S! All!

The idea that sprang the line of thought about a game using human players as AI in an otherwise 'offline' game is in the following thread:

http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=100;t=000197

Lexx - this is not a 'sinister' thought. I don't know why you are against doing something like this in a flight simulation. Nobody would force you to buy the sim, and nobody would force other developers to follow a similar model. There is the possibility that if this idea works as well as I think it would then a similar model might be used by others. That is how it works: someone has an idea and they follow it. If the idea works, then others borrow from the idea and improve upon it. Some people call that 'progress.'

If I get to build that sim and I make a little money for a publisher in the process, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. A solvent marketing model for the flight simulation world might be considered a GOOD thing by many of the people here.

I'm not going to re-post that entire thread here - particularly when the specific sim idea expressed in that thread is outside the scope of this conversation - but if someone wants more information on how I envision it working, they are welcome to read that thread.

The general concept I exhibit in that thread - the concept of moving toward using other human pilots rather than AI - is sound. Yes, it would require an Internet connection. But who said it would require some central server? The game I want to build would have a central server, but that doesn't mean someone else couldn't do it differently. Someone else could take a similar concept and release the server software or build the server software into the game. I could see doing this in a peer-to-peer network, or over a LAN, or over any of a number of different models. It doesn't have to be 'scary' like Lexx_Luther is trying to make it sound.

But then that gets back to some of the themes in my original post on THIS thread - we have defined ourselves into a box. Anyone who tries to innovate and get the flight sim genre out of that box gets slammed by negativity. And that's not the fault of the developers, but rather of the community as a whole.