S! All!

I posted this on the editorial discussion on the General Flight Sim thread. This is a better place for it though and it is just as topical here as it is there! So forgive my re-posting it here!!

S! All!

There are some great ideas on this thread. A number of people have made great posts. None of them however really touch on what I think is wrong with this genre.

There is an idea floating around out there that flight sims don't sell well. I disagree. There is a lot of empirical evidence that flight sims don't sell well, but there hasn't been much discussion as to why they aren't selling as well as they did years ago. Have gamers changed that much? I don't think they have. I think the concept of combat flight simulations is just as viable today as it ever was. There is a romanticism involved with flight that people feel almost universally. Simulated combat is fun - be it laser tag, paint balls, or computer simulations. Add the romanticism of flight to the fun of simulated combat, and you should have something easy to sell.

I don't think there is anything making flight simulations inherently less popular. What I think is happening is that we look at flight simulations from such a grainular perspective - scrutinizing the flight model, the damage model, the view structure, etc. etc. etc. - that we forget about the most critical element: does it do a good job of simulating air combat?

Read a book about air combat. Read Adolf Galland's 'The First and the Last' or Richtofen's 'The Red Baron.' Hear from the actual participants what aerial combat was like. Then fly and see if you get the same feeling they discuss in their books.

What is aerial combat about? It is about dogfighting. That's it, folks! And guess what? Dogfighting is FUN! Make a game that centers on the dogfight and you'll make something you can sell. Everything else is secondary. Get the dogfight right and you'll have a great game engine to build around. If you want it to be fun then you build the simulation around the game engine rather than the other way around. The dogfight is 'the game' and simulations need to address that fact.

In all of my readings, one of the things I've found is that once a pilot sees another pilot they can pretty easily keep track of where they are throughout the combat. I don't remember Galland talking about flying past Bader and then wondering where Bader went. I remember reading things like "I went into a half-loop while my opponent circled around below me" and things like that. REAL pilots fought like the dogfight was a big chess game. The victor was usually the one who better employed their aircraft. That usually means starting with an advantage, but really it means they outflew their opponents before and/or after the merge.

But we don't have that. We manage our view systems instead of managing our energy. We manage our engines instead of our dogfights.

In the Red Baron 3D days we used to talk on these forums about the dynamics of a dogfight. How do you gain an angles advantage or get an energy advantage on an opponent? How do you turn-the-tables on an opponent who has an advantage over you? What are the strengths of your aircraft and how can you best employ your aircraft against different enemy aircraft? What are the different parts of a dogfight, how to you recognize what part of it you are in, and how do you react to that information? These are the things we should be talking about because these are the things that should help us win! But these are NOT the things we talk about.

In the quest for 'realism' we have defined settings that are neither realistic nor fun. Rather they are hard. Hard for realism's sake is a good thing. Hard for 'hard's sake' is just stupid!

People talk about having easier settings for newer pilots. I agree, but I think that misses the point somewhat also. Nobody really wants to fly at easier settings. Everyone wants to fly at the harder settings. Those who fly at easier settings generally do so with the expectation of getting better and increasing the difficulty with the eventual hope of cranking it all the way up.

That makes a big push toward the hardest settings. This is particularly true online, which IMHO is where the real fun is.

And someone should mention that you shouldn't need an advanced flight degree to figure out what difficulty settings or joystick settings to use!

Focus on making the game feel real. If that means doing some things that are not entirely 'realistic' then do it. It is the feeling that matters. Who cares if real pilots had external views? They didn't have computer monitors either. What should matter is making a view system that captures the experience of aerial combat. If Chuck Yeager could maintain SA in a real P-51, then Chuck Yeager should be able to maintain similar SA in a simulation.

Anyway, that's my point. I see a number of other great points and I don't want to detract from those, but I don't want what I think is the centerpiece of this whole thing to get forgotten either...