Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
King Crimson - SimHQ's Top Poster
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 121,383
Miami, FL USA
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989. While I don't fly as much now than I did during my peak years in the 90's and early 2000's, I still try to fly at least a couple of hours every week in Rise of Flight or in DCS World.
And while I enjoy sims like DCS World, I can completely understand the criticisms from others about the sim being too stale and sterile.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
This thread has been a real eye-opener for me and I can definitely understand why console gaming systems have been appealing for so many people who used to be primarily PC gamers. With a console system you just turn it on, load the game and go. I think the same phenomenon has happened with flight sims.
In terms of getting into the play, yes that would be a big help for me. I have no consoles, but on PC I totally admit to letting the hardware and controllers become my own snare. I just need to come down from the mountain of feeling like I need those things.
On the other side of the coin, I do still very much enjoy a complex piece of gameplay that is engaging. The complexity doesn't keep me away. But to some degree, I started to feel like the flight simulations with deep systems complexity just began to lack a depth of engagement. After the initial enthusiasm (due to my previous interest in some aircraft) had led me through learning how to reset the hydraulics electrical pump circuit breaker as part of the preflight testing... well without some way for this simulated system to ever be an actual part of a flight (and very, very often it could not), it did sort of start to seem more like animated scenery after a while.
Lately I've been playing a few non-computer games that are more complex than even my old aircraft systems sims. But they are designed in ways that every aspect of the complexity figures into the play, and I like this very much.
WARNING: This post contains opinions produced in a facility which also occasionally processes fact products.
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989.
Same here, except I was 27 at the time. I can remember excitedly telling a guy at work how realistic Jet Fighter was! LOL. My second flight sim was "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat".
"In the vast library of socialist books, there’s not a single volume on how to create wealth, only how to take and “redistribute” it.” - David Horowitz
I will be 51 this month and I haven't touched IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad since one or two updates ago when my game crashed to desktop constantly. All my research and all my years of troubleshooting experience brought me no answer. After that I stuck to occasionally playing Ghost Recon Wildlands.
For all I know, Battle of Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban might work now after more recent updates but I haven't found the motivation to try again.
A contributing factor might be my recent foray into drum set playing again. I jam every Saturday afternoon with some friends and parts of my weekday evenings are taken up by drum practice and learning more songs for the next jam session.
45 and I haven't lost interest in the subject (or racing sims). It's the time investment Even if I have time, the fact that each screw up I make- which I will make as I can't devote enough time and I get rusty- will make me re-fly or re-race or just practice. So the time "training" expands and the time "really doing" contracts. All that in the time I don't have enough of to devote to it.
What kind of car is that? What does it matter? When I drive it, I'm Steve McQueen
41, I still sim and don't mind them being complicated. My issue, and the reason I don't sim as much, is most sims post 2000 lack soul. They have no spirit or life to them--they're plain screens with radio buttons to pick a few things and off you go. EAW, Battle of Britain, Red Baron (the original), Gunship (the original), F-19 Stealth Fighter, Aces and SWOTL had soul. They had thick manuals, stories and personality that made you want to stay inside the sim.
Most modern sims lack that. They're dry and boring. And some even half ass the sim itself, while being realistic as hell, they refuse to give the player life by implementing an awesome dynamic campaign like Falcon 4.0/BMS (I am looking at YOU DCS series sims... Want to know why I don't buy DCS? Because why bother learning fancy controls when all I got is scripted missions. I don't want to be bothered with making missions. I want a Falcon campaign I can jump into and have fun).
Oh, and I still love Falcon BMS. It might be soul-lite, but damn, that dynamic campaign is incredible. Rise of Flight seems so far to have a neat career mode, too. Haven't flown an identical mission yet. And the feeling of flight is unparalleled.
Games like DCS got old really really fast for me. As beautiful as it is, DCS world was the most barren and lifeless environment I have ever seen in a combat sim.
Falcon 4 and the various mods were ro me the best ever and nothing else came close. Howeverm as good as they are they still got old over time. Other than that the type of sims I enjoyed were Longbows, EEAHCH, JF1518 type games. Those games did not age well. Exception being EECH that still got mods.
I also was never that into EAW, IL2 and variants type games. Although i did nuy them. Never really got into it.
FSX...i wont keep sinking more money into it for scenery, more planes, etc., felt like a money sink.
So the fact that I have less time with wife and kid, plus lack of anything new that drew me in like Falcon4 meant I started more and more towards consoles if anything. Even if I only have 30 minutes, i still get to enjoy it.
One thing I can't help thinking about, though, is...now that flight sims finally look as realistic as I had always wished they could be, I'm not interested anymore!
"From our orbital vantage point, we observe an earth without borders, full of peace, beauty and magnificence, and we pray that humanity as a whole can imagine a borderless world as we see it, and strive to live as one in peace." Astronaut William C. McCool RIP, January 29, 2003 - Space Shuttle Columbia
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989.
I believe my very first "sim" was "F-15 Strike Eagle" by Microprose on the Commodore 64, followed by "Gunship", of course also by Microprose. Next one was F-19 Stealth Fighter, and subLOGIC's "Flight Simulator". Some time later I switched to the Amiga (= begged my mom to buy an Amiga for me) after I've seen "F/A-18 Interceptor" on a friend's Amiga. Got that, then re-bought Gunship and F-19 Stealth Fighter for the Amiga. My favorite flightsim for the Amiga by far was Digital Integration's "F-16 Combat Pilot", which was great for its time and released a little after the original "Falcon" by Spectrum Holobyte.
Why men throw their lives away attacking an armed Witcher... I'll never know. Something wrong with my face?
#4356903 - 05/12/1712:43 AMRe: Question about flight sims in general
[Re: DM]
The "hardcore" fanaticism has killed flight sims for me. I enjoyed Falcon 4.0 to an extent just because it had such a great dynamic campaign, but I never could be bothered to learn the sim in depth. I learned to fire missiles, drop bombs and that was it. Anything that requires me to execute a half dozen keystrokes, with lots of ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys thrown in, just to get a weapon ready to fire/drop I just don't enjoy.
BMS is an entirely different beast now. With a clickable cockpit, there is absolutely no need to remember any keystroke. So long as you have enough buttons on your HOTAS to map what's on the actual F-16 stick, you're good. Anything else, you just need to flick the appropriate switch or press the correct button in the cockpit and you're good. The switchology is still there, but it's now in the cockpit rather than on your keyboard.
Originally Posted by F4UDash4
I want realism of the environment, the proper weapons etc for a given time period and I want accurate flight models and accurate weapons performance I just don't want to learn exactly how it's done in the real aircraft, IE figuring out SOI, and which switches need to be in what position to fire/drop a weapon etc. I want to select the weapon then pull the trigger/press the pickle button and it works.
Check and check and check and check... up to a given extent. And to drop a bomb, all you really need is to flick Master Arm to ON. Everything else is icing on the cake. Don't let all the other stories bother you. So long as you have a CCRP or CCIP symbology on the HUD and Master Arm is on, go drop that bomb. SOI and SPI and TGP Point track and all that other fancy stuff are for the fancy weapons and you don't have to use them if you don't want to.
Originally Posted by WileECoyote
You see, it used to be the case that when I wanted to play a game, all I had to do was take the joystick from the top of the PC case and put it on the desk, click run, and play, maybe also insert the CD but that was it.
Nowadays if I want to play I have to:
1) Take the Warthog base from the overhead cabinet and clamp it on the desk. 2) Do the same for the stick. 3) Take the rudder pedals and position them. 4) Lower chair, bring monitor forward. 5) Put TrackIR. 6) Start TrackIR, start TM T.A.R.G.E.T and load the profile, load the profile in my custom panel if I'm playing a different game than last time. 7) Finnaly, play.
That's a ton more work than I'd like to do most of the time... so I just fire up Age Of Empires or Virtual Pool for a quick match. Sims were never casual, but now with all the peripherals it's a lot less casual than ever.
I can totally relate to this... and that's why my setup is like so:
And here it is "at work":
If I want to play, all I have to do is to startup the required programs and everything else is where it should be. The price to pay for being lazy is having to build a setup like this and be ready-to-fly almost anytime.
Originally Posted by Arthonon
so I'm hoping it's a gateway to getting back into BMS.
I find a lot of people think they need to know EVERYTHING about Falcon to play Falcon. Such is not the case. If you're happy with the basics, I'm sure you could learn how to be "effective" in a particular delivery method in under 30 minutes with the right tutor. Also, the documentation for BMS has gotten a lot better, back to the format of Falcon 4.0.
If you need any help or just want to get a feel of how it would be like to get back to Falcon, post on over the Falcon sub-forum and you'll get loads of help and advice.
Originally Posted by Sokol1
In case of DCSW if you remove that "hardcore" part - the Alt, Ctrl, Shift... what left don't worth be touched with a long pole, because the "realism of the environment, etc." still very WiP.
Hahahaha.... No comment!
Originally Posted by PanzerMeyer
The general consensus seems to be that the gameplay and complexity change with the flight simulations themselves is what drove many people away.
While true up to a point, this may be one of the biggest misconceptions of flight sims. For Falcon BMS as an example, some people think you have to ramp start --- not true. You can have a runway start or a taxiway start. Heck, if you forward the time a bit more, you can even jump in the plane just before it hits the IP -- so that's an airstart right there!
Another issue of complexity --- if you insist on dropping GBUs on pre-determined targets... or worse, find targets on the TGP and make markpoints there-and-then, yeah, that's complex. Load up on Mark-82s or -84s, drop on CCRP or CCIP, and head home. That's about as simple as it gets.
The objective is to kill the target. That is simple. The cockpit and systems only seems complex because there are about 53 dozen ways to do that one job
Originally Posted by DM
I used to do the heavy-duty stuff too. Falcon 4, Longbow 2, Black Shark, FSX Hercules payware etc. But now... meh, I hit my mid-40s and relaxed a bit..
Interestingly enough, Falcon BMS is something I fire up every night to relax. As weird as it sounds, I do a couple of air-to-air refuelling runs to get into a relaxed state. Being all tense means I don't get to connect; I'd PIO all over the place. So I have to FORCE myself to relax...
Quite a few interesting bits of info here, so I decided to start a thread on the Falcon sub-forum to address Falcon-specific concerns. I'd like to invite everyone curious about or on the fence regarding Falcon BMS to post their questions or concerns there.... the reasons you guys stopped playing Falcon years ago or the reasons that stopped you from picking up BMS may be totally unfounded or would be easily remedied if you knew the situation today.
Falcon BMS is most awesome when played online, on a persistent server full of other players on either side. I've had some nerve-wracking flights in BMS. But that was several years ago, before my wife got sick, when I had lots of spare time. Fantastic times.
Never really lost interest, but lost interest in reinvesting after the death of MSFS.
I have Lomac, Flaming Cliffs, Falcon 4, IL2FB, and they were all fun, but MSFS was my root.
Never liked X-Plane, but I'm considering getting into it nowadays.....
VR is what's REALLY making me think of getting back into it though.
I'm still really pissed off that Microsoft let FS go.
I'm even MORE pissed off that I think my last "activation" of my 2006 disc might BE the last - I still have FSX installed (with quite a few mods of course), but now that old "You're just being paranoid" #%&*$# argument is probably going to come true next time around.
And no, I will NOT "buy it again" on Steam.....
So on another tangent - DRM. Killed my interest a LOT on a LOT of things.......
#4356943 - 05/12/1710:52 AMRe: Question about flight sims in general
[Re: F4UDash4]
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
King Crimson - SimHQ's Top Poster
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 121,383
Miami, FL USA
Originally Posted by F4UDash4
Originally Posted by PanzerMeyer
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989.
Same here, except I was 27 at the time. I can remember excitedly telling a guy at work how realistic Jet Fighter was! LOL. My second flight sim was "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat".
And I bought the game at a Radio Shack of all places!
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989.
Same here, except I was 27 at the time. I can remember excitedly telling a guy at work how realistic Jet Fighter was! LOL. My second flight sim was "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat".
And I bought the game at a Radio Shack of all places!
So did I! LOL!!
Bought my first PC at Radio Shack, a Tandy!
"In the vast library of socialist books, there’s not a single volume on how to create wealth, only how to take and “redistribute” it.” - David Horowitz
My first flightsims were SubLogic FS2, Jet and F-16 Combat Pilot on the Atari ST. I played those through most of my teens until other interests (girls, guitars, beer) took over. I rediscovered simming when I got my first Windows pc with Pacific Air War, Red Baron 2 and bought pretty much every title until around 10 years ago. IL2, or rather what came in its wake, ruined it for me with too much attention to details that don't really matter while other aspects of gameplay were being neglected. Rise of Flight introduced some really cool stuff but in the end was constrained by its original concept as an online dogfighting game.
Today I still go back to my old favourites: Mig Alley, BoB, Falcon, MSFS and the ThirdWire sims, but at the age of 40 other interests (girls - I mean wife - guitars, beer ;)) have taken over. I have some hope for CAP2 and I see its potential, but progress is a little slow.
The really sad part is that one could find similar threads 10 or even 15 years ago, with pretty much the same complaints being raised regarding gameplay. I guess no developer/publisher is listening.
Undercarriage lever a bit sticky was it, Sir?
#4356969 - 05/12/1712:40 PMRe: Question about flight sims in general
[Re: Johan217]
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
King Crimson - SimHQ's Top Poster
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 121,383
Miami, FL USA
Originally Posted by Johan217
I guess no developer/publisher is listening.
All of the developers that would have listened dropped out of the flight sim market a long, long time ago.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4356971 - 05/12/1712:48 PMRe: Question about flight sims in general
[Re: F4UDash4]
I'm 44 and I've been playing PC flight sims ever since I bought "Jet Fighter" in 1989.
Same here, except I was 27 at the time. I can remember excitedly telling a guy at work how realistic Jet Fighter was! LOL. My second flight sim was "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat".
And I bought the game at a Radio Shack of all places!
So did I! LOL!!
Bought my first PC at Radio Shack, a Tandy!
I can relate. From memory (27 years ago)...
Tandy 1000SX Single 5-1/4" FDD (booted from DOS disc, then swapped with program disc). No HDD No math coprocessor (upgrade was too expensive) CGA graphics.
It was great!
The rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in Gives way and suddenly it’s day again The sun is in the east Even though the day is done Two suns in the sunset, hmph Could be the human race is run
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
PanzerMeyer
Pro-Consul of Florida
King Crimson - SimHQ's Top Poster
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 121,383
Miami, FL USA
Ha!! I had the exact same floppy disk container and file card box!
Last edited by PanzerMeyer; 05/12/1701:00 PM.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I mentioned before that I am not put off by the complexity of some of these sims, that hasn't changed, if anything I like it more. Take BMS for example. It is more 'complex' than AF or 1.08 SP or whichever version of Falcon I'd flown before. Things like Mavericks, or the datalink were easier to use before. Well, maybe not easier, perhaps more accurately they were more simple. But I was thinking about the comments in this thread, and I realized that what I have no patience for anymore is the dance we used to do to be a simmer. Everyone posting here is about the same age, give or take 50 years old. Most of you remember the way it was. If you were like me, you would defrag your hard drive before installing a new sim. There were command line switches that were more necessary than not. Ini's needed to be edited, mods were often copy/paste, this in to there, and this in to that. Configuring peripherals was often a nightmare. If you've been simming since the Win95 days, you've done all of this stuff. That is something I really don't have the patience or desire to do any longer. Luckily it's not really needed as much any more.
As an example there is a mod for Napoleon TW that I was interested in. I think it was La montée de l'Empire. Reading the install instructions I just lost interest in trying it. Shame, as I might have missed a good one. When I decided to get back in to Silent Hunter a few years back I looked at some of the best SH3 super mods and just couldn't be bothered. The install instructions were so complex that I moved on (ended up playing SH4 with TMO, Real Fleet Boat and Operation Monsun). Those SH mods were self-installers, so I used them. Plus, we have many more mod-manager type programs today than we had years ago.
So I guess my point is I am still fine with a complex sim, just not with a sim that is complex to get it going.
No, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!