount of time and effort it takes to hunt up forum posts or YouTube videos to answer questions you might have on the finer points of a startup process or RPM or landing speeds. Depending on what it is you need answered, it can be anything from finding the first Google result to having to register on a new forum, get authorized, make a post of your own, and wait for a response. Frequently, there's nothing simple about it, and there's zero quality control - if you get the wrong info from your YouTube video or forum post, there's no authoritative source to compare it to.

 

More importantly, however, the fact that we now EXPECT you to have to go online and dig up basic information about a product you paid a non-trivial sum of money for is arrogant and elitist. It's this attitude that helps keep new players firmly out in the cold and keeps combat flight sims stuck in a small and dwindling niche.

 

Nothing I'm suggesting would, in any way, compromise the way you'd like to enjoy the sim. Nothing I'm suggesting would, in any way, compromise the fairness of online play. It's mystifying that arguing for better built-in training or single-player options makes people think you want to dumb down other aspects of the game somehow.

 

I found the way you characterized your approach to this sort of game to be instructive: "Make it your job to learn how to operate the 109..." You're free to approach sims this way if you like, but to me, this is the core of the problem. I don't want another job! I just want to play a challenging combat flight simulation game!

Edited July 16, 2014 by Bruins

[SKG51_robtek]

posted by Bruins

............

I found the way you characterized your approach to this sort of game to be instructive: "Make it your job to learn how to operate the 109..." You're free to approach sims this way if you like, but to me, this is the core of the problem. I don't want another job! I just want to play a challenging combat flight simulation game!

 

 

If it is a simulation, then it is a job to learn to do it right, as it is really, really complex.point!

If it is dumbed down to a game, it can still be challenging, but it is not a sim anymore, imho.

 

It would be great if one is getting bored with the "challenging game", to be able to switch "reduced complexity" off and "simulation" on and be challenged again.

Edited July 16, 2014 by robtek

[Wind]

Stuff.

 

 

Absolutely brilliant post. Coherent, well written and a nice peek what happens behind the curtains.

 

+1 Sir.

[Hylo]

That said, I think the problem with the audience is less that they're stupid and more that they get treated like they're stupid by an industry that can make insane amounts of money and somehow still seem desperate. It's a crisis of creativity.

...

The industry is so centralized and risk-averse that nobody wants to do anything terribly innovative, opting instead for seventeen new CoDs/Halos/whatevers. This, along with mobile gaming, is also where your more sinister, psychologically manipulative money-makers come into play.

Definitely agreed; these two points here are the real clinchers. I don't for a minute suggest that the industry has to be this way, but the reality is that it is because of these risk-averse decision-makers that these "safe options" are being bet on, which ironically has led to an indie revival.

 

Let's look at your example of the Assassin's Creed series a bit more closely. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of Ezio trilogy, simple context-sensitive controls and all, because the movement system was a joy to play with and the architecture and setting looked gorgeous. I have a funny feeling that you're less upset by AC in and of itself, and more upset by the fact that major studios seem hesitant to make games WITHOUT simple context-sensitive controls, gorgeous environments, etc.

I quite enjoyed Assassin's Creed for a little while too, but it was definitely throwaway entertainment. The gameplay itself was repetitive and uninspired and in an unusual turn of events my opinion of the game eventually ended up being aligned with this review (that the game was essentially two or three gameplay mechanics and a lot of collecting of miscellaneous uninteresting objects). The fact that the game has reach a fourth outing (is there five now?) continues to baffle me, and I liked the Metal Gear Solid series, the cut-scene criminals extraordinaire!

 

So I disagree with the argument that "flight sims are doomed because of economics and also because people are stupid" argument - I think it's both wrong and more than a little bit elitist. I think sims could be a lot more popular than they are, but, as we've been talking about, the people who make real sims don't even try to attract new customers anymore. Sure, BOS is never going to challenge the genuinely mass-market titles in terms of overall sales, but the current state of the industry is at least partially self-inflicted.

I don't agree with the argument either, but unfortunately this is what the people at the top of the industry seem to think and this probably won't change unless there is another defining flight sim with a good market reaction which bucks the trend in the way that Star Citizen has done for space sims (although the sheer ambition of that game probably means that there will not be imitators in that genre).

 

There is one other aspect that is a difficulty for the flight sim sector of the market, of course - the equipment factor. It's possible to play the more serious driving games using a gamepad if necessary, but it would be very difficult to do the same with a flight sim.

 

I think one of the most serious positive contributions that a gaming company could make to flight-simming to get people along for the ride would be to make a serious flight sim with serious physics easily playable with a gamepad when the more complex engine settings are off, and to make clear to players that they can do so!

 

I don't for a minute want the gameplay experience to be optimised or dumbed down so that this will be easier but just for the game to be playable in the same way that for example the Gran Turismo games are playable with a gamepad - you can play the game but you'd get a wheel if you were serious.

 

I was also interested to read your comparison of BOS' development with that of the original IL2 game - although, if I'm honest, it was a little bit depressing, because if BOS is going to evolve along the same lines, that sucks.

I wouldn't make any assumptions just yet. I think that the Northrop Grumman issue really soured the relationship between Maddox Games and its two publishers, and that this likely contributed in an extremely significant way to the lack of ambitious development activity after Pacific Fighters.

Looking at the history of RoF there is a lot to be positive about: after all the game started off as a bare-bones sim with a small planeset and limited mission options. When the game's pay-per-plane development strategy was first discussed I was a bit concerned that that would be it, and the game would get a lot of planes and not much else, but they went and developed the career mode too, which at the end of the day is kind of a holy grail for single-player flight-simmers. It never captured me in the same way as Il-2 but that's more to do with the setting than the game itself.

Equally, there are a lot of ways that all of the disaster stories that I outlined above can be handled. On the technical side programming has become a much more consistently disciplined craft than it used to be. There have always been companies that have had strict development practices but it's become more of an expectation now that companies will have high test coverage of code, a good coverage of code via code reviews, an established internal programming style or system of best practices for each of the technologies that they use, etc. etc.

Design issues are trickier, especially where people's responsibilities cross over but at the end of the day the solution to most of these problems comes down to constant internal review of solutions at a technical and at a functional level. Companies are more likely to conduct internal demos where a wider range of feedback can be obtained too, and this early access process is like the ultimate form of that feedback, although I am certain that it is close to impossible to distill the sheer volume of feedback that will be received into anything resembling a coherent picture of the community's view on the game.

 

@Wind Thanks, but it's important for me to mention that not everything that I discuss will be relevant to the gaming industry vs. the financial services industry! It's just that projects in every sector of the software development industry fall into the same kind of pitfalls.

Edited July 16, 2014 by TheGrunch

[Wind]

@Wind Thanks, but it's important for me to mention that not everything that I discuss will be relevant to the gaming industry vs. the financial services industry! It's just that projects in every sector of the software development industry fall into the same kind of pitfalls.

 

 

Indeed!

And this is the key point. Far to often we (as clients, as enthusiasts) forget what kind of machine there is behind these products. The people, schedules, technological constraints, budget etc.. Would be nice that at some point the end users/clients would start to realize, even a bit, how frigging complicated it is to get anything squeezed out from the end of the pipeline.

 

 I appreciate that you can give that glimpse what is going on behind the scenes. A lot of that is obscured from people and that info can

(hopefully..) give some slack to the dev team and give them a bit of slack.

[SOLIDKREATE]

I got one that just boiled my blood YESTERDAY!!!!!

 

 

Okay I admit my printer is older than most of you, LOL. Once and a while a window will pop up and say to buy more ink at their online store. Okay fine, glad you reminded me.

 

BUT FOR F---KS SAKE............Don't pop the window up while I am behind a LaGG or a 109 when I am just about to FIRE!!!! 

 

Edited July 17, 2014 by .VMF/214_SPEKTRE76

[Cybermat47]

 BUT FOR F---KS SAKE............Don't pop the window up while I am behind a LaGG or a 109 when I am just about to FIRE!!!! 

 

Oh man... if that happened to me, I'd probably punch a hole through my monitor

[ARM505]

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree that sims should have better tutorials and teaching aids. Given the apparent financial and resource squeeze on sim developement I just don't think it's realistically going to happen in a big way

 

Personally, I'd like an engine test bench in these kind of sims, to see how they model engine damage at prolonged high power settings - I hate having to magically work out how they've modelled cumulative damage by taking a plane and running it over max specs until it breaks! That DCS P51 was/is insanely irritating for me - engine's running fine, hmmmmm....maybe a little on the high power side *WHAM* engine is locked up solid. Er........wat? Yes, it decided that I was too far over some or other magical parameter and froze it solid.

[Br00ns]

@Grunch: Once again, tons of insightful stuff there, thank you. When I read your Gran Turismo example, I mentally waved my arm in the air and thought "Yes! That's EXACTLY the sort of thing I'm thinking about for flight sims!" There's no way these things have to be mutually exclusive. The equipment issue, as you say, may well be one of the big sticking points. And what's the Northrup Grumman issue? I'm unfamiliar with this.

 

Also, you're right - I may have been a bit too cynical in my evaluation of BOS' prospects. To be clear, I do think it's going to be a good game one way or the other, I'm just less sure about what type of game it's going to be, nor how long it's going to take for the features I'm interested in to be added.

 

Jeez, this is awkward - I hate to be the one to end the string of lengthy, thoughtful posts, but I essentially agree with most of what you've said above. Hmm. I guess we should either start fighting about fine details of 109 performance or call this a discussion.

 

@ARM505: Oh, I'm not denying for a moment that there seem to be some fairly serious financial constraints in place - it's actually the point of my argument.

 

The problem is circular: The only people buying flight sims anymore are the hard-core types who'd prefer a lavishly detailed flight model to detailed training materials or a dynamic campaign/career mode. So the flight sim developers make sims that are devoted to ultra-realism at the expense of that other stuff, ensuring that the games are as unattractive to new players as possible. So the new players don't buy the games, and the flight sim developers keep making titles for essentially the same few people every time.

 

Maybe not everybody got into sims the same way I did, but I didn't start with particularly stellar sims - as a very little kid I played a ton of Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, as well as something called Birds of Prey that, in hindsight, was just awful. But I was a little kid, and it was fun, and even in these terrible games, there were at least a few training missions that let you know how to get off the ground, maneuver, and, potentially, land.

 

Now I'm an adult and my disbelief is a lot heavier and more difficult to suspend, so I've gotten into things like IL2, BMS, DCS etc. over the past few years - these are all great games, but they're all deeply flawed in their own ways, as well.

 

Anyway, it sounds as though we're essentially on the same page, and I apologize if I came off a little aggressive earlier - wasn't my intention.

 

EDIT: Oh, also, your idea of the engine test-bench sounds awesome, though I for one think there need to be long-suffering ground staff that sigh sadly every time you burn up another engine running around in the background.

Edited July 18, 2014 by Bruins

[Hylo]

And what's the Northrup Grumman issue?

Big legal mess allegedly caused by the use of trademarked names (e.g. Wildcat, Hellcat etc.) in the Pacific Fighters marketing material. It doesn't seem to have enough substance that it would stand up in court (see the Bell-EA thing over Battlefield 3), but apparently the threat of litigation was enough that the publishers caved and signed some kind of legally-binding agreement not to produce any further material containing representations of NG "IP" in order to settle out of court.

 

 

Hmm. I guess we should either start fighting about fine details of 109 performance or call this a discussion. 

Oh no, I forgot my charts! 

Edited July 22, 2014 by TheGrunch