SPOCK! Wall Dog

I don't follow the discussion about "mechanics" vs "feel" in flight simming. For one thing, we are opposite type of flight simmers as I think flight sims are still Fun (at least Forgotten Battles and original MSDOS Flanker 1.0) -- the only 2 flight sims I play until Oleg releaces BoB+ with Battle of Poland and France addon packs...

~~> http://www.france-simulation.com/

Mentoring the Newbies would be cool, as testified by many internet squads. Alot of merit to online war simming if internet gamers actually behaved like real life wartime air crew in history. But then real life aircrew had to follow orders and if they didn't they got server kicked FOREVER--I mean court martialed (or executed).

Wall Dog:: Pay very close attention here. Wall Dog has stated [last page] he/she wishes all flight simming to move 100% pure online and abolish all AI.

...just poking hard here...I am really into your more recent idea [this page] of mixing humanoid and AI in an online war server...Offline simming needs AI, Online simming gets a huge immersion boost with AI available to fill out the ranks and with that comes the gut wrenching Question "is my target AI or humanoid?" I wonder if flight sim AI is programmed just enough to let the game be put on sale without more serious programming efforts. I agree with Wall Dog that AI is not as good as it could be.

Then make it better! That is the solution for the Re~Birth of the Flight Sim Genre. We have succeeded [this page] in getting Wall Dog to claim that Online flying needs AI programming, so lets make Online flying even better with better AI programming. What ya say Wall Dog?

To answer the Question, I think flight simming should target both offline and online, but can't give percentages because both share at least 90% (pure guess) of flight sim coding and modelling.


Recall the basic goal of Artificial Intelligence is to make the computer indistinguishable from a humanoid. I make the [apparently] wild claim here that offline World War 2 AI--or any given era AI--can be made far more realistic than any online simming involving humanoid internet players (look at teh dogfight servers). The catch here is that flight sim developers either don't have the desire or don't have the resources to do such extensive AI programming. It can be done. It will be done if we push for it. It will never be done if we just give up and say AI is not needed because it does not work well. Many have said the same thing about new aircraft design ideas not working well so just give up.


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Thanks Osram, you are correct about some parts of flight simming being "too hard" but I was thinking only of Flying The Plane part. The faulty visual aspects of flight sims of course result from lack of programming effort--or resources given the low budgets. Better programming can be found, but not always by higher budgets--Microsoft for example lol.

Making flight sim visuals and view system easy to use is NOT the same kind of programming goal as programming a Sopwith Camel or MiG~3 to be "easy to fly." MiG~3 in Forgotten Battles proves that flying a flight sim plane is far easier than real life flying. Don't anybody here be fooled by this assertion that flight simming is "too hard." What is too hard is the simulation of the pilot him/her self...view system, aircraft grafix system especially at long ranges (thinking FB again here), all the 1st person pilot stuff is what makes flight simming seem very hard. Indeed, one may think of cockpit view as a 1st person narrative which is always harder to write than a 3rd person narrative, where the 3rd person narrative corresponds with our "easy" External View. Lets try a little harder to get that 1st person view done well.


This is an interesting point I would like to bring up again for potential discussion...I could be wrong...

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 we at teh sinhq let ourselves become confused by the Whining of a very few and the silent majority of flight simmers out there.


oh, and Wall_Dog, just what online wars really need now is checking six with External View. Lets start thinking about more programming for our cockpit view system that benefits both the silent 95% offline simmers we so easily ignore and the 5% online simmers--from who's meager ranks are drawn the FM Whiners we just talked about.

And Wall Dog, don't s! or SPOCK! me like a trekkie at a convention