Quote:
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.
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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.
12-22-2010, 04:21 PM
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