[MikkOwl]

I must say though WOP and ROF give the two best feelings of actual flight out of any other sim, I have played. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is that does this for me, but I think its a combination of different things. I'm really impressed with WOP's shadow system, Its very good in my opinion, maybe one of the best I have seen.

Flight sims are few and far between, so them having the latest goodies is a rare occurance. No doubt they set up the engine with a load of effects quite nicely for the most part. Since most of us never flew anything at home with graphics like this, it is no surprise we are so impressed. And let me see if the reasons you think it feels 'real' is the same as I do, especially compared to, for example, IL-2:

- Foremost, the graphical effects and details. The cockpit windows look more stained around the edges of the frames/pillars and there area more shaders at work. Long distance rendering with very well defined atmospheric effects, lots of planes visilbe at the same time, high rendering quality and decent speed doing it, shadows being cast by aircraft parts into the cockpit, higher quality textures of own plane when looking out from cockpit, neat reflective/bump mapping effects. In general, a lot of activity, the world is filled with things going on visibly and aurally.

- Specific immersive additions: The pilot being heard breathing in a strained way when pulling G's, the G-forces acting on the pilot's head being VERY well tweaked (even without headtracking - a real human head is dampened from G-forces and vibrations in a good way due to the neck and it's muscles, giving a bit of a delayed smoothed movement), all changes in field of view (FOV, zoom) take place smoothly without sudden jerky changes, the airframe and view really starts vibrating when going fast, as well as having high throttle setting (got this while trying to catch up with He-111 bombers, tried to shoot like that too, not easy).

- Perhaps the music for some. It's always there. I turned it off however.

Add it all together and for your eyes and ears, in many ways, it fools you better than the rest. At the same time, there are things which are not there correctly and these break the immersion (depending on the person). Each time I started that Battle of Berlin mission in the La-7, the first few seconds when it flows smoothly and I just look around (trackIR) it is a monumental sight, that things can look 'that good and convincing'.

Here is a couple of videos of real flights, one modern and one from WWII. which sims out there looks like this real footage the most ?
Wop or others ? I'd say this footage is a example of what the Wop Dev's where watching & trying to match. The colors are just about a perfect match.

The footage there is grainy or shot with a not so well set up camera, and neither are a good representation of how things look like in reality. For example, in the Stuka flight, the camera often adjusted its exposure to match the bright sky, and not the (far far darker) landscape, leading to the landscape looking much darker, even underexposed, compared to how it should be (on a side note, I was taken by how similar it looked to looking around with TrackIR, haha, headmounted cam or something). The WW2 era footage (which I have seen many times before ) is discolored and of poor quality.

Either way, I don't think any sim matches those clips much. The vibrations from engine and explosions certainly lend themselves more to Wings of Prey, while the colors of the stuka clip (pretty real, at least) are pretty similar to FSX (micorsoft combat simulator).

the video's I've seen for WOP or even IL2 for that matter, do not match what I saw out the window of the pipers and cessna's I got my licence in.

But like anything, little step's forward and we will get there in the end. It will be a while till we get holo-decks to fly our flight sims in!

How about microsoft Flight simulator + FSX?
Holo decks... I want. But then I'd move in there and not want to leave.