Quote:
Originally Posted by constant
Flight sims don't do "more" over "other" games. AI is AI, Terrain is terrain, objects are objects, etc.
Consider Oblivion, or Fallout 3. Games with weather systems. (And stars of some sort..)
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I think that's rather the point - all of those games have benefited heavily from having an excess of RAM compared to more shallow games, which was what we were discussing. In any case, how do you think the physics systems of FPS games compare with contemporary flight-sims, generally? How much do you think the AI of such a game needs to consider compared to that of a flight-sim? The AI in Oblivion and Fallout 3 is an absolute joke, and the promise of Radiant AI never came about, the AI in Oblivion and Fallout from the player's point of view is exactly the same as that of Morrowind - essentially "start combat if you steal my stuff, hit me or I hate you enough and have a high enough aggression number, run for help if you hurt me too much" - with the exception that people are to be found in different locations at different times of day and that they can pick up weapons from the floor if they feel like it.
I don't really see what weather systems have to do with it, either. The weather system in Oblivion and Fallout is simple (I don't know how much modding you've done of those two games), all that happens is that each exterior cell in the overall game grid is assigned to a region, and that region has a particular percentage chance of each weather type assigned happening when the weather changes every few hours after what amounts to a dice roll that chooses the weather. It's not really a weather system as such.
As for stars, it's simply a series of domes with different textures applied with varying transparency that rotate depending upon the season/time of day/etc. No atmospheric modelling as we see in the screenshots Oleg showed of the Stuka at various times of day.
The point is, both these games needed huge amounts of RAM and powerful CPUs to run well at high settings at release, even with such simple AI and weather systems and so on. Comparing flight-sims to FPSes, even in Il-2 we require some fairly complicated modeling of aerodynamics and ballistics occurring essentially non-stop (although realism in ballistics is usually attempted in FPSes nowadays, it doesn't have to take such account of factors as relative wind), we need to have an AI that can effectively fly an aircraft without a) exceeding critical angles of attack constantly b) flying past the physical limits of the pilot (the AI are limited to 4G maneuvers, I think) and c) that understands how to effectively maneuver to a good firing solution given the capabilities of the aircraft it's flying and the position and capabilities of the opponent. Compare this to the average 2010 FPS AI and we're already talking about a more demanding AI in the 2005 4.01 incarnation of Il-2, never mind SoW. And crucially, given the focus of the next game on the Battle of Britain, Oleg and team are almost certainly aiming to have the game running reasonably on medium settings with a lot of aircraft on screen at once, after all the Battle of Britain was primarily about small groups of fighters intercepting large groups of bombers and fighters. How many FPSes do you see with more than a handful of people on-screen at once nowadays? The only FPS games that approach flight-sims in terms of difficulty of implementation would be tactical shooters (lots of fairly complicated decision-making AI and a basic physics engine), and how many of those often have lots of people on the screen? Only one that I can think of, ARMA 2, and that devours PCs even on medium settings.
So yeah, no wonder there are only a few flight-sim developers left, and thank God they have the dedication to work within such a difficult genre.
04-18-2010, 09:38 PM
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