Hardware, software and the future of flight combat sims.

[Skoshi Tiger]

Damn! I just spent half an hour crafting a beautifully worded response to this topic - distilling my thirty years experiences in computing, software development and flight simming and - my bloody computer turned itself off!!! **&^%$* %%^&&% $#^%%^ - Heres the short version

One of the problems is that although our hardware is still improving and processor power is increasing and following the old moores law, we haven't developed ways of harnessing that power.

All the major CPU and GPU platforms have plateaued in terms of clock rate and that increase in power is being increased in terms of number of processors Cores or texture units or whatever you wan't to call them.

To take advantage of that power the programs need to be multi threaded and contain tasks that can be solved using parallel processing, Graphics cards work good using this approach. Other areas of programming the sims are not so good.

In a recent interview at Sim HQ Albert Zhiltsov, one of lead ROF development people, was talking about the complexity of modern fligh sims and said

I am an optimist. I believe that right now — somewhere in the doorway of a university or an office — a young man leaves with a solid idea to make a project better than Rise of Flight. But, as we said earlier — it will be harder for him to do than it was for us, because the speed of life will increase even more and financial crises will put into question all existing business models again and again. James Cameron dove to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, using his own funds. Perhaps this young man will find an opportunity to test his strength; I wish him luck and will be happy to share my experience with him. I am an optimist.

Hopefully the person Albert was talking about will have the idea about making the program scalable accross miltiple cores (to realise that improvement in performance), be able to create a demonstator as proof of concept and will then be snapped up by one of the bigger development houses rather than out lay the costs from his own funds.

The scary thing is is that any development needs to be spending part of their profits on
research and development or the life of their product will be limited. Oleg knew this and this approach showed it through out the life of the Il2 series up until present. Unfortunately he forgot that they do have to make an actual profit and they couldn't get it together before funds ran out and COD development came to a crashing halt.

My biggest fear is that the new il2 sim will go the other way and will not get that fundimental development to the core of the product and the development will be focused on content. The problem with this approach is that when something does arive that is fundimentally better it will be too late to catch up.

To fund this development a steady stream of income is required. It shows how distructive the whinning, and snide remarks can be to these products.