I saw make a new engine. We don't really need two WWI sims with the Il-2 code (Rise of Flight). That game pisses me off enough.
Keep in mine that a few of the old "aces" games were being remade then canceled. We will see how far this one goes with delight.
Minor correction for clarity's sake. RoF doesn't use IL2 code, they said they would when they initially announced the project but decided to use a new engine later.
Similarly, when i referred to Oleg's new engine i meant the one that is going to be used in Storm of War:Battle of Britain, his next line of flight sims. According to him, the game was 80% complete as of his last simHQ interview (during the summer or spring i think?) and what they have left is to model the ships and various other secondary things. So, if this is true the SoW engine is complete and maybe it would be possible for another developer to license it for use in a sim of his own.
Anyway, it would be awesome to have a new Red Baron title running on an up to date engine.
I also like the idea proposed by Catfish about a "wind tunnel" utility and i've been advocating it from time to time on Oleg's official forums.
Every FM out there is an approximation of the real thing, because our PCs are simply not powerful enough to run everything at 100% realism. I bet we could simulate true to life dynamics, but not with the graphics, sound and other things happening around you that we are used to seeing in a flight sim. Maybe if we relegated the horizon to a single line and our flyable to a cross-shaped vector graphic it would work, but it would be 21st century flight dynamics modelling with 1980s graphics. So, there need to be some shortcuts taken.
Now, let's imagine we have a new plane creation software suite. First, the 3D modellers design a new flyable whichever way they want (3D studio and so on). Then, the FM guys import it into this software suite, run the wind tunnel tool and let it crunch numbers for a few hours or even days. Heck, if it can run in network mode and use 10 PCs instead of just one then it would be even better (think distributed computing a la Seti@home for flight sims).
This utility would be as close as it gets to real aerodynamic modelling, basing it's computations on the shape, size, wheight, wheight distribution and horsepower for a given airframe, based on the imported 3D model and maybe even other properties of the materials used. For example, you could have a materials toolset, a database of properties for materials commonly used in aircraft construction, from wood and linen to aluminum and steel. This could be used to calculate the DM as well as wheight and wheight distribution for the FM. Marking different areas and objects in the 3D model with different flags, you could assign those preset properties to them and tell your software that for example, these spars on your Hurricane are made of metal, but the covering is fabric and so on, letting it calculate the important bits.
So, after a week of having a dozen i7 based PCs working on an network crunching numbers, we would now have an almost true to life virtual copy of the airframe in question. One that we can't use in any flight sim because it will grind everything to a halt that is. This is the really nifty bit, our little software suite would come equiped with one more final function, one to approximate and extract the final simulated FM and DM from the real one. Then, you could import those parameters into the sim and have an aircraft that flies as close as possible to the real thing, limited only by the engine's capabilities.
It would be a lot of work to code something like this and i guess we won't see this for years to come, but with the longevity that comes from modding flight sims, some developers have started talking about such prospects in the future. Instead of doing manual calculations, approximations and coding the FM/DM, they would have to code such a tool once and let it do the dirty work. From that point on, people could create a flyable plane per week if they knew the materials used in its construction, engine rated power and had an accurate 3D model of it. Well, we can dream, can't we?