Friday 2010-12-17 Dev. update and Discussion

Originally Posted by tourmaline

It's a game, if you want realism, fly the real thing.

By the way, every fryday there is something new to whine about, i am quite sure Oleg and team will do their best to make it as realistic as possible but not losing to much fps ingame. You want to be able to fly the darn thing, are you? Ultrarealistic will also mean huge hit on pc!
Oleg allready said that ultrarealistic is not for the moment, otherwise no current pc is able to run this game!

Exactly! There is a reason why actual flight simulators (military and commercial) use what are essentially supercomputers (20 core+ systems).

One reason is rendering the sim onto a few displays (sometimes almost 360 degrees) and another is the colossal number crunching dedicated to ultra-realistic flight modeling, flight systems, damage modeling, and a host of other things that you don't have the time or resources to put into a game, which is what SOW is.

They might call this a flight sim, but no matter which way you cut it, it's sill a game meant to generate sales and revenue. Real sims are designed to do neither, they are commissioned by a government body or a commercial sector and made with little thought put towards hardware requirement, money, or fun-factor. The only thing they really have in common with SOW and other flight sims with regards to development might be "development time" but in a lot of cases they're being made at the same time the actual aircraft is being developed so it's not that much of a race.

[The Kraken]

Originally Posted by Redwan

BoB is just a game and not a simulator (in a real flight simulator, the complexity of dynamics would make BoB look like a mario bros on PS1 ...

Difference between a game and a flight simulator:

Real Flight Simulator – How Realistic Is It?

http://www.realflightsimulator.net/

You realize that you're linking to a poor rip-off that repackages FlightGear, which in itself is a nice open-source project but hardly the pinnacle of professional flight sim development, spiced up with some shallow marketing hogwash to make people spend money on something they could download for free? Not sure that's such a good source for information on "real flight simulation"

Most professional flight simulators anyway focus on specific aspects and are pretty poor in others, depending on the type of training they're meant for. They rarely require the combined level of detail in graphics, flight/ballistics/damage modeling, AI or WAN network connectivity that a PC flight sim like SoW needs.

[Sutts]

>>Originally Posted by Redwan View Post
>>BoB is just a game and not a simulator (in a real flight simulator, the complexity of dynamics would make BoB look like a mario bros on PS1 ...


I think we're all agreed that compromises in fidelity have to be made to allow SoW to run on current home PCs and allow for the extra environmental modelling that military sims generally lack.

However, in no way does this make SoW default automatically to game status. In my opinion saying that is an insult to the skills and vision of Oleg and team. This is as close to real as Oleg is able to get us based on current hardware limitations. Knowing how Oleg operates, if PCs were more capable we would have proper airflow dynamics modelled by now. It just isn't possible yet on a home PC.

SoW will give us a pretty accurate flight experience. It may lack some of the subtle control inputs and response to airflow that a military simulator can offer but a comparison to mario bros on PS1 is way out of order.

[erco]

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

Exactly! There is a reason why actual flight simulators (military and commercial) use what are essentially supercomputers (20 core+ systems).

One reason is rendering the sim onto a few displays (sometimes almost 360 degrees) and another is the colossal number crunching dedicated to ultra-realistic flight modeling, flight systems, damage modeling, and a host of other things that you don't have the time or resources to put into a game, which is what SOW is.

They might call this a flight sim, but no matter which way you cut it, it's sill a game meant to generate sales and revenue. Real sims are designed to do neither, they are commissioned by a government body or a commercial sector and made with little thought put towards hardware requirement, money, or fun-factor. The only thing they really have in common with SOW and other flight sims with regards to development might be "development time" but in a lot of cases they're being made at the same time the actual aircraft is being developed so it's not that much of a race.

The last time I was at FlightSafety for recurrent training, I spent some time with the sim techs, asking questions and looking at the hardware. I was surprised to learn that today's multi-core desktops have more than enough computing and graphics power to run a Level D full motion simulator. What the desktop can't do is properly synchronize everything so that everything that's supposed to happen NOW happens NOW. Thus you need a multi-board/multi-processor thing that lives in a server rack. But, relatively speaking, powerful it ain't.

[Trumper]

You also don't get the physical effects,the g forces,the positive and negative,the being thrown around,the force of acceleration and deceleration.
I have to go on a simulator at work [not a pilot one, a train driving one every year ] and the biggest complaint we have is the lack of movement [the seat of the pants driving].You can see the simulated scenery going past but there's no "feeling" of moving.

Another thing you don't get in a commercial sim is the rendering of every little subsystem that an aircraft has. Throttle, Pitch, Mixture, compression, etc are pretty good for a flight sim game, but the ones they use for the big Boeings, Airbusses, and the military jets and choppers simulate the hydraulic and electrical systems, the in-cabin PA system, the backups, the bypass circuits, and a thousand other things. Plus most of them require outside operators to input different variables and such that the pilot and copilot are going to have to deal with. We're probably 10 years away from flight sim games simulating airframe expansion, how icing affects airflow over the wings. . . . and all those other things you find in real Simulators.

I'm not Knocking SOW, but it's not possible given time, money, and hardware constraints. The fact that we are being given variable flames from the exhaust is a milestone, and I'm sure there are other milestones Oleg's keeping for release and future patches.

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by erco

The last time I was at FlightSafety for recurrent training, I spent some time with the sim techs, asking questions and looking at the hardware. I was surprised to learn that today's multi-core desktops have more than enough computing and graphics power to run a Level D full motion simulator. What the desktop can't do is properly synchronize everything so that everything that's supposed to happen NOW happens NOW. Thus you need a multi-board/multi-processor thing that lives in a server rack. But, relatively speaking, powerful it ain't.

Makes sense. The days of the 8 and 16 core processors aren't too far away. Once we get to that point we'll be able to do the same sorts of things on a home PC that they do with server racks. Of course it just means that there will be server racks with the equivalent multi core CPU's to match

[Azimech]

And we may see the development of interchangeable modules like A2A has with Accusim, at least that's what they claim, that in the future their modules will be able to interface with a number of 3D flight engines. Imagine SoW becoming hugely successful, and top of the line third part developers joining forces thereby increasing the level of technology. Who knows, maybe russo-american cooperation might even lower the threshold for products from a certain american defense corporation. I'm dreaming again.

[Trumper]

The sim should always be overdeveloped as computers in time will catch up and you need to keep the sim on the front edge able to use the technology as it comes in.

[klem]

Originally Posted by erco

The last time I was at FlightSafety for recurrent training, I spent some time with the sim techs, asking questions and looking at the hardware. I was surprised to learn that today's multi-core desktops have more than enough computing and graphics power to run a Level D full motion simulator. What the desktop can't do is properly synchronize everything so that everything that's supposed to happen NOW happens NOW. Thus you need a multi-board/multi-processor thing that lives in a server rack. But, relatively speaking, powerful it ain't.

Well, "powerful it ain't" may be true at the single board/processor level but combined into that multi-board multi-processor supercomputer it is a fair bit more powerful than the new i7 multicore PC about to arrive on my doorstep. But it's true that things have moved enormously over the 20+ years I spent in the flight simulation business. The Visual computers for a certain VSTOL aircraft back in 1987 occupied a portacabin-like structure about 30 feet by 30 feet, completely full up, unique PC boards about 2 feet square and generating enough heat to warm a factory. All to enable low level graphics rendering at high speed. It was later replaced by a system in a cabinet about the size of a small single wardrobe. The later ones were about half that size and some are now down to super PC/rack size.

We've come a long way and we haven't finished yet.