| Flight Sim Evolution
by Gavin Bennet |
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A few weeks ago, I was watching a friend of mine playing a Rally sim game (Colin McCrae) and watching its' nice graphics and detailing. I was forced to come to two conclusions: one, we have come a VERY long way since Outrun, and two: we still have a VERY long way to go. Go where? He was playing Need for Speed 3, and the intro segued together action scenes from the game with the movies, and while if you weren't paying attention, it was VERY impressive, it was not perfect. In other words, we have a long way to go, graphically until we reach a state of graphical realism. After much humming and hawing on the issue, I finally cranked up my graphics settings on Falcon 4. Maxed everything out (except object magnification). I need not have worried. The game is still silky smooth in TE and Dogfight and Instant action mode. A beautiful sight to behold, but it wasn't half bad before. Very nice.
When JSF was in production, Innerloop sent a UK PC magazine screenshots. The article went something along the lines of this: once upon a time, there were flight sims, featuring planes that only had a vague polygonal resemblance to whatever they were supposed to be, and people laughed at them. Nowadays there are flight sims, featuring planes that only have a vague polygonal resemblance to whatever they are supposed to be, and people are awed by them. The screenshots were impressive. The game looked great too. (oi, lads? where's that add-on disk??? Why not do a deal with DID and make that now mythical JSF game for them????) Of course F-22 ADF came along, and Longbow 2, who showed the world a thing or two about graphics. A few weeks ago I postulated on USENET that the future of flight-sims was not assured, and that perhaps the days of pure simulation games were numbered, and we would see TAW style, strat-sims taking its place. How much better can you model and AH-64D anyway? You can tweak to your heart's content, I suppose…. However, what sim fans want is bigger, higher, whatever, so you are mostly looking at a 1024x768 virtual, clickable cockpit. And that, basically, is a graphics issue. We want, for example, proper clouds in Falcon 4. And that, basically, is a graphics issue.
 F4 at 1600x1200. We would like super hi-resolution external views. And that, basically, is a graphics issue. We would like far, far larger playing areas, and be able to explore whole regions of the world, to fly from Tunisia to Italy and Cyprus and the Bosphorous to the distant Thar Desert of Pakistan and India, with scenery taken from satellite maps, but so high res that they only pixelate when you crash straight into them. And that, certainly, is a graphics issue. Pez from DID reports that to add any other countries to ADF/TAW would mean a 2FPS sting a time, minimum.
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 Lighting Effects in Team Apache. We would like to have the graphics engine communicate the fact that military what-nots are made of metal and are therefore shiny. And that, basically, is a graphics issue. We want dynamic lighting, and lighting effects. We want to watch the thunderstorms of artillery barrages, the contrails of cruise missiles in the sky, the distant flashes of a distant tank battle, the flames of a burning city. Look out a window in a plane in flight- watch the light play out between the clouds and the ribbons of distant rain, the mist on the horizon, the sudden burst of sunlight against a river, the vast red shock of dawn and the subtle fall of night at 10,000 feet. Perhaps one of the best reasons to fly fighter planes is not that you can learn to do high-g turns, or that you can be the best, or whatever, but that you can look at the world through a 360 degree glass cockpit and see the world curving away.
Longbow II Virtual Cockpit
And another thing. We all complained about low-level flight in Hornet Korea; how it gave no feeling of speed. That's because a sense of speed is given by the human eye noticing details and a marking the progress in relation to that detail. Falcon 4 is admirable in this regard, as is F-15. Falcon 4 looks better, though. Falcon 4 has some lovely, rough textures that means your eye is bombarded with details, and therefore, you can feel that you are crossing this landscape very fast indeed. We want proper forests in our helicopter games, so that we may hide inside them. And that, largely, is a graphics issue. Yes, this is all eye-candy, and hard core simmers feel that may rot your teeth, but even if 21 inch monitors were standard, we need to communicate mankind's oldest dreams onto that screen better. Yes, Flanker 1.5 looked rather plain, but had a heart of amazing complexity, but that complexity does not match Falcon 4, now does it? And does Falcon 4 not look better? Sims do not have an improvement cycle stretching into infinity. There is a real limit designating how far they can really go, at which point you have to sit back and say: sod this, and join the airforce. Even air force simulations, as we know may model the avionics better (the classified avionics!) but they don't look half as nice. Go to Part II
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