Well, yes. A lot of this is about opinions and feelings. Of course it gets personal. But that’s ok. As long as I can have my opinions and feel what I feel, and you can do the same.
And that’s your opinion.
We’ve had this discussion before, here at the forum.
What is realism…?
Do you want to simulate flying a real aircraft in a real war, going through every little thing a real pilot does/did?
Or is it possible to say that it’s ok to use simplified systems, rudder assist and even labels, because you’re 60 years old and want to simulate being 20, with 20/20 vision, having years of government funded flight training…?
Realism means different things for different people.
In the end you’re just a gamer with a PC…
Yes! Most sims had it, particularly WWWII sims. My guess would be the strikefighters series as being the ‘last’ sim in general to feature it.
I believe it was the original IL2 that kind of did away with it and just used time acceleration. In the Pacific add-on I remember they tried introducing some kind of ‘advanced’ skip to the next waypoint option, but it didn’t really work (and was kind of bizarre, I think your whole screen went black and there was a tiny clock in the bottom right corner?)
And that’s funny, for me it’s the opposite - in IL2BOX the time accel barely works past x4, in DCS it can go pretty high but god forbid I so much as twitch while holding the joystick I’m all over the sky.
I think time acceleration in general is only tolerable if the sim has some kind of rudimentary autopilot, and the time acceleration actually works at speeds like x16. Right now I don’t think anything we have fits that bill.
The more I fly sims, the more I find myself wanting this. I guess deep down, I subconsciously want to answer the question: Could I have done the job of a Viggen pilot facing off against the soviets in 1983? Could I fly a Hornet off the deck of a carrier in driving rain, perform the mission and fly a case III recovery at night successfully?
Obviously flying DCS will never answer those questions, because in the end no matter how ‘realistic’ it gets, it’s still just a game. And that’s fine, I don’t have to live with the consequences and stress of actually living those careers/lifestyles. I don’t want to do that, I just want the ‘fun’ part!
Those are awesome screens! I own that campaign, but haven’t cracked it open yet. Don’t think I’m being snarky at all, honest question: How are your framerates in those scenarios, with that many AI aircraft?
IL2:GB seems to be very smooth no matter what is going on (and CLoD as well). DCS for me (i7-7700K, desperately need to upgrade, but do have a 3080 card) seems very sensitive to the number of moving parts a scenario has. Raven One and Persian Lion have both run very well so far, but Reflected’s Paradise Lost had some moments around Andersen AFB that really crawled (in VR).
Wierd! I used time acceleration quite a bit in various campaigns in IL2 and had no complaints. Maybe it has to do with hardware, my processor is kinda marginal for DCS VR. It can do 2x-4x happily, but beyond turns into a slideshow and I worry about the game crashing. Also, the lack of an autopilot is definitely a dicey proposition.
If time-skipping is too much technical effort, I’d just be happy to have a save function. I know you can save a replay track, time accelerate to a point you want to resume, and take control, but that’s clunky, and often just doesn’t work. One example is in the Hornet, the replay will never remove the wheel chocks, meaning you never move.
I hate using labels, even the subdued dot option we have now, but find myself having to in VR. That’s one thing Falcon BMS really gets right, is spotting. The smart scaling they have works really really well, and is realistic in terms of what I can make out in the air in real life. I really wish ED would implement a similar system in DCS. Right now when I’m a few miles away from the S-3 tanker, I can hardly tell what kind of airplane it is.
Precisely. DCS may be simulating all these things very well, but we’re still far from the real thing. So who am I to tell others what is realistic or not, for them? They may not even have real life flight training, but they want to play the game as if they do. They want a taste of combat, without fear of life and limb and within the allotted spare timeframe of a normal domestic family man.
So, when I consider which sim is the most realistic, I need to know, for who?
Yes I wish that smart scaling thing that was going in DCS for a little bit had worked out. I really liked it, actually felt like I knew what was going on around me (well, mostly) without having to use modded labels.
Well said. I’d be fine with expanded difficulty options in the sim, even if it meant flying with a wingman who’s using a game flight model as long as I can use a sim mode for me. I don’t care at all how others do it, aside from what they do (teamwork, coordination and playing friendly), and if allowing simplified systems options to make it more accessible for everyone, I’m all for it. No elitism here!
Fine on my 3080 equipped rig, but Reflected also has an F10 option to reduce the size of the formation for those with lesser performance. The other thing to be aware of, is when they all drop their bombs at once. For about 5 seconds you get a slide show, then it returns back to normal. It helps if you haven’t followed the buffs all the way to the target, which I need no invitation due to the heavy flak.
I found that experience to be quite different in multiplayer. Whenever I would try to have a formation of 8 or more player-flown bombers flying together, the framerate would dip significantly, making it almost unplayable. Such issues are kind of what made me stop flying bombers operations in Il-2 BoX.
I say often here that we live in the best of times. But I mean that only in regard to near-generation stuff. For WWII, the times are mixed at best for me. I still, after all these years, remember individual flights on the Warbirds of Prey and Spits v 109s servers in IL2:1946. At the peak of both servers and Hyperlobby (remember that?) there would easily be 50+ pilots including a fair number of Japanese players, especially when Pacific maps were in rotation. Dozens of maps were available—from the fjords of Norway to the jungles of Guadalcanal. The environments lacked anything close to today’s realism, but the experience felt more real somehow. And honestly, I can’t really tell a huge difference in flight characteristics between IL2 circa 2008 and IL2 now. It’s not that they haven’t improved. Certainly they have. But the difference between both sims and reality (I think) overshadows the far more subtle differences between the sims themselves.
I am not young anymore. But mine are not just the reminiscences of middle age. Accurate simulation is by itself not enough. There must be a reason to show up: be it friends, mission variety, or decent chance of success at finding something to shoot or bomb.
I havn’t tried BNBoB yet, but I have done the Big Show campaign on my modest VR rig. Turning off wake turbulence (huge FPS-killer with the bombers) and using the F10 option to reduce unit numbers helps, but things will still get choppy when the action gets hot sometimes. The Rouen mission in particular went straight PowerPoint when all the bombs impacted.
