Impressive.

There is literally nothing in that article that is interesting.

Unlikely wrote:

There is literally nothing in that article that is interesting.

in your opinion! 

shame us average game players will never get to try something like this.

what an exciting life.

Thread's going well.

What's an emo hangover?

Kow wrote:

What's an emo hangover?

It's a scary thing

We'll be as uninterested as we like thank you very much.

Which is quite a lot.  

Thing is, I could talk an awful lot about simulator fidelity because it's quite an important thing in my line of work, but there are some things that it just doesn't work well with.  Driving's one of them.

elmlea I have no idea mate never even sat in one, which is kinda the point, I would totally love to for a wee shotty. Big dream of mine would be to get a perfect car simulator load up a hot hatch spec and just screw the shit out of it through various cities around the world.

I bet they're like Gunship on the Spectrum.

g.man wrote:

What are the military flight sims like then Elm?  any cop? g.man

Yes, but with some of them a large proportion of the immersion comes from the knowledge of the procedures and doing the things you're used to doing in the real aircraft.  Most of them have relatively average graphics, but extremely, perfectly smooth so you don't really notice.  They have areas of enhanced graphics so there are certain areas you can fly where everything's in high fidelity.

The processing power's incredible, though.  The flight models are all generally pretty pin sharp, and the weaponeering stuff is absolutely incredible; fire something and it'll go exactly where it would go if you fired one for real, so the degree of physics the thing is managing to figure out if the seeker head on a missile can shift at an appropriate rate to track a laser spot boggles the mind.   

The set-up does enough to keep the suspension of belief though.  Wearing the correct kit, feeling the g-pants inflate when you pull G, having little motors rumbling the seat and things like that all add to it.  Couple that with realistic radios and things and it's an astonishing training tool.

The Typhoon Operational Conversion Unit we have has experimented with producing fully qualified Typhoon pilots who've only flown the aircraft 4 times.  They arrive fresh from Hawk Fast Jet Tactics & Weapons Training, do ground school, fly the simulator a dozen times, fly the jet once, start learning proper procedures, fly the jet solo, then do all of their air combat stuff, fly one air combat check in the jet, then do the rest of the course in the sim up until their final check in the jet.  The sim is considered so good you can save money on flying the aircraft.

Of course, that shouldn't be the option, and military training is one of my specialities that I could talk about for hours, but it is incredible it's that good.  Modern civilian aircraft sims are considered good enough for pilots to requalify on or gain new qualifications on, so someone can be entirely rated on an aircraft without ever flying it.  Don't think of that next time you fly on a low-cost carrier.

See, sub_normal?  That's interesting.  Pay Elm for making your thread interesting.

LazyGunn wrote:

i'm glad this thread got good elm, out of curiosity, when abouts, in history, did 'videogame' sims start to be considered genuinely analogous to flying, and hence respectable training software?

Never; it's all bespoke software.  Within the last 2-3 years, some training centres have used some commercial software to simulate aircraft, but only when they're not the critical node of training.  For example, I've "flown" a simulated Tornado using a pair of PCs, 6 screens, and a big hobbyist flight sim stick and throttle thing to provide training as part of an integrated fires exercise for a Royal Artillery battery.  I was just there to be a subject matter expert, and so that I could listen in to a simulated radio, "fly" my jet where I was told and make things blow up, but the actual training was for the Army guys so it didn't matter that I wasn't perceiving it as realistic, if you see what I mean.

There isn't anywhere that uses video game style non-bespoke software for aircrew training, though.  It's not realistic enough.  Some modern PC flight sims might actually have slightly better graphics than our Tornado sim, but on the other hand the Tornado sim absolutely cannot suffer from frame rate issues as it'd break the immersion, and has to handle a fully-calculated model for weapons release, laser handling, things like that.  Plus the flight model obviously has to be perfect.

Unlikely wrote:

See, sub_normal?  That's interesting.  Pay Elm for making your thread interesting.

Okok I'm too drunk to be bothered with this anymore. I think what you want to hear is now you have made it. You win. Your now officially more annoying than my mother in law. Congrats.




elm, sounds fantastic. I can only dream of how much fun that must be. Oh and thanks for making my thread epic.