Interestingly enough, at work the brass spent about $100K for a top of the line driving simulator. It used a real CVPI dash, gauges, etc. We had proprietary numbers from Ford for the simulator to run with, all the bells and whistles except full motion. Sucker didn’t feel one inch like driving a real car, I’ve had a better sense of motion and speed some in arcade games, compared to a purpose built simulator the most of us would drool over.
Also for the record, my first girlfriend still looks pretty dang good. One of the many reason’s we’re closing on twenty years of marriage (with a LOOOOONG period of dating prior to that).
For me, the late 90s sims hit the sweet spot of realism vs fun. When the new century rolled around, we had a collapse of the market (and the makers) combined with the new divergence in types of sims. You had the clear divide between study and survey beginning with nothing left in the middle.
Of course, in the 90s the two weren’t as far apart to begin with.
But I would agree the market has fragmented into the people who want a combat flight sim and those who want a combat flight sim. Getting satisfaction like schurem mentions is clearly the latter, and that’s never been me, I’ve always been the former. I couldn’t stand MSFS or P3D or any of those for a second.
The ideal to me would be a survey sim like FC but with dozens of planes and then the option to pay more for study versions of the planes you really like.
Exactly. That is why I feel many (some?) sim pilots might be good at flying certain modules, but rarely would any of them actually be proficient. They are good at flying a deep sim in a simulation, but most of them don’t know Vyse or Vmca or what the hydraulic limitations are, or what PSI the nose and main wheels need to be at. Some want realism, but I don’t think anyone really wants realism.
And it really is all relative. I’m currently reviewing an add-on for a sim that I’m pretty intimately familiar with. I’m finding all kinds of things wrong with it. But it is ONLY because I’ve flown the type (or pretty close to the type) for 23 years. In reviewing it, I’m trying to keep it in perspective. When I review a Harrier, or a Su-25, or an Airbus A320, I don’t have any experience to fall back on. With those reviews, it often comes down to my feeling that it is right rather than whether it truly is. But reviewing planes that I’m current in has opened my eyes that I’m kind of giving a pass to the other planes because I can’t be SURE and probably couldn’t even recognize that something isn’t operating according to its real world counterpart unless I took an entire initial course in it.
Anyway - I agree. The ABRIS and CDU are great examples of depth of avionics that most users will only graze over. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth modeling them. Or learning them and becoming as proficient as you can. And believe it or not, it IS possible to be a little bit of all these types of simmer. I love playing SF2. And I love spending five or six minutes bringing the Ka-50 to life. And I love spending 20 minutes bringing an Airbus to life. I can have a great time flying a non-combat flight over a course of two weeks and 15,000 miles (Christmas Island woo!) in realistic weather. I can have a great time flying a ten minute mission in SF2 where I’m the hero and blow up two SA-2 sites.
I’ve posted it before though - my list of DCS modules that I’ve bought and not flown (and FSX and P3D) is pretty long. Not because of lack of desire…it’s just that life and work thing. I’m so psyched that I have so many choices though. And I’m not too sympathetic for people who can’t find something they like to do in some sim of their choice out there. Rise of Flight, IL-2, SF2, DCS, Falcon 4, FSX, P3D, X-Plane, Aerofly, etc…etc… If you are a simmer and you can’t find something that suits you, it is purely YOUR fault at this point.
Personally, I think you nailed the mix of complexity and fun in that module. And the you guys built an insanely fun campaign to use it with…so job well done!
Yeah - I was pretty enthused about the vision of CAP 2 because I thought the campaign and gameplay would really make the game interesting. They are still working at it (hopefully)…because I think what they were shooting for was looking good. I just wonder if the scope of it might be too big for such a small team. We’ll see…
Yeah, same here. I think he got a bit drawn into the weeds of making a custom terrain engine (a sim programmers occupation hazard it seems) and VR support. Which (especially the latter) is appreciated and still progress, it does mean some of the exciting campaign stuff seems to have slipped way down his todo lists for too long.
Yeah. Hopefully he’s independently wealthy and doesn’t need this project to make ends meet. I hope he can build something that he has always wanted to build. I’m certainly rooting for him!
I’m not antsy about CAP 2…yet. Ed seems to be all alone over there doing his thing and I don’t see DCS users demanding he do things their way. I presumed they weren’t going to buy it to begin with.
Agreed. I hope they don’t discover CAP 2 and decide to run Ed out of town because the thrust ITT is 30 degrees low or that the canopy bow is 2cm too narrow.
Beach, how is this constructive? So far in this thread I’ve read people complain DCS isn’t like other sims. I’ve read people psycho-analyze simmers who favor more complexity. I’ve not really seen the DCS crowd show up and brow beat people about how other sims are too simple and people are misguided for liking them.
If we’re going to arbitrarily divide up the combat flight sim catalog and start parceling out games based on their complexity or lack there of.
The simple camp has
FC3
IL2: BoX
IL2
War Thunder
SF2
CAP2
The Jane’s catalog
RoF
(I’m not going to spend all night continuing)
There are libraries of sims with simplistic controls to choose from, why is it suddenly the case that when there’s finally a flight sim that catering to my demographic, it needs to be dumbed down?
I’m not sure I understand where you’re going with your post, @near_blind, but let me just add my take on the division…
Complexity is a relative entity.
What one person consider complex, may be easy to another.
Take F4 and RoF, from your list.
Is F4 really the more complex sim? I guess most people would agree. But, going from F4, with radar, guided weapons, fly by wire and a huge jet engine, to RoF with an underpowered rotary that will flick in a blink of an eye, and machineguns with iron sights, can be quite a challenge. As a sim, RoF isn’t necessarily any less complex, it just simulates less complex machinery.
The way I read this thread is that the view on complexity is a individual thing.
There are all sorts of flightsimmers and there’s something for everyone.
Uh, haven’t we seen all sides represented here? Heck, haven’t * I * stated I’m the multi-faceted simmer that likes pretty much all sims?
Oh yeah, I did.
I didn’t see anyone saying that. I think you saw some people saying it would be nice if ED did some mid-level, FC3 type airplanes. I didn’t see anyone saying they shouldn’t make the F/A-18 for you US?
And to specifically answer your question re: CAP 2. Why would I be worried about that? Because it happens. The sim community are their own worst enemy sometimes. And sometimes developers leave because they get fed up with it. For what? So someone can be right that the ITT is off or that the HUD symbology uses a slightly wrong font? But ten thousand other things are done right. I’ve seen federal cases brought against ED because of some issues that have remained in the A-10C after all these years. Meanwhile, my company pays $9,000 a year for me to go sit in a full size, full motion flight sim box that costs tens of millions of dollars, and there are probably significantly more things in that that don’t match up to the reality of the world. And you might not have seen the worst of it. While critics of combat flight sims can be pretty vociferous, you should see how worked up the FSX/P3D/X-Plane crowd can get worked up over things that don’t quite work right in their software.
