That’s the rub though, you’ve got a vicious cycle: it costs $$$ to fire up development, a skilled team to put it together, and a complex engine to do everything you need it to do, all for an audience that isn’t interested in sims. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, in other words. Look at games like Fortnight and Overwatch, then ask yourself if the typical player of those games would be interested in DCS or XPlane.
We have to come to terms with the fact that traditional real world flying is going away. It’s no longer going to be a pilot in a jet, but UAVs, UCAVs, and the like. Someone born today will come of age when these start becoming the standard aircraft, not the unusual ones. They might find them interesting, but they might not; but they’re not likely to be interested in historical sims because it just wasn’t a part of their life experience and most younger people don’t have an interest in history.
It sucks but sims will remain a niche in the foreseeable future – no market conditions or improved economy will change that. I think at present time, we’ve probably got all the sims our little audience can bear.
Why well because a product needs to be seen and marketed to be sold and remain in the market as competitive and profitable.
Where or when you go and visit video game shops you don’t see a flight sims seller shelf but only AAA console products.
If there were more or a few on the shelf to entice the market with new Graphics Engines and a world globe and many air craft to fly in that would begin the cycle and renew the market.
So when was the last time you entered a video game store and actually have seen any DVD or USB Stick or other type of a sim for sale or at least advertised amongst AAA video games?
But again “NEW GRAPHICS ENGINES” with a full listing of features and on the shelf products at all video game retailers or properly marketed.
Just like it use to be…
AAA titles like EAGames spend billions on marketing and advertising sure there is cost involved but there are ways of doing things at low cost and keep a small place in the video game market.
There are many games/producers that don’t make the the top 10 if you like but keep developing, as put earlier in thread “if they can be bothered” and that is where it really sits.
Would you be willing to accept the same quantity of sims, with less graphics and less fidelity? Because that’s basically what you’re asking for in the above. Not to mention most were made in a time when licensing official likeness and names wasn’t a thing because games weren’t big enough for the lawyers to bother. Now that they’re raking in billions, well… Lawyers see dollar signs.
F-15 Strike Eagle II, for example. You had three weapons, virtually no flight dynamics, simple damage model, and worst of all, no rudder! On the plus side, you could probably run it on your phone easy. I dunno if most people would be happy with that game, though.
Or go forward a bit: DI’s Apache. Bit more advanced flight model, but not by much. Pretty simple weapons model, highly simplified systems, looks a bit better. Probably run on the phone, too. It’d be fun, I think – but would it make people used to DCS Ka-50 happy? Would they be willing to buy it? I think most would complain endlessly about how unrealistic it is and how it’s just an arcade game, not a sim.
Alright, so instead turn the clock forward a bit more: LOMAC! DCS’s predecessor. We basically have that with the FC level aircraft. How many people complain about how simple they are and how arcadey those aircraft are, plus how people should probably quit being afraid of the complex modules and just get those anyways? Oh, and guess what: the typical gamer thinks FC level aircraft are hard.
So basically, if you’re willing to step back from what we consider a sim and move more into games territory, you might have something. But I’m pretty sure there’s a lot like that already:
Honestly? Ray tracing doesn’t do it for me. I think we got to a certain level of graphical fidelity a few years ago and what we’re doing now is just pushing the limits. I’m cool with that, but I’m not expecting to see it mainstream for a few more years at best.
I’d like to see sims get into a level of fidelity while at the same time providing the fun factor. Think Strike Commander done with DCS’s current graphics and fidelity.
It is strange, but fhere is that HTR for example for helicopters in FSX.
I gues also A2A Sims using some external flight modeling.
But most of the 3party devs are just developing using the core engine of FSX or XP.
We can say that flight sim customers are prefering lower fidelity.
With this in mind it will be cool to see one of the older sims/games recreated in modern engine. Like the F15 SEII, how it will be received…
He’s got a fun project going, but near as I can tell, DCS doesn’t allow for custom UI, databases for tracking resources from mission to mission, an economic model, etc. that would be necessary for Strike Commander II. At least, not yet.
So basically the DCS lua engine by default doesn’t allow write operations against your OS. This is meant to protect you from malicious code embedded in missions installing viruses or what not.
You can disable this, and allow lua scripts to write data. This means you can take any data available to you via the scripting engine, and save that to a external file. Once you are able to save data outside of the mission environment in DCS, you can do whatever you gosh darned please with it. You can either have the mission itself do things with this data upon load, or you can write an external program that takes information and does whatever with it.
@MBot has an entire campaign engine based upon this concept.
Interesting, in which case DCS does potentially have the ability to such things if one is so inclined. All it would take is a bit of framework to support a native format on ED’s part.
Check out @MBot’s Dynamic Campaign Engine. It will track damage and inventory across missions, and it also requires that the sanitize code in the DCS luas is remmed out.
Our concern with the scripted solution is DCS’s own efforts to make a dynamic campaign. Persistence would be ideal, but would hate to see efforts become incompatible or overshadowed “shortly” down the road. We have chosen not to go too crazy with scripts for that reason, not that “mostly in the box” solutions have any guarantee.
So from a world standpoint, persistence will rely on mission goal scores to try to predict what occurred and then setting up static units for that branch to try to reflect what happened. Scoring and branching may allow some rogue-like elements, like unlocking a weapon, or a plane. Labor intensive for sure, but safer. Probably.
Playing on DCS strengths, it’s gonna have to be all about story, and the visceral joy of flying these things in high fidelity and also blowing ■■■■ up, ideally in VR. DCS does most of this so well the effort so far has been a joy. Even with a great dynamic campaign, there is a place for a scripted campaign, and there is no reason it can’t be fantastical, lighthearted and focus on the “fun”.
Anyhow, some random thoughts. Now back to mission 2 in Time Pilot, “Preventing ASS”. We figured out how to make a train stop in Normandy!
Impossible to tell how realistic those physics are, from a video, unfortunately.
The Canard deflections look too big. But maybe the visual model isn’t corresponding to the flight model?
Looks good. But I don’t think it looks any better than the sims we already got, like DCS, X-Plane or IL-2 GB.
All of which has believable flight physics.
But it’s good to see people are developing both graphical and physical simulations that may be transferred to fligtsims.
Today, we’re doing a special look at the Technology of Gaming, particularly a look at the capabilities of the Unreal Engine. I thought these were pretty revolutionary examples of what we’ll soon expect gaming to look like. Seriously, most of these are so realistic I am doubtful I could discern the difference between reality. I think, once developers get the opportunity to really learn to master these tools at their disposal, things will get interesting as what we think is possible in gaming will go out the window. What do you guys think? Which of these demonstrations do you see the most potential for? Do you think we’ll see this level of realism in AAA titles in 2016? Imagine this quality of graphics in VR! And as hardware gets cheaper, more people will have access to this kind of power. Anyway, special thanks to Ross Budgen, who’s music is featured in this tribute to the graphical capabilities of the Unreal Engine. If you liked it, you can check out more of his music at his channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQKG… Thanks for watching, and for more things in gaming and everything else futuristic that’s available today, subscribe to The Futurist!
Great for FPS, not so much for anything outside of corridor shooters. Note how they have to use static background images in a number of scenes (which is smart), but which notably doesn’t work too well for our genre. Outerra is more impressive for what it can do in my book, especially as it applies to sims.
I’m not really impressed by a lot of new eye candy features in modern game engines. What drew people into Undertale? Superhot? Limbo? It certainly wasn’t the graphics. People still play TF2, despite it being 11 years old now – same for IL2 '46, which is technically older still.
A certain level of graphics fidelity is only required to a point, then it becomes sprinkles on top of ice cream. Sure, it’s great, but you’re already swimming in sugar, so what’s a few more flakes on top of that? How about we add some more substance instead – something that makes it worth playing.
