chimpymcflightsuit

Hi JT. Spoke to you fellas a LOOOONG time ago in the "What do you want more?" thread. It's looking great so far! Nice clear, crisp graphics that will run on a computer you don't have to live in a basement to buy. Very good stuff your team has put together. I've also noticed you've been keeping the expectations of the release date realistic. Excellent work, sirs. I really have my hopes pinned on this baby. Keep your heads down, take all the time you need, and nail this sucker down right. Chimpy

In my opinion, this is entirely wrong. Joe average doesn't walk into a store and look at the back of "World of Warcraft" with towns on fire and people being executed on pikes and say to himself "Gee, this looks like TOTAL CARNAGE!" and then pick up the flight sim next to it and see a tiny puff of an explosion on the HUD and say "But this looks ABSOLUTELY INSANE!" It would never have been a sale in the first place if they were looking for instantaneous blood or gigantic explosions so long as games like World of Warcraft are on the shelves. People that have little or no experience in flight sims buy them because they're looking for something different, whether it be the feeling of simply flying a REAL enormous beast at mach 2.0, or the exhiliration of getting what they consider to be a REAL kill. Nobody on earth buys a computer flight sim and expects to be an ace in four hours or able to level an entire city in one sortie. The feeling of being able to experience, even if it's just a little taste, of flying a real jet aircraft is what brings them there in the first place. They know it's something they will have to invest time in when they hand over their fifty dollars. I've never heard anyone complain about the complexity of managing an army with 100 different commands during a dynamic compaign in a war game, and their willingness simply because it's a flight sim doesn't suddenly just magically drop. The problem occurs when they're thumbing through the biblical manual and follow the exact directions to drop a bomb, excitedly pull the trigger in anticipation of evaporating a parking lot full of buses, and it doesn't work. Then 2 minutes later, under the mistaken assumption they're doing something wrong in their exciting quest to feel a little itty bit like a pilot and learn how the aces do it, they find out on the message boards that no, they didn't do anything wrong, and it's going to take them 3 hours of downloading patches, reading workarounds, and investing an additional $300 in graphics hardware to get any real enjoyment out it. At that very moment, their opinion goes from "Wow this game is awesome!" to "This game sucks". This is the experience that has become known as the difficulty ("complexity") inherent in buying a flight simulator. It's not that the average user is unwilling to learn more than one radar mode in the same fashion they learn more than one way to kill someone with a pen in "Hitman 10", it's that they don't feel like spending four hours reading posts to find out if they're doing something wrong, or the game is. If it were just a matter of learning, and it being their mistake, communities would begin forming reflective of their skill level because they would feel like they're building their skill each time they PLAY, not each time they log onto a forum to learn if it's broke or not. In addition to the game not working, they're told by a bunch of seething nerds that if they don't want to upgrade and peruse forums for four hours every day learning which parts of the game are broken, they're just an wanna-be and don't belong there. It makes a person feel a lot less like a pilot and a lot more like a guy hanging out with the people who still wet their bed in highschool, and on top of that, a sucker. That's when the box gets thrown in the closet, word gets around, and the community folds to a few hardcore guys and a bunch of people who stare at the graphics while the joystick remains idle under the desk. The fidelity of the experience is the #1 selling point of a flight sim, and I guarantee if a team of devs released a product with the characteristics you've described (balanced graphics, no bugs) it would sell more than enough copies. It's just that no one has stepped up to the plate.

The industry should consider releasing a product that, you know...works...before they start drawing conclusions about the serious flight sim market. I can recall a lot of games that actually worked out of the box AND without a computer that costs more than the GDP of a small country that didn't need the latest bells and whistles or most advanced flight models to be successful. "But that's WHY they worked! They weren't complex!" you say? Baloney. If a team of devs came along that concentrated on keeping the code clean and making the damn GAME instead of worrying about all of the frills that, in reality, no hardcore simmer really gives a damn about when taking into consideration how they would prefer the devs to allocate their resources, they could hit it out of the park. BANG. Instant brand loyalty. They've lost sight of their own demographic. "Realistic" flight sims didn't die at the consumer's hands. They committed suicide.

Oh, and one more thing fellas... Aside from making it compatible with TrackIR: Please, for the love of common sense, make the padlock system work. It's really very simple, yet hardly ever gets done right. Here's how it works: If he's in my **field of view**, as in where I'm looking at the present time, and he's visible on the screen and I press the padlock button, REGARDLESS OF A LOCK OR NOT WITH THE RADAR, I padlock him. If there's another ENEMY TARGET, read that again, **ENEMY TARGET**, in the air, then if I press padlock again it immediately slews to that target instead. If I press it yet again, it goes back to the original target. With me so far? Good. Now if I press the UNPADLOCK button, it goes right back to whatever view I was using before I entered padlock mode. That's it, that's all. It's not hard. The user SHOULD NOT have a hard time padlocking the target if he gets behind him. All he should have to do is use the "look behind" button and press padlock again. If you want, include reasonable accomodations for losing padlock if the target say, flies underneath and behind the pilot's plane. That's fine. But it SHOULD NOT be required to have a lock with radar or any other kind of asinine rule. I'm using my damn eyesballs here. Why this is so hard for idiotic developers to understand absolutely mystifies me. If I see him in any field of view and I press padlock, it locks the view. It should padlock cycle depending on the range to target. Closest gets padlocked first and so on... And for pete's sake fellas, if I padlock someone and press a *view* button like look backward (NOT THE UNPADLOCK BUTTON), don't make the game lose the padlock. When I want to simply look foward at my HUD or straight behind or whatever for two seconds and then have to move the view all over again and repadlock, it kind of defeats the whole point in the first place. Make it easy to check the instruments and look back at the padlock, OK? And yeah, if you want, make a padlock button for locked/tracked radar contacts. But please, keep it seperate from a normal, common sense view padlock. Thanks a bunch.

This is my list of what I require in a sim, in order: STABILITY: Do NOT release a buggy product. Honestly, if you're the kind of developer that's going to fall back on excuses like "We haven't even had a chance to patch it yet!" do us all a favor and just scrap the project. Plan your release date when it's a stable product, not "when you think it's done well enough". Don't hand out a release date before you know when this will be. Yes, there are always unforseen problems. Well, get past that point, THEN release it. Forget releasing demos, forget the damn kids posting in the forums about it taking forever, and just do the sim RIGHT. Got it? If you want beta testing done by real users, do it privately. And for chrissake, do not release any code until the sim is dead and buried in history. EASE OF USE: Please, take a page from the Eagle Dynamic's Bible of How to F*** Up a Sim. DO NOT make the damn specs of the game absurd. People who *really* play simulators don't give a damn about shadows and pixel lighting and all of that crap. They play it for the incredibly dynamic experience that is air combat and they play it to win. Honestly, the market is so full of crap I'd play an accurate wire-frame DOS game over the fancy garbage being peddled out there now. You know what made Novalogic's sims so successful (even though they moved on to more profitable FPS shooters)? They concentrated on making the game friendly instead of the latest this-and-that nonsense. You could play that game all day on 56k and not have a hiccup. You could run it off of your crappy built-in graphics card and be able to play it just fine. Now I'm not saying it should run on a 200hmz computer. I'm saying determine a reasonable present-day level of performance RIGHT NOW where someone with say...a 2 gigahertz computer and 512mb of RAM can see EVERYTHING. DO NOT MAKE COMPUTER PERFORMANCE AN ISSUE WITH REGARD TO COMPETENCE IN THE GAME. The game should look the exact same way at that reasonable level as it does for someone with a Cray supercomputer, except for aspects not related to proficiency in the game. Examples: Shadows on plane look better ---FINE Can't see smoke trails of missiles as far away as someone with the new 900XT Super Ultra Turbo Hyper graphics card ---NOT FINE Explosions look more voluminous and exagerrated with said 900XT card ---FINE Same explosions bring FPS to a screeching halt and make further runs on the same target almost impossible without 900XT card ---NOT FINE Detail on buildings better with 900XT ---FINE Can't see buildings at all until you're .5 KM and then pop up out of thin air without 900XT ---NOT FINE Got it? Good. Bear with me... MULTIPLAYER: This deserves it's own category seperate from stability because it's a huge one. Let's face it, no matter how hard or interesting you guys make the campaigns that come with the game, we find them boring after...oh...five minutes before we log online to kill something. Now, I want you to download Hyperlobby at hyperfighter.sk and take a good, long look at that interface. Would you wish your worst enemy to have to deal with that interface? Can you find anything on this earth more boring than that to look at? Here's the deal: make the multiplayer a fun, easy-on-the-eyes and easy-on-the-brain place to get together. Don't make it a project to find out how to connect, IM people, or hold a private conference. Have the basic information of the games being played displayed for all to see before they join. Don't make me guess whether or not people are flying biplanes or migs, and make the server rules able to be enforced from BY THE SERVER. DYNAMIC MISSION EDITOR: Believe it or not, we don't enjoy finding creative ways to hide targets inside building textures so the players can't go off and destroy the targets before the story behind the mission we planned over the course of three hours even has the chance to occur. I think that about says it all. SOUND: Sound is huge. If I don't feel like I'm standing there with my camera waiting to take a pic of a Harrier about to blast past me and enjoy the whoosh and thunder of the engines during a replay, the experience doesn't excite me. One of the few things LOMAC got right. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whew. Well, that's about it. Take it for what it's worth.

File Name :: treeskim Author :: chimpymcflightsuit Category :: LOMAC Tracks/Videos/Tutorials Description :: Simple MiG-29 track, has a nice end to it skimming just above the trees supersonic. View File