Desireable level of realism in a comabt flightsim?

[ElAurens]

Originally Posted by Sutts

How could improving systems modelling possibly reduce fidelity?? Your arguments are getting pretty poor. I think you need to get that big chip off your shoulder mate.

Ever flown FSX?

I have, and it's terrible. Poor terrain meshes, no FMs to speak of, no damage or collision modeling. Why? Because to have a total world modeled for folks who want to fly across the Atlantic in thier Boeing or Air Bus, and have all the ATC functions, and still have it playable on a home PC, something has to give, and that something is the immersive realism of our air combat sim.

But this discussion is rather pointless now anyway, as any decisions about how systems modeling are to be done were taken long ago. The way the sim will be is already set in stone.

We just have to see what we get.

[Sutts]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Ever flown FSX?

I have, and it's terrible. Poor terrain meshes, no FMs to speak of, no damage or collision modeling. Why? Because to have a total world modeled for folks who want to fly across the Atlantic in thier Boeing or Air Bus, and have all the ATC functions, and still have it playable on a home PC, something has to give, and that something is the immersive realism of our air combat sim.

But this discussion is rather pointless now anyway, as any decisions about how systems modeling are to be done were taken long ago. The way the sim will be is already set in stone.

We just have to see what we get.

I have flown FSX and have to agree that the FM and DM suck compared to IL2. I'm not sure if this is a resource issue or plain poor programming on Microsoft's part though.

I'm a programmer by trade and what I do know is that things like the line of sight calculations required in the modelling of radar and preventing the AI from seeing through clouds have a far greater hit on resources than enabling a few simple switches - a battery isolator can either be on or off, the strokes on a fuel primer would only be checked when the starter switch is pressed etc. A clickable cockpit may have a hit but that is already built into the engine from what Oleg tells us.

I also agree that it is unlikely that BOB will change much whatever we ask for here. What I'm sure of though is that Oleg will deliver the flexibility to allow for what we want in future releases - either from 1C or third parties and I'm quite happy to wait.

[ElAurens]

Originally Posted by Sutts

What I'm sure of though is that Oleg will deliver the flexibility to allow for what we want in future releases - either from 1C or third parties and I'm quite happy to wait.

No argument about that here. The new sim promises to have a very flexible and adaptive engine, and that is a good thing for all of us.

[Antoninus]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Ever flown FSX?

I have, and it's terrible. Poor terrain meshes, no FMs to speak of, no damage or collision modeling. Why? Because to have a total world modeled for folks who want to fly across the Atlantic in thier Boeing or Air Bus, and have all the ATC functions, and still have it playable on a home PC, something has to give, and that something is the immersive realism of our air combat sim.

But this discussion is rather pointless now anyway, as any decisions about how systems modeling are to be done were taken long ago. The way the sim will be is already set in stone.

We just have to see what we get.

Most of the in depth systems modelling was done by 3rd party add on makers and is not part of the default aircraft. You can't make it responsible for the well known defects of FSX. In many ways MSFS is just like an operating system for add ons and it looks like SOW will show this flexibility too. It would be the ultimate flight sim for me. Especially the realistic engine simulation found the latest A2A simulation planes like the P-47 was something I never expected to see in MSFS and it came without any significant performance decrease.

Also FSX is a bad example to explore what can be achieved with modern hardware. Technically it looked already outdated when released. Multicore and DX10 support were only added as an afterthought with Service Pack 1 and 2, the latter only emerged as a buggy "preview" mode. It completly relies on high GHzs numbers and barely uses the capabilties of modern graphic cards.
At least the last few versions of MS Flight Simulator were built ontop of each other. They had a great amount of legacy code and rather provided downward compatibility for old add ons than focusing on new technology. I am glad that Oleg started SOW from scratch. Just read what Gibbage (who worked for MSFS developer Aces before the Studio was closed) has said about their code in another forum:

Originally Posted by Gibbage

I can assure you, they will NEVER release the source code. First, the code is MASSIVE!!! Its the culmination of over 10 years in flight sim programming. It surpasses Windows Vista in size of its code. Also, its size is only rivled by its complexity. When Aces closed, its office employed 150 people, and not one of them knew everything about the engine. I even heard 10+ year vets saying "wow, I didnt know it could do that!" when talking about features. If it did happen, 3rd party dev's would need years to even disect it, and that cost's money.

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...l=1#post251217

However the terrain mesh is anything but bad. FSX can dispaly terrain meshes with a 1m resolution. Maybe out of the box in some regions.BY default you only have high resolution (76 m) mesh for europe, north america and few other places. But there the mesh is one of the elements of the landscape done better than in any other flight sim I'Ve seen before. Even with the horrible default landclass, that in no way resambles vegetation and settlements in central europe, I was instantly capable to orientate myself by terrain mesh alone. Most of these problems can be fixed by using 3rd party add ons.