RAF74_Wall-dog surrenders:: Wall Dog personally admits Defeat. Don't anybody here follow Wall Dog or you will personally never see another flight sim worth buying.

Why?


(0) The claim that we have become too "nitpicky" about FM is false. Only a loud vocal minority of simmers post on flight sim internet webboards that Whine about FM so loud. Did anybody here at the sinhq stop to think that in the quiet "old flight sim days" there were no flight sim webboards for these dozen or so FM Whiners to advertise themselves as the total community? Indeed it is possible that Wall~Dog has confused the Whining of a very few with the silent majority of flight simmers out there.


(1) You need no difficulty settings in a flight sim. You need historical era flight sim training planes and a deep manual and game interface that leads the flight sim Newbie through basic flight training and into combat training. This requires programming effort, not watering down realism as suggested here.

(2) Wall's idea of using External View to "make up" for computer monitor demonstrates the danger of following his/her entire advice in this thread. Why? To start, full cockpit view can be made so it is as easy to use as natural human vision...

Mouse view for those that don't have TrekkieIR ( ) It works.

Aircraft grafix that don't vanish and monitor resolution dependent "dot" sizes for distant aircraft. Some may recognize here that I am come from the FB camp which is totally diseased with this problem of aircraft invisibility.

A wider zoom cockpit view, at least 120 degrees maximum like LOMAC, and with zoom in view possible. And I don't mean the Sloppy LOMAC zoom controls that are slow but instant zoom in view like FB provides (here we have one minor example of sloppy implementation in LOMAC that makes the game hard to play).

Pilot Lean. I agree with Wall Dog that we need pilot leaning control, but then Wall Dog states we can't have it yet (we can).

I could go on with more, but the pattern so far shows that everything here all depends on programming code to make it happen, programming that is not being done but could be, and not bizzare debates about flight sims being too realistic or too hard. There can never be such a thing. Just thinking and it sounds dumb. Don't be fooled here. Flying can be easy and very difficult at the same time. Modelling both requires programming effort.

I believe what turns off most Newbie flight simmers is the lack of immersive air combat environment. Wall~Dog is conspicously silent on this. Going by my experience with FB, a flight sim should provide the basic air combat game engine but allow 3rd Party people to easily communicate with the the game to create engaging frontline situations.

Wall Dog:: Bingo. Wall Dog must by admission ignore 95% of flight sim purchasers.

Why don't AI fly smart? Because the AI needs more programming. I will say that AI programming in flight sims is an afterthought.
The goal of AI programming is to reduce the visible difference between computer and humanoid operator. AI can be programmed far more deeply than is done now. Follow Wall Dog and AI will never be improved.


Again, all this requires much more programming effort than we have seen so far, and more effort than would be required by Wall's ideas about watering down flight sims into arcade games (okay, I said it). Wall's claim that flight sims are too hard are correct but he/she conceals the reasons--lack of programming. Ignoring this will truly be the Death of the Flight Sim Genre (possibly why Wall chose this as a title).

Granted, IL~2/FB was Oleg's first flight sim with limited funding, and his future sims may be far more deeply programmed for gameplay. If so, we are about to witness the Birth of the Flight Simulation Genre.

:p Granted, Oleg still refuses to allow re~fuel and re~arming for those who wish to sim an all day "scenario" with multiple missions.


Better, and more, programming is the key to Victory.

I shall agree with Wall Dog about the prices....that such programming could use a more expensive retail package, or at least far greater sales volume at current flight sim prices.