Documentaries occasionally get produced about the amazingly cool stuff the military has to train its pilots. Now, putting the physical shake-em-up box aside for a moment, and putting aside certain notions of reality (i.e., the Kill ‘em All switch is actually on the left), what really drives these things is software and processing power, no?
How do today’s mainstream gaming systems (higher end, but not over the top, good monitor and appropriate control sticks) compare to what the military had available as recently as 2000? 1997? 95? I’d think ridiculously so, but I figure the government’s budgets at the time allowed them to do some pretty amazing things dedicated hardware and software wise, so I thought to ask.
Zooooooooooooooooooooooom~~~~
This is a bit further back than you were inquiring about, but this is the only experience I have with this.
Back in '88 my uncle ran the C130 flight simulator in Little Rock, Arkansas. On a visit, we had a chance to go and he’d load some flight sims for us. It was like you see on documentaries: hyrdaulic articulated pistons that angled at 3 axis of up to 45 degrees. If you crashed in the sim, the control panels would pop off, the seats would slide up - to simulate impact.
As I recall, the graphics weren’t much better than what you’d see on the consoles at the time, but I remember the framerate being pretty fluid. And he could insert scenarios on the fly. He set up one sim where you’re coming into a landing strip and the first half of the runway is on fire with smoke billowing up everywhere. We come in for our approach, plow into the smoke and out the other side, and what’s sitting on the runway? An aircraft carrier.
At the time, it was the freakin’ coolest video game I ever played.
My BIL maintained RAF Flight Simulation equipment into the mid 90s. They were electromechanical devices that moved camera’s over model landscapes.
There were “cloud layers” as the POV moved from scale to another.
Si
Well they basically knock’em out of the park with regards to visuals.
But that would be it.
si_blakely’s BIL probably worked on the Jaguar sim that used that method. The warehouse that housed the ground maps was something to behold, im told.
When it came to graphics in the 90’s SGI machines were the ticket, however some/all militaries do not take much stock in whats going on “out the window”.
A good simulator replicates all the functions of the actual aircraft and used a shed load of computers to achieve just that.
So whereas Microsoft would tack in a library for radar picture generation, the sims of yesteryear would use a room full of racked boards to generate the same picture backup into the CRPMD.
The difference being that MS Radar would work how MS liked it to work and Mr “Room Full of Circuit boards” operated to specification.
The RAF GR1 simulators had 6-axis motion and no visual, the canopy was opaque. The missions where all considered “Night Sorties”. There was however so many bells and whistles going on in the cockpit that would in reality to being reacting to real radar signals, fuel burn and pilot input that several computer rooms would be racing ten to the dozen keeping up with what is going on.
Now in the naughties it’s all PC based, each set of instruments is allocated to a PC and the whole kit-kaboodle now takes up two cabinets which may contain between 4 and 8 computers.
The visual is now a 12 PC set-up, 1 for each projector in a 270 degree dome. Refresh rate is set to 60 hertz and must stay at 60 hertz. This is where the problem lays, Microsoft can afford to re-write MS FS from scratch and spend millions doing it if they know it’ll be a big seller. In the simulation world the visual is just one part of the total cost of the Sim.
So if you have a visual program that is in service and no one is complaining about, why re-write it with fancy smoke effects and dynamic lighting.
Ironically the visual IGs we use would play MS FS X smooth as butter at 200FPS, the reality though is that the IG has to faithfully replicate ground 1x1 meter out to 50 miles including buildings and also generate 100 other aircraft in full detail within that area while keeping everthing skipping over smoothly at 60 Hz.
Thats where MS FS X would die a slow and laggy death on a home PC (The IGs are 10 PCs in a cabinet).