In some sense, I’m glad Koe got delayed. If it had not, we might never have had these discussions.

Blurring offline and online play: Once I was in a PTA league race, racing in Nascar Racing 2003 Season. One of the guys seemed to be in a bit of a determined mood, because he was driving hard and fast.

He didn't respond to our greetings, never uttered a word. Oh well, perhaps he was having difficulty with the chat and we don't chat much either, when qualifying and racing.

Afterwards it turned out that the computer had fooled three guys into thinking that this driver was human, while in fact it was a bot. It chose a car from the roster that belonged to one of our regular racing mates. Now, if the bot had been capable of uttering a few well-chosen remarks, the Turing test would have been passed with flying colours. Rofl!

Regarding the mix between functionality, or features that are available, either on the user’s PC and on one or several servers, it’s certainly an idea that boggles the mind, if taken to the extreme.

I’m not sure if I understand RAD74_Wall-dog’s ideas, but the way I see it you can have;

-Offline only,
-Online only
-Mix of offline/online

The online part could be;
-IP-IP
-Server-client TCP/IP, involving a server, which could be operated by the company that published the sim/game
-peer2peer

If you discuss the Server-client and peer2peer situations, there’d be the necessity of a boss server, some CPU to ensure all are playing according to the same clock, same settings etc.

Next to discuss is how much of the game/sim information should be transferred over the internet and it could range anywhere in between just the basic coordinates and manouvers of the remote a/c to just about everything that would be available in a sim: Individual skins, Terrain, a/c, AI etc.

If you choose to transfer information about relatively few objects, say the flight manouvers of the a/c and the AI, well couldn’t you just offer updated AI in a patch?

I’m probably going to be proven wrong by the development of the relationship between PC and internet in the next few years, but I don’t think we’ll see the extreme case, where a lot of the content is downloaded as we play, in the foreseeable future.

I just don’t think the philosophy of a “semi-dumb” terminal downloading gamecontent, live, and as the game progresses, is a very good idea in terms of fast and constant frame rates. You have to have at least decent physics- and AI- modelling, and lag free-environment to please simmers. Imagine the equipment needed: 20 GHZ CPU and 10 GB/s internet connections.

Did you know that GTR, the latest racing simulation, to be released shortly I hope, is supposed to support 20 – 25 cars during online racing, but it requires a server bandwidth of at least 1 Gig?!

OK, we know that there’s something called Massive Multiplayer games, but how many of these could deliver a lag-free, credible 50 a/c furball? And is 150 better than 50??

Transferring bits and bytes over the internet in order to ensure a lagfree experience is hard enough, how many flightsims have absolutelty perfect IP play? How many simultaneous a/c do they support, and how many bytes do they transfer?

Besides I’m not so sure if we’re not just projecting our aspirations for future sims on to a new technology. Wasn’t the consoles supposed to give the user better products? Here we are with at least two major consoles and we haven’t really seen anything new yet.

Did 3GHz CPU’s and internet really give us better sim experiences than 500 MHz?

Who will pay for server cost? The company providing the server, of course, but will they put a server up if they’re not willing to shell out another 150.000 to finish KoE?

Like I said, I may be totally wrong, but I think focusing on technology could be sidestepping the real issue, and I think that it has got a lot to do with “programming”, and delivering satisfying gameplay for newbie as well as seasoned campaigner.

Personally, I do like a fully reserved offline environment to train in, as well as "kicking some bot". Sorry about that joke :-/

Anyways, I'm not always up to multi, sometimes it's nice to just play around with the AI for 10 minutes and then go and do something else. It's not always I can spare the time and energy for longer duration multiplay. Yeah, there’s flat-rate, but who earns the money? Telco’s and Cisco’s.

Despite some UFO-like stunts at times, the AI in BoB is behaving rather intelligent too. Those ME-109's do gang up on you and put you in their cross-fire.

Have you seen the trailers for Silent Hunter III? The sub is now manned with moving people and it can be played (or simmed) at different levels of "difficulty" and it will be possible to give commands directly to the boat, or through the correct crewmember. So if it turns out well it should be a Sub-Commander sim, as well as a Sub-sim.

In a previous post I hinted at something clever that could be done with a post-op debriefing, in terms of enhancing gameplay, and in this thread we're currently discussing the merits of a training-part of a sim as opposed to throwing newbie pilots into the lion's den against AI or human pilots.

Now, here's my idea for something which to my knowledge has not really been done before in the history of flight-sims; You become the pilot.

For this to work you will control a person, much like the way you control a person in a FPS WW sim/game.

Start off by reporting to OTU or basic flight school. We'll do away with some of the more boring subjects like endless hours of written tests, drills and developing mathematical skills, and concentrate on the flying part. But basically you are being collected by the Staff Sergeant or whoever was sent by the CO to get you off the bus or railway station and to the training facility.

You have to get to learn the training facility, where do you bunk, where's the mess, the officers' readiness-room, the CO's office etc.

You have to report to the instructor at the right time and place, First time round the Training instructor might tell you to report the day after at crack of dawn, but for future reference, he will tell you where such announcements can be found, and he tells you to check that out for yourself in the future.

Once you've reported for the first flight lesson, you start learning how to fly; dual instruction, later, if you've shown enough aptitude, you'll fly solo, and when the time is right you'll be posted to your first squadron.

This training part of the sim should be optional, i.e. you can jump into a Camel or SE5a, Dreidecker or whatever suits you and enter the Great War within 2 seconds of installing and configuring the sim (yes, you can choose between several options of "difficulty", even one that will let you survice your first dogfight).

The really kewl part of my idea, at least I think so, is that once you are in a squadron, you will experience a helluvalot more than just flying missions. You'll be a part of squadron-life.

Go talk with the mechanics, go meet the met man, go the the mess and chat to your fellow aviators, go just about everywhere you like as long as you keep reporting for the missions that are assigned to you.

You'll start out as Flt. Sergeant or some comparable low rank. If you survive long enough, you may be chosen to lead a flight, and this will mean you have to take on new responsibilities (at least by now you know you should have taken the navigator's course in the training-part of the sim).

If you get lost during and op, you might have to chance it and land near some friendly trenches and aske where the heck you are.

If you get called to HQ you’ll comandeer a vehicle from the pool.

And it will really shine during online play.

New postings to the squadron would be taken up by an experiecend pilot, "Stick to me like glue", and be given the tips that no training facility could ever give, because at the front and in daily battle, things change from day to day. New, improved aircraft have been deployed by the enemy, so your squadron has had to change tactics.

Imagine us meeting up; FlyXWire, Cas141, Wall-dog or Polovski, on the virtual arodrome, each of us being represented on screen by moving characters or Avatars. The day's flying is done and we head for post-op debriefing. The sim will have saved the latest battle and we can replay it (or rather the guy who's got the Intel job can do so). We can all chat and comment about the battle, how did it go, was the objective met etc. After briefing, we head for the mess and a few tankards of brew!

Note that replaying the battle is not strictly historical correct. To be historically correct all you'd have would probably be a photgraph, perhaps not even that, and it would be several hours later, brought home by a scout plane, but this is where I think we ought to have more and better than the real pilots had available at the time (Or do we have anyone volounteering for a photographic mission?).

The next day, Someone might ask; "Where's McG?", and the answer might be; "He hade some leave coming, he's off to Paris, lucky s*d", or "Didn't you know? Never came back from dawn patrol, bought the farm, saw him auger in myself".

In reality this could be, all rolled into one, forum, flight sim, tactical sim, strategic sim, adventure game-ish. In the online environment, the Intelligence as well as the tactical and strategic elements comes from human interacting with human, not from or with the AI.

For offline, the sim does have to be programmend as a tactical or strategic game. Like I said, it will shine online.

Offline and with AI, this sim will require some clever programming to avoid repetition of 3 standard phrases that are played over and over again, and to avoid bugs the lead to you getting an absurdly wrong answer from the met man when you ask about the forecast for the coming op: "It's quarter to noon".

Nevertheless, the CPU is not being tasked with any complex flight models at this stage, so would it be that hard to give each person you can interact with some 20 or 30 individual sentences + 10 or 20 common to all chit-chat style remarks?

Perhaps the sim could be put together in such a way that pilots I fly with and chat with online, can have not only individualized skins that I can download, but also individualized phrases that can be downloaded too? At least in terms of textfiles that can be displayed on the screen?

Voice chat would have to be an online only feature.

Writing this, I've come to realize that the line between what can be done offline and what can be done online is becoming very blurred: If noone wants to be the met man during an online session, that part could be taken by a bot. The mechanics that send you off in an online mission could be bots too. As has been mentioned, some of your fellow pilots could be bots.

All this sound silly?

Let me round off by going back to the example with Nascar Racing 2003. The computer choose the skin of an existing league driver. If there had been a file containing information about that driver's nationality, and some individual and generic phrases as well:

Us: "Hi mate, how are you?"
Bot: "Hi gents, how are ya doin?" (Notice how direct questions are often not answered directly?)
Bot: "Time to do some flying" (heads out to the track or swings legs up on the wing of the Sopwith)
Us: "He-he, let's go" (really intellingent conversation we're having! :-D)

And then the bot will occasionally offer somewhat sensical remarks appropriate to the situation, in a flight sim I'd suspect that with remarks triggered by the combat situation it would be very hard to determine if it was a bot or a human.

I'm not asking for a lot of intelligent conversation from a bot during combat. In that situation, naturally the CPU cycles should be devoted to the flying skill of the bot.

In terms of programming, I know there's real life limitations by hardware, budgets, time-constrainst, but if the programmers put their minds to doing something like this, I think we'd be pretty surprised by the results, even if we would still be able to Spot the bot after some play. Or would we??


Jens C. Lindblad


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