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.

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.

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.

F4 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. Yes, simulation machines might be a future option, but seriously, these are COMPUTER games, and computers are used by most people for lots of other things, not just flight sims. Yes, maybe in a few years, Thrustmaster or Microsoft might make a home cockpit machine like that old Afterburner arcade game, and it might actually be affordable. But again, we are reaching beyond the limits of the definition of "computer game" even "flight sim." This is idle speculation.

For the last twenty years computers have been: case, keyboard, mouse, and monitor, with a joystick for games. That does not look like it will change any time soon. Yes we might even end up with VR sets that can have a 3d OS activated by movements of our fingers and arms. But one thing that every futurist should be aware of is that the future sneaks up on you and never looks like your dreams; it looks a lot more like your reality. That monitor might get smarter but it's still gonna be a monitor.

(To digress, one possibility for VR helmets might be to have something like those Israeli HMDs. We have a monitor with our work on it (say MS Word) But we have a "virtual desktop" that exists around us. So using a VR chip on a pair of shades we can look around. The sim applications would be cool.. The more I think of this, the more I like it! Are you all thinking what I'm thinking??? Okay, have a main, say, 25 inch monitor. A smaller secondary monitor. A very big projection monitor. VR shades, and maybe some kind soul would make a USB MFD widget. OOOOOOH). Graphics, graphics, graphics.

After all, immersion can only be improved by better graphics, no?

In that USENET article, I argued that "pure simulation" was reaching an end. I believe that a hybrid of strategy and simulation (ala TAW or M1TP2) represented the future; only with a far better, far more realistic and wide ranging strategy than either of those games. In short something that a C+C player or a Harpoon player or a People's General player would like, and buy it as a genuine, all singing, all dancing, real time strategy game. Only with the ability to fly stuff (or whatever). (Ed. Note: sounds like the original game plan for Janes Fleet Command).

That strategy element would take away the problems of the dynamic ground war. (I sent an email to DID at one point, suggesting that Wargasm could be used as a basis for a ground war for EF2000 V.3.) The strategy element could get deeper and deeper, with smarter and smarter AI; but this isn't a "pure-sim" feature. (For a remembrance of the original EF2 see EF2000 v.2.)

I do not think we shall ever see a Virtual Battlefield. The more complex sims become, the more bandwidth they need to communicate what is going on to other computers. DID claimed, and I believe them, that it would be a "nightmare" to co-ordinate even just the air-war of TAW on multiple computers. MPS managed it, and we all see how much trouble they are having. Yes, one hopes that EF2000 V.3 has a ground-air dynamic war, and that it can have 8 player LAN co-op, and no doubt they will manage it, eventually.

But a poor man's virtual battlefield, with maybe four well modelled units fighting in one theatre area is the likely result. A Flanker, F-16, F-15, MiG-29 combo, maybe; an F-22, EF2000, Su-37, Rafale combo; a Flanker, MiG-29, Mirage 2000 and F/A-18 combo, an Su-33, F/A-18, Sea Harrier, F-14 combo; an Aegis, 688, Type 22 combo; an M1, Challenger, Ah-64, A-10 combo? Or an AH-64, AH-1, UH-60, OH-65, A-10, AV-8B combination (this was my big idea for LB3: make it a strat-sim of the ground war, but fought at 30 feet off the ground? There are reasons for those choices… think about it.)

This may well be the Golden Age of sims, and we may well be watching its twilight, but if we are lucky, it's only the beginning of a new era of war games. Yes, we are all going to need faster computers and expensive toys, but damn it, is that not the way of the world? They talk about a MINIMUM of a P300 for an office computer doing boring accounting crap….. Flight sims kick Excel's ass….. And if you are going to have to upgrade for Excel, then why not treat yourself to some intense graphics, and some wonderful sims? And see war played out, in all its terrible beauty.

For other views of the way the world may be heading, see our Editorials page or recent articles on coming hardware like the AMD K7 and Voodoo3 Revealed. We'll bring you more information on Longbow 3 as it becomes available.