What's in a Flight Sim?
By Gregor 'Gecko' Veble

Page 1

How to start one's first article for a major simulation site? I am no more enlightened about the flight sim business than anyone else reading this. Yet, in this position I feel as if I am standing here, expected to reveal the newest and dirtiest about what's going on behind the closed doors of the major and minor sim development studios. But I won't. This article will not deal with such stuff. I am not a sim insider, developer or a real life pilot. I will only write about what I know from breathing in the sim community. 'Not about much, then,' I hear some of you say. True, perhaps. All I can give is my perception of the simulations of today and the community that exists because of them. You may not agree with my views, but I reserve the right to be in disagreement with some of you.

Here I will try to find out what the purpose of a combat flight sim is and what should hence be its essential ingredients. If this interests you (and I am pretty sure it does as you are visiting this site), keep reading.

So, what's in a flight sim then?

You're still reading? Great! The idea for this article came about when I heard a lot of simmers on various forums and a newsgroup putting down some otherwise excellent sims because they do not have a dynamic campaign. While there are obvious benefits of dynamic campaigns in terms of immersion and replayability, I've never felt that it should be an essential part of a combat flight simulation.

I thought about it some more and then asked myself "what are the essential bits for a good flight sim, anyway? The answer to this question really depends on what a flight sim should achieve. Sims are like most good things in life, basically they are always the same, but everyone likes them being done a bit differently. At this point one has to refer to the article at Frugal's World titled Pilot Sim vs. Flight Sim that gives in my opinion quite a shift of the perception of the flight sims of today, and a fact which the developers were obviously aware of quite a while ago without really telling us. The title says it all, namely that more than simulating a plane the sims simulate the pilot's experience. I dared to ask Chris 'CJ' Martin, lead designer (amongst other things) on the Jane's F/A-18 team, a couple of questions regarding this issue. Here's the correspondence:

Yours truly: What kind of experience do you want your simulation to present to the player?

Chris Martin: The short answer is "entertainment". Our target audience wants to be able to place themselves in the role of a modern day fighter pilot, and we work hard to give them the best experience possible. We want to give our players an appreciation for today's real military pilots, and some small understanding of how a real modern combat jet operates. We try to accomplish these goals by modeling certain key systems (radar, flight model, avionics, AI, etc.) in as much detail as we can. This gives the players an ability to use real world procedures and tactics to defeat the bad guys in the game within the context of an interesting storyline.

Yours truly: What is the single most important ingredient that makes a good combat flight simulation (if it can be identified)?

Chris Martin: I don't think there is a single ingredient that is more important than any of the other components of a good flight simulation. A good game is a balance of many things. The challenge to any game developer is finding that right balance of features that creates a fun and compelling experience for the intended players.

As you can see, this development team has known that most of us are after a pilot sim even if we ourselves consciously perhaps didn't. But, in my opinion, this is just one possible approach towards creating a good hardcore flight sim. So I also asked Mr. Rod Hyde, the designer of the Mig 'my-knuckles-have-never-been-this-white' Alley these question, too:

Me: What kind of experience do you want your simulation to present to the player?

Rod Hyde: We aim to make the experience as real as possible and at the same time fun to fly.

We always spend a lot of time researching the combat methods used. For MIG Alley we have read combat reports and autobiographies and we have managed to talk to a pilot who was there. We then designed a system that reflects the combat of the era. Inevitably though we have to make changes for the sake of playability.

In reality MiG pilots say that the American pilots avoided combat and the Americans say the same about the MiG pilots. The sky is a big place and without radar it was easy to hide and avoid combat if the situation was not favourable. In the game, MiG pilots are much more likely to engage and you will come across far more MiGs than was the case in reality. However when combat is started we try to make the experience as real as possible.

We have spent a lot of time increasing the realism of the landscape and have accurately mapped the whole of the Korean peninsular area to a resolution of 10m. So for instance, the rivers are the correct width and that the bridges over the rivers are part of the landscape. The traditional way of doing bridges in sims has been to put a triangular ramp at the end of the bridge. In MiG Alley you won't see any ramps. The landscape is accurately contoured and the bridges just fit in!

There are many other features which help to make the sim realistic, including:

• Light shading on the aircraft and other shapes
• Light shading on the landscape, including explosions lighting up the landscape
• Cockpit canopy and instrument reflections that vary with the direction of the sun
• Cockpit shake to indicate stall and high speed buffet. Eye position change to indicate g effects
• Ground shadows that change with time
• Bridges where individual spans collapse. For bridges with long spans, it is possible for a bridge to collapse in sections
• Napalm
• Realistic contrails and rocket trails
• Lens and sun flare
• Rain
• Different times of day
• Blast damage, so that something may be damaged by the shock waves produced by an explosion

We have a number of other features that can be used to adjust the realism of the flight model. For instance, 1950's jet engines took a long time to get to full thrust and so you don't get an immediate response if you bang the throttle from minimum to maximum. This is simulated in MiG Alley, however you can choose to configure things so that you get an immediate response.

 

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