Quote:
Originally Posted by Oleg Maddox
Can't say you right now. We put it in the final development.
As for my personal opinion - FF doesn't reflect real things. No one existed. And in realistic flight sim really FF is more bad then the good feature comparing to real life.
So the work over FF is the very secondary in our plan. This should be important for totally arcade game.
In the past I tried to communicate with all manufactures of FF joysticks to make some standard in forces, that would reflect more realistic things... Really only Trustmaster and partially Saitek were listening me in the past.
Hope with BoB this communication will be again up and probably we may set the stadards in future. But untill that time to spend a lot of time for FF I personally very dislike.
This should be done by some third party - special driver for any FF joy.
Manufactures should follow that standard (non MS SDK code, that we were using in the past with Il-2). Should be tunable special separate tool not in the sim, only external.
I can't spend right now time to explain all my thoughts about this issue.
You should talk to real pilots asking their opinion about joys with FF.
Probably they will say the same... also they would say that Joystick do not replace real control column 100% in feel of aircraft control.
With some of manufactures we had in the past the speech about what should be done for realistic control column useful in flight sims... But the price would be really more higher... and effect on the market (to sell it) will be not so successfull.
However I have several good ideas and drawings how to make it with more or less commercial success. But for this - SoW should be on a horse...
|
Agree that there should be standards. Third party tweaking - hmm. Sure, why not. It can allow specialists, or the manufacturers themselves, to tweak things to suit their hardware. Users too. Instead of having to rely on game developers to work with specialized hardware OR having 'one size fits all' force feedback which is not ideal either.
I have a personal story that I want to relay regarding the topic of force feedback. I like racing simulators, and racing around a bit in real life as well (especially in the past). The force feedback wheels used to be very crappy. The racing sims did not use even that old hardware well either. Back then, maybe I thought a bit like you, that it just isn't close enough to a real car and is even worse in many ways. But then comes some better simulators using hardware, and then the Logitech G25. It completely changed things. I have it now and it really turned force feedback from something clumsy and badly flawed into the most realistic option (for consumer price range).
Flight sims are the same now (SoW not yet released) with force feedback as 9 years ago. Maybe even worse. Manufacturers have not done anything for force feedback sticks over this whole time, except some optimizations (quieter, smaller etc). Only Logitech's G940 which just came out advanced the hardware noticably. But the market is empty of flight sims that use the hardware.
And think about what you said: you asked me to ask pilots what they think of force feedback joysticks with sims in the year 2001, not what it can be with existing hardware. If I ask racers what they thought of FF wheels with sims from the year 2001 they would also say it is horrible compared to reality. It is not a sound argument against force feedback for flight sims. You have such an innovative approach; I think you might have overlooked how the new hardware can be used, dismissing it based on how it was like in the year 2001.
EDIT: Maybe I was a bit unfair. You did point out that you cannot relay all thoughts on it, and that you have tried to make the manufacturers more responsible for allowing better force feedback programming (not just the hardware itself in the past) etc. I hope SoW will bring something new with FF to the market because that sort of thing is needed to get FF advancing. Only having hardware, or only software without hardware, does not bring it forward well.